BOOKS
347
And when, on page 7 of a 467-page book, he says, "So much for the
elemental [i.e., biological] nature of man," the reader grits his teeth
in preparation for another giddy slide through history on the super–
naturalist toboggan. Mumford does not recognize the efficacy of rational
thought: all that man "knows" or believes about the physical world is the
result of his own personal and social development"; this would be a
simple tautology if it did not imply that no two people can know the same
thing about the physical world, that, in other words, the scientific
method is a complete illusion.
For a man who suspects rationalism wherever he finds it, Mumford
has an extraordinarily high opinion of the indestructibleness of ideas
and their far-reaching influence. Thus he finds a "drawback" in the fact
that the institutions of the Middle Ages progressively obscured the
Christian "idea," as if it were possible for them not to do so; and he
implies that the men of the Middle Ages should have returned con–
tinually to the original idea, as if the original idea were somewhere (per–
haps in Palestine?) waiting for them. And again, Mumford tells us
solemnly that "the conception of life as a picnic has certain serious de–
fects. First of all, it is an infantile aim, bound close to the pleasure prin–
ciple," etc., etc. Now, it appears that if I go to the park for a Sunday
picnic, I do so because of the nefarious influence of Rousseau.
Th e Condition of Man
is a history without a method and with–
out a unifying passion!. Mumford has seriously misrepresented the
character of the cultures he talks about. Although modern society is in a
state of disintegration and chaos, Mumford has as little trouble finding
a symbol which represents it as if it were perfectly organic: the symbol
is the .technician, the business man, the promoter, the "passive fascist"
(for the "active fascist" in Germany and Italy is nothing but a sort of
super-pragmatist, i.e., technician). The author then deduces the character
of the intellectual and the worker and everyone else from the character
of the technician. But when he says that "the wisdom of the race" re–
volted against the modern mechanical world conception in the person
of Blake, Ruskin, Morris, Arnold, Emerson, and a dozen others, he
neatly destroys his own picture of modern society. When he talks about
medieval society, he does so in terms of a very few men whom he ad–
mires, such as St. Thomas and Abelard. The people of the Middle Ages,
we gather, were like St. Thomas and Abelard: "even the dumb peasant"
"could not be altogether vile . . . he daily had the experience of a
sacred art"; I should like to see some proof of this common allegation
that the medieval proletarian was better off than the modern proletarian.
The Romans appear to have all been pragmatists, made stupid (or like
Marcus Aurelius, mystic) with wealth and boredom.
Cultural bolshevism flourishes in Mumford's kind of impulsive vital–
ism and obscurantism:
It
was not in the bloody operations of the guillotine in 1793
