18
PARTISAN REVIEW
that it is basically commercial, since iron and glass were applied to–
gether ,even earlier in the
Hailes
and
Passages,
the grain markets and
shopping arcades of the early 19th century. His organicizing of inven–
tions and societies is even more subtle. The telephone, the airship and
contraceptives are for Mumford organic, whereas the telegraph, the
railroad train and the printing press are merely mechanical. Feudalism,
in which he mistakenly supposes the class struggle abated under the
happy spiritual sovereignty of the church, he considers more organic
than capitalist society; in this opinion he joins hands with the
mod~rn
Catholic ideologues of the corporate state. And in an astonishing
passage which we must lay to his historical shortsightedness, he un–
wittingly presents his organic ideal as a kind of mediaeval totalitarian–
ism; he reproaches Protestantism in the 16th century as socially anti–
organic and as having "further destroyed the possibilities of creating
a united front."
In his fuzzy organicism, Mumford also cultivates that fringe of
inspirational scientific metaphor common among world-saviors and
neo-religionists to-day. Like a romantic
Naturphilosoph
he equates the
mechaniCal with the visible, the organic with the invisible-he cites
rays, emanations and dreams !-and insists . that the latter "are as
real ,... as any external phenomenon." The polarity, organic and
inorganic, corresponds for him to that of quality and quantity; and he
opposes the science before 1870 to science after 1870 as mechanism
to organism. Sad dilettante muddle of Whitehead, Bergson and ABC's
of the cosmos! He must be aware that the mechanism of the 17th cen–
tury presupposed particles that no one had seen and invisible attrac–
tions through distant space, and that mechanistic physics was full of
concepts derived from the experience of the human body; whereas
the growth of the biological sciences in the last century has depended
largely on the application of the methods of physics and chemistry to
the living organism, and it is the classical mechanics which is applied
in these sciences.
In Mumford's writings, the polar twins, organic and inorganic,
are often nothing but heavily weighted homiletic counters, like the
metaphors, life and death, light and darkness, in older religious
speech. In characterizing an object as organic, Mumford sanctifies it,
endows it with an aura. And in spite of his strenuous espousal of the
or.ganic, his social analyses, in their reduction of issues to bare polar
conflicts, are often mechanical and primitive, and congested with New–
tonian categories of mass, force, inertia and space: "our failure even
to contrive a breathing space in bellicose effort is partly due to the
inertia of historic burdens."
Political Program.
The counterpart of this rousing faith in the
