Course:LIBR559A/Mumford1986

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Citation: Lewis Mumford, “Technology and Culture: Technics and Human Development,” in The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald Miller, First Edition (United States of America: Pantheon Books, 1986), 391.

As an alternative to technological determinism, Mumford proposes that the reason humans developed civilization was due to their excess cognitive capacity. Human brains had more creative power than their hunter gather situation required and humans used this excess brain power to engage in various cultural activities. These cultural activities aimed to develop symbolic systems that would order and structure the world. As these symbolic systems became more complex some came to dominate entire regions and resulted in civilizations. The final outcome of a civilization for Mumford are meagmachines. Megamachines are highly ordered systems of humans and machines that have a regional or global effect. Mumford uses the Pyramids of Giza and the Manhattan Project as examples of megamachines.

Mumford did not believe that megamachines were a positive outcome of organized human labor though. As Mumford put it, "...we must have the courage to ask ourselves: Is this association of inordinate power and productivity with equally inordinate violence and destruction a purely accidental one" (314). For Mumford, megamachines had to violently suppressed the diverse symbolic systems that had created them in favor of a single system to function. This devalued humans and made work machine focused instead of human focused. Mumford's solution to megamachines was to refocus work on humans and the production of symbolic meaning. This would generate new symbolic systems and restore a healthy diversity of ideas in the world. Mumford provides the example of Byzantium Rome as an example of a society where values shifted away from machine focused work (engineering aqueducts, stadiums, etc.) and towards human focused work (churches, theology and mysticism).

As a social critic, Mumford employs a survey approach in his writing that draws from numerous disciplines to form his arguments. This requires Mumford to write in broad strokes that tend to weaken his arguments. He frequently uses the ill defined idea of a civilization as a structural element in his arguments without properly defining the term. As a result he has to rely on generic ideas of civilizations that are western centric. This in turn weakens his argument that the ideas he is presenting can be generalized. When Mumford discusses more focused social structures he also tends to ignore social divisions within a civilization such as gender, race and class. As a result, Mumford does not discuss systems of oppression and does not offer actionable suggestions for altering or over throwing the megamachine.

Mumford is not really aiming to present a rational argument, but to provide inspiration rhetoric that moves people to action. This element of Mumford will be of undoubted value to librarians working to communicate the importance of libraries and present a pluralistic world view in their collections. Mumford is also valuable as a guide to the potential for information systems to support tyrannical power structures. Finally, Mumford is valuable as an inspiration for later thinkers that explored similar ideas such as Langdon Winner.

Page author: Logan Bingle