Technics and Civilization
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Harcourt, Brace, $4.50]
MAKE no mistake about it; this is a rich book. In addition to revealing how mankind evolved past and present tools, machines, and systems, Mr. Mumford shows, in most cases with penetrating astuteness, what the tools, machines, and systems have done to mankind. The latter is more important than the former. I think I should say at once that Technics and Civilization is hardly a book for beginners; it is too closely written for that, and the author uses technical vocabularies so freely that the average reader will need a dictionary. Yet there are innumerable passages of beautiful prose, done with a sure touch and a passion for truth-telling.
Mr. Mumford’s book is distinguished by his keen perception of the connections between the machine and all the other evidences of man’s social progress. He relates technics to æsthetics; the loom to tulip beds in bloom, the locomotive to liberal politics, the printing press to domestic furniture. Archæologists have long been reconstructing the physical aspects of past civilizations from the shards found in kitchen middens; Mumford does something like that for the recent past when he searches the middens of our parents and grandparents, drawing from Victorian and McKinley débris evidence of current trends and proximate futurities.
In a work of such scholarship and penetration, to which workers in many fields will be long beholden, it is perhaps ungracious to call attention to spots in which the author seems to be jousting at windmills instead of arriving at his technics. Occasionally the ‘must’ note intrudes itself, reminding us that a champion of causes is present. Occasionally one will find Mr. Mumford going far afield to find the reasons for the actions of dead men when a short and simple answer — profits — would seem to explain their conduct sufficiently. Again, he strains the pattern for the sake of sharp, telling effects, especially in the section on the monastery and the clock, and in references to the sex question. Religious rites and ceremonies were timed and regularly performed by Druid and Egyptian priests in the ancient world, long before mediæval monasticism appeared. And to say that man needs more leisure for love-making is like saying that he needs more leisure for breathing; neither function seems to require special consideration from statesmen or philosophers in order to get itself done.
The author’s range in this volume is wide; he leaps front seconds to ages, from pins to pyramids, from clods to galaxies; yet amid all this vast and closely correlated knowledge false notes are relatively so few that the argument flows convincingly and with majesty from first to last. A critical reader may cavil at sentences and paragraphs, but he cannot escape the conclusion that in its entirety this is a great book which will be read approvingly years hence — if the men of those distant times still read the longish books of ancient sages as is our habit. Mr. Mumford has wrapped the machine age up in a brilliant package for posterity, and we who are his contemporaries are also his debtors.
ARTHUR POUND