Another Mumford Reading Excerpt: The New Organum

I am still making my way through Vol. 2 of Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine, it is going slower than normal as I am also reading and highly recommend:

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Thy Will Be done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil by Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennet 

Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton 

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

The following is only the first section of chapter 14, roughly 6 pages. The entire chapter is about 40 pages long, far too long to digest in blog format, not that I would actually sit here and type out 40 pages. I apologize if there are errors, as there are no sources of what could be considered  Lewis Mumford's most important work on the web. I am transcribing this directly from print, for previous Myth of the Machine reading excerpts see:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/05/another-mumford-reading-excerpt.html

From  The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine: Vol. II

Chapter Fourteen: The New Organum
1: Plants , Mammals, And Man

In the opening pages of this book we followed the two parallel paths of exploration that beckoned modern man: the exploration of the earth, hitherto never encompassed as a whole, and the exploration of the skies, and of all the physical phenomena, cosmic and earthbound, that could be interpreted and controlled without direct reference to man's own biological and cultural antecedents. We saw how the period of exploration and colonization gave the primal vitalities of Western man fresh outlets, at the very moment that the new mechanical order began to curb and contain them more completely than ever.

I propose here to emphasize, not only the heavy debt that modern technology has owed from the very start to terrestrial exploration, but how this exploration in turn laid the basis for a change that is only beginning to pass from the initial phase of ideation, incarnation, and rational formulation into one widely organizing and incorporating a new mode of life , radically different from that of the power system. The human insufficiency of that system has grown in direct proportion with its technical efficiency, while its present threat to all organic life on this planet turns out to be the ultimate irony of its unqualified successes in mastering all the forces of nature - except those demonic and irrational forces within man which have unbalanced the technological mind.

Terrestrial exploration, plainly, began a gigantic revolution which was both a quantitative and a qualitative one. It established contacts between the entire population of the planet, and brought about an increase in energy resources and a circulation of goods, plants, peoples and ideas on a global basis, breaking down adaptations, like that of the Negroid races to tropical Africa, that had taken hundreds of thousands of years to effect. The transplantation of the Negro from the continent to which he had so completely adapted himself, and the reverse transplantation of the European to the Americas and to Africa, were only the first of a series of wanton displacements in which the profit and convenience of the governing groups outstripped both biological knowledge and social prudence. Never was the ecological balance of nature, and even more the integrity of cultures, so violently upset as during the last two centuries.

By now this exploration has reached a natural terminus: the last frontier is closed. The landing of the first two astronauts on the moon was not the beginning of a new age of cosmic exploration but the end. The scientific technological revolution that began in the sixteenth century therewith reached its appropriately sterile terminus: a satellite as uninhabitable as the earth itself will all too soon become - unless by a massive expenditure of imagination and courageous political effor the peoples of the world challenge the age-old power complex . Without a counter-movement to slow down or reverse these automatic processes mankind comes closer, year by year, to what is in more than one sense a dead end.

Though the effect of the terrestrial exploration in offsetting the constraints  of technical invention and organization was only temporary, it actually laid the foundations for a new world order: one which would alter the original mechanical world picture by superimposing upon it a more complex model derived, not from matter and energy in their pre-organic states, but from the living organism. The geographic frontier is now closed, but a less superficial exploration is taking place. This is an exploration in time as well as space, and into subjective as well as objective phenomena. This new exploration deals not with cause-and-effect alone, but with patterns of almost inextricable and indescribable complexity, flowing through time and constantly interacting. In one field after another this organic world picture is already unfolding. In his Introduction to Darwin's 'Origin of Species', George Gaylord Simpson points to this approaching transformation. "The astronomical and physical revolutions were already well advanced in the early nineteenth century", he noted, "but the biological revolution, destined to change the world even more profoundly, was still to come."

Unfortunately this biological revolution has already been recognized and eagerly hailed by the exponents of the power system as the next step in one-sided technocratic control. Carried out on their own peculiar terms this revolution would lead, not to a fuller development of man but to his progress into a quite different kind of organism, or series of organisms, genetically transformed in the laboratory or modified in an artificial womb. Man in any recognizable historic sense would be thrown on the scrapheap. This series of changes would give the Power System, itself a segregated, time-abbreviated product of human intelligence, an authority that man, by the virtue of his own constitution, has always declined to give to Nature. To what rational end?

On this matter, a poet of our day has spoken wise and timely words: an admonition that might be specially directed to the priests of the megamachine, now sharpening their nano-needles, sot to say, in preparation for permanently altering the nature of man.

"Re-shaping life!" exclaimed Boris Pasternak in 'Dr. Zhivago'. "People who can say that have never understood a thing about life - they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat - however much they have seen or done. They look in it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processes by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself."

Happily for early man's development, his own mind seems to have made an even greater impression on him than the physical environment; and even in that environment he was more aware of the edibility of plants and the activities of birds and animals thane he was of purely physical manifestations of  nature, except when the occurred violently, as in storms, floods, and volcanic eruptions. Nature itself spoke to him as an animate being: in exhibiting malice or friendliness, stones might be lifelike, but organisms were not petrified. Even after Neolithic grinding and polishing had introduced people to regular industry the improved environment was mainly one belonging to living organisms, though copiously invaded by gods, demons, and sprites more lively than man dared to be.

Although systematic industry and enforced drudgery had been introduced by the early civilizations, the greater part of the human race largely escaped complete subservience to the power system. Under the prevailing hunting and agricultural economies, a good part of mankind remained dispersed in villages outside the province of the megamachine, never rising to the heights it achieved in reshaping the habitat or enlarging the mind, yet never sinking to its depths, except when under the calamitous external pressures of 'civilized' war.

Until our own day human culture as a whole  developed in an organic, subjectively modified environment, not in a sterile machine-made enclosure. In a confused unfocussed way, the criteria of life prevailed everywhere and man's own existence prospered or failed in so far as a balance favorable to life was preserved among all organisms. It is only in the worst degradation of ancient slavery - namely, in the working of underground mines - that human existence has been conceived as possible in an environment devoid of life.

Man lived in active partnership with plants and animals for whole geological periods before he fabricated machines. His mental involvement with the world of life began with the consciousness of his own existence. Many of his basic qualities he shares with other animals: prolonged sexual pairing and nurturing the young, social companionship and erotic delight, playfulness and joy. His deep love of life was fostered by finding himself in an environment prepared, not merely to maintain life with the requisite amount of physical nourishment, but to promote its unceasing self-transformation. On these matters, even the simplest organisms have something essential to teach us beyond the rang of our most sophisticated technology. If we were dependent for our instructions and material sustenance upon machines alone, the human race would long ago have died of malnutrition, boredom, and hopeless despair.

Remember Loren Eiseley's observation in 'The Immense Journey' about that turning point in organic development when the Age of Reptiles gave way to the age of Mammals, those warm-blooded beasts that suckled their young. He pointed out that the Age of Mammals was accompanies by an explosion of flowers; and that the reproductive system of the angiosperms was responsible, not only for covering the whole earth with a green carpet composed of many different species of grass (over four thousand) but for intensifying vital activity of every kind; since their nectars and pollens and seeds and fruits and succulent leaves dilated the senses, quickened the appetite, exhilarated the mind, and immensely increased the total food supply.

Not merely was this explosion of flowers a cunning device of reproduction, but the flowers themselves assumed a variety of forms and colors that in most cases cannot possibly be accounted for as having survival value in the struggle for existence. It may add to the attraction of a lily to have all its sexual organs displayed among teasingly open petals; but the huge success of so many compositae, like the daisy and goldenrod, with their insignificant florets, shows that biological prosperity might have been purchased without any such floral richness and inventiveness.

Efflorescence is an archetypal example of nature's untrammeled creativity; and the fact that floral beauty cannot be explained or justified on purely utilitarian grounds is precisely what makes this explosion so wonderful - and so typical of other life-processes. Biological creativity and the esthetic creativity that so often accompanies it exist for their own sake and transcend the organism's earlier limitations. If survival were all that mattered, life might have remained in the primal ooze or crept no further upward that the lichens. Though one may abstractly conceive a world with neither colors nor any richness of living structures, that muted world is not the actual world of life.

Long before man himself became conscious of beauty and desirous of cultivating it, beauty existed in an endless variety of forms in the flowering plants; and man's own nature was progressively altered, with his increasing sensitiveness to sight and touch and odor, through his further symbolic expression of beautiful form in his ornaments, his cosmetics, his costume, his painted and graven images: all by-products of his enriched social and sexual life. In this sense, we are all 'flower children'.

For at least twelve thousand years, possibly far longer, man's existence has depended upon the close symbiotic partnership between man and plants, rooted in thousands of small village communities spread over the entire earth. All the higher achievements of civilization have rested on this partnership, one devoted to the constructive improvement of the habitat and the loving and knowing care of plants: their selection, their nurture, their breeding, their enjoyment, in a routine of life that punctuated and heightened the delights of human sexuality. That culture, as Edgar Anderson has suggested, made some of its best discoveries in plant breeding by being equally concerned with the color, the odor, the taste, the flower and leaf pattern, and the nutritive qualities of plants - valuing them not only for food and medicine but for esthetic delight.

In our machine-dominated world, there are plenty of people working in scientific laboratories today who, though they may still call themselves biologists, have no intimate contact with this organic culture and no respect for its achievements. They have already begun to regulate the creative process in accordance with the market demands of the power complex. One of the latest triumphs in plant breeding, for example, has been to develop a variety of tomato which not merely grows to uniform size but ripens in quantity at the same time, in order that the crop may be garnered by an automatic picking and packing machine.

From such preconceptions flow further dreams of an even more tightly ordered world from which all more primitive or non-profitable species and varieties will be eliminated - even though primitive stocks remain essential for creative hybridization. Perhaps only the residual wildness left in man himself, still stirring in his dream life, will now save him from submission to such deadly conformity.

Admittedly, in the earlier stages of human development the relation between man and plants had been a one-sided one, not an effective relation of mutual aid. Though plants, birds, and insects have been man's active partners as well as his chief food for most of his history, he did little at first to modify the natural vegetation, still less to assist in the cultivation of favored plants. Man's attachment to the existing plant life was parasitic rather than symbiotic. But first by preservation and selection, and then by active cultivation, man found himself able, when the last glacial period ended, to make his own environment more habitable, more edible, and - what was no less important - more stimulating and lovable. In the very act of establishing a new role for plants, man both deepened his roots in the landscape and gave himself a new leisure and a new security. It was in the garden that man, thanks largely to woman's efforts, found himself completely at home: at peace, if only fleetingly and precariously, with the world around him.

The prolonged tending of plants began with the fruit and nut trees, the mango and the durian, the olive and walnut and palm, the orange, and not least, if Henry Bailey Stevens prove right, the apple. Here in orchard and garden, a world in which life prospered without inordinate effort or systematic carnage, man had his first glimpse perhaps of paradise, for paradise is only the original Persian name for a walled garden.

Significantly, it was in another garden, according to fable, the Garden of Eden, that man, by eating an apple, lost the innocence of animals and gained the consciousness of good and evil, of life and death. All those selective discriminations that aim to promote life and to reduce  or countermand the forces that would diminish it must be alert to the presence of evil in its many forms, from fixation to wanton violence and destruction. Though Walt Whitman might, in 'Song of Myself', praise the innocence of animals, he was sufficiently are of the realities of human existence to proclaim that he was the poet of evil as well as the poet of good - and he knew the difference.

The capacity for growth, exuberant expression, and transcendence, symbolized esthetically as well as sexually by the flowering plants - this is the primal gift of life; and in man it flourishes best when living creatures and equally living symbols are constantly present, to stir his imagination and encourage him in further acts of expression both in the mind and in his daily performances of life-sustaining work and human nurture. Love begets love as life begets life; and eventually every part of the environment should be open to this response even if, under the command of love, one sometimes serves it best by withdrawing and allowing it, like a redwood forest or an ancient monument, to remain itself, simply mirrored in man's mind, without more than the faintest sign of man's own presence. A day without such contacts and emotional stirrings - responses to the perfume of a flower or an herb, to the flight or the song of a bird, to the flash of a human smile or the warm touch of a human hand - that is, a day such as millions spend in factories, in offices, on the highway, is a day empty of organic contents and human rewards.

There are no mechanical or electronic or chemical substitutes for whole living organisms, though one may have frequent need for symbolic enlargements and re-enforcements of actual experience. To be condemned for any length of time to a devitalized megalopolitan habitat, in which human beings are isolated not merely from each other but from all other organisms, and may even be forbidden by housing regulations to keep a dog or a cat for company, is to unlearn and discard all the lessons learned in cooperation by living organisms during some three billion years on earth - and by man, especially, during the last hundred thousand years. "we live by helping one another", a soldier in combat wrote. This applies to all creatures at all times; and it holds not only for survival but for further human development.

For man to restrict his social activities and his personal fulfillments solely to those that conform to external megatechnic requirements would be a form of collective suicide - or more accurately biocide - is in fact taking place before our eyes. Our elaborate mechanical equipment may be a useful supplement to organic existence: but it is not, except in grave emergencies - as with a mechanical kidney - an acceptable permanent alternative. It is from the organic world in its entirety, not merely from a swollen fragment of man's mind, his technique for handling abstract symbols, that the materials for further development are to be drawn. Once the new organic world picture becomes intelligible and acceptable, the ancient 'myth of the machine', from which our compulsive technocratic errors and misdirections are largely derived, will no longer keep its grip on modern man.