A Bit On Mumford

-from Donald L. Miller's autobiography: Lewis Mumford, A Life.

Moreover, like Plato and Emerson, Mumford held strongly to the notion that the good life involves more than a reordering of economic and political institutions. While essential, this would have to be preceded by a transformation of the mechanistic mode of life--the psychological submission to the machine process and the power state--that had created a new personality type--bureaucratic man--in capitalist and socialist societies. Mumford called for a complete transformation of the consciousness of industrial man, the creation of a "new humanism," an organic mode of thinking and acting that recognizes "the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective, the world known to personal intuition and that described by science [as] a single experience." While some radicals expected such a value change to occur after the revolution, for Mumford, this value change was the revolution.

The place to begin this process of cultural change, Mumford declared, was not with the nation, an artificial creation of statesmen and politicians, but with the geographic region, an area possessing a common climate, natural environment, and culture. He urged his fellow reconstructionists to begin by thinking small. Avoid sweeping national crusades for change and start immediately in your own region and locale to lay the basis for the renewal of life, he advised, just as Geddes had done in Edinburgh.

Mumford saw Patrick Geddes's civic survey method--a detailed, firsthand diagnosis of a region's natural and human resources--as the starting point and foundation for all regional reconstruction efforts. The outstanding feature of Geddes's sociological method, in his view, was its union of "concreteness and synthesis." The solid foundation of "localized" knowledge that would emerge from the survey was precisely what he found absent from most radical and utopian schemes, "paper programs for the reconstruction of a paper world." But in synthesizing the work of a number of regional investigators from a variety of fields and professions, the survey avoided as well the narrow compartmentalization of knowledge and the restricted vision that characterized specialist studies. Geddes had pioneered a sociology that combined theory and action, detailed field research and daring synthesis. In his own way, he had outdone Marx.

More than Geddes, however, Mumford emphasized the role of the creative artist in the process of social transformation. Attracted to both sociology and literature, he described a role for the insurgent intellectual that perfectly embodied his twin interests. A systematic sociology, Geddes had taught him, must be linked to a vision of the good life; and in The Story of Utopias Mumford declared it the responsibility of the artists to suggest this. They would be responsible for the first, the most important step in any general reform--the reconstruction of our inner world--by suggesting images of a more balanced, spiritually satisfying life. These could then be woven into the plans of the regional surveyors, whose job it would be to recommend social programs for each of the various regions of the country.

Unlike the Utopians he wrote about, Mumford was not driven by the dream of social perfection. The world would never be swept clean of evil and injustice, so rather than trying to imagine an impossible "no-place" where all was well the modern reformer should concentrate on the practical task of building Eutopia, the best place possible.

Mumford possessed no natural instincts or abilities for politics, nor did he consider political change important at the moment. "Our most important task at the present moment is to build castles in the air."