Relapse
I am almost finished the Mumford book of over 400 pages. Lewis Mumford has a way-with-words to stoke my imagination. So I push ahead to read his account of the reciprocal influence of machines and society from the middle ages, about 1000 AD to the early 20th century. The quoted lines highlight the pivot point of developing a common language, the precursor for a morality of trust. Reasonableness is the child of shared meanings… But there is always the other side of the coin. I mean to say the possibility of relapse to the moral dynamic of mistrust, of medieval, might-makes-right style of managing our collective affairs. Mumford’s analysis, now nearly 100 years old was prescient to describe our present condition.
The technique
of creating a neutral world of fact
as distinguished
from the raw data of immediate experience
was the great general contribution
of modern analytic science.
This contribution was possible second only
to the development of our original language concepts,
which built up and identified,
with the aid of common symbol,
such as tree or man,
the thousand confused and partial aspects
of trees and men
that occur in direct experience.
Behind this technique, however,
stands a special collective morality:
a rational confidence in the work of other men,
a loyalty to the reports of the senses,
whether one likes them or not,
a willingness to accept a competent and unbiased
interpretation of the results.
This recourse to a neutral judge
and to a constructed body of law
was a belated development in thought
comparable to that which took place
in morality
when the blind conflicts between biassed men
were replaced by the civil processes
of justice.
HOWEVER ON THE OTHER HAND…
The shrill, the violent, the vociferous,
the purely animal tooth-baring and foot stamping,
paroxysms of uncritical self-love and uncontrolled hate
–all these archaic qualities,
which once characterized the leaders of men
and their imitators,
are now outside the style of our epoch…
their recent arrival
is merely a symptom of that relapse
into the raw primitive…
Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford, published 1934 by Harcourt, Inc.
