Lewis Mumford

LEWIS MUMFORD considers the view from his study at the top of Leverett towers one of the great advantages of the apartment he has occupied there since 1965. The scene unfolds up Dewolfe St.: first the insistent brick spire of a Catholic church, then the stubby red buildings of the Yard, and finally, William James, towering abrupt and white in the background. The church spire struggles for attention, but can't really match William James, which rises sleek, new and confident above the Cambridge sky-line. Beneath it, the quiet buildings of the Yard huddle together as if frightened or resentful, wrapped in tradition.

Mumford, a visiting scholar in Leverett for the last four years, says he likes the scene because he likes Cambridge generally. The tableau also seems to resonate with something deep in Mumford him-self. The tension between old and new, past and future weaves through almost all of Mumford's 50 years of prodigious writing on man and his social environment. Mumford remarks philosophically that he's a "rare bird." He may be rarer than he thinks: a kind of latter-day Thoreau, trying to make sense of the twentieth century and plan for the twenty-first.

At first meeting Mumford's manner recalls an era that is dead or rapidly dying. Stately in his prose and his bearing, his voice rises from his chest in low modulated tones, while his accent, though definitely American, contains a touch of the British. Seated in his brown-hued study in formal repose, his solid features, white hair, and bushy white eyebrows suggest languid discussions, pipes and open fires.

At 73, Mumford is a scholar in the old-style as well--not the product of assembly line education, but a thinker without titles, whose formal education was night school at the City College of New York. Mumford calls himself a writer, but it's probably for lack of a better word. "The orthodox name is philosopher," he says, "but a philosopher today is a specialist. I loathe the very notion of expert."

Over the years, Mumford has become known as a specialist in many fields--a tribute both to his vast learning and his stubborn refusal to confine himself to one discipline. Among the twenty-three volumes he's produced since 1922 are texts on Herman Melville, on the history of art and literature, on design and architecture and on moral philosophy. But perhaps his most famous and important work has been in urban affairs. Mumford was among the first Americans to study the problems of the cities systemically, and the ideas he formulated in the 1920's have, if anything, gained in relevance as time passed.

IT IS TYPICAL of Mumford that he should have been most ahead of his time in urban affairs--an area where his thinking seems most at odds with the trends of modern scholarship. At a time when social scientists were carving up the urban field into fiefdoms--sociology, education, economics, politics--Mumford insisted on considering all the approaches together, and pioneered the study of man's "total" urban environment. Mumford became interested in the cities because he thought they were being ruined by a dangerous trend in human affairs: he uncontrolled spread of technology. In the Culture of the Cities, he cautioned that man had better make room for human beings in the city, and make himself the master of his machines.

Mumford's critics have since portrayed him as an implacable foe of technology, a relic of the Victorian age who prattles mindlessly about how automobiles and jet-planes will be the doom of us all. Mumford himself finds it "hilariously funny that people think I despise technology." He doesn't: he wanted to be an electrical engineer before he set off on his writing career. It is just that while most people uncritically accept applied science for the wealth it creates, Mumford has remained an unswerving humanist, asking where man fits in.

As he watched slum multiply on slum around his birthplace in New York City, he concluded that throughout all of history there have been two types of technologies. One of these he calls the democratic technology, in which the "symbolic" pursuits of men--the arts, music, poetry, human communication--have been ultimate ends toward which man's work and his tools contributed.

The other he labels the authoritarian technology. In less developed civilizations, authoritarian technologies consisted of men organized as human machines to produce for kings and priests. Today, he warns, we are on the threshold of a new king of authoritarian technology: "The center of authority in this new system," he wrote in "Now Let Man Take Over," "is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent."

Only now are we beginning to see the implications of the insight Mumford had 30 years ago. It now appears that the Victorians are not Mumford and his following but the defenders of unhindered technology and its corporate and military offspring in this country. In any case, Mumford has now picked up allies both in the establishment--mayors who are fighting pollution and Galbraith who warns of corporate control in the New Industrial State--and on the Left.

THE UNWITTING alliance between Mumford and student radicals seems particularly unlikely, but fits into the pattern of Mumford's blend of eras. Mumford, the crusty scholar born in 1895, considers it a stroke of luck that he waited until the student revolt had matured to start writing his twenty-fourth volume, the second part of The Myth of the Machine (the first part appeared last year). "I'm entirely sympathetic with the students," he says bluntly. "Everything they're asking is long over-due."

Mumford considers the McCarthy movement and the revolt in the Universities proofs of his hypotheses and signs of hope. The first, he feels, was an effort to recapture for human beings a system that has become increasingly inward-looking--taking orders from its computers and social scientists instead of its subjects. The University upheaval he sees as a healthy effort to restore the University to its rightful place as detached critic of the system instead of participant in its oppression of human life. "Everytime a professor goes to the Pentagon he is binding the University that much closer to the existing society," Mumford emphasizes.

Mumford was among the first scholars in the United States to speak out against the war in Vietnam. He wrote Johnson an open letter condemning the escalation of the war two days after Johnson started bombing the North in February, 1965. Then, in May, 1965, in his last speech as President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he again struck out against Johnson's policies on the war. "I was doing something that was reprehensible in a conventional sense," he recalls, "but I felt the issue had to be thrust forward." For his efforts, he was physically threatened by a painter sitting next to him on the stage.

BUT WHILE THERE are great areas of overlap between Mumford's cause and the New Left's, there are important differences as well. To a large degree they are differences of style and experience, but precisely for that reason they are revealing of Mumford himself. Mumford is highly critical of the young for their arrogance in ignoring history. The impatience of the young, he feels, is just another manifestation of push-button mentality, which expects rewards in seconds. "Change," says Mumford, "takes experiment. It can't come overnight. This is the one thing I'm against." History teaches this lesson, and also gives clues to how change can come about.

Mumford cites several elements of human experience which young people today ignore or consider irrelevant. One is the relation of rural and urban areas. Mumford can still recall the time when a dime and the subway put you in unspoiled country-side outside New York City; and he maintains doggedly that recapturing the rural experience is essential to the "renewal of life" which he envisions for this country. To this end, he envisions an ideal pattern for future societies: a polynuclear, regional development of moderate size cities, each surrounded by green belts devoted only to agriculture. The central core would combine industry, residential areas, and cultural facilities. Beyond the green belt would lie untouched countryside.

For Mumford, the city seems a place where a nineteenth century man--rural, self-sufficient, intellectual--can reach some sort of compromise with modernity. Many young people, however, seem to see positive values in the chaos and closeness of city--a chance to meet other people, and share an almost communal experience.

Concluding an article in the New Yorker last July, Mumford described with evident admiration how Ralph Waldo Emerson prevented a riot in Concord one hundred years ago. Emerson asked the crowd with "calm reason," "Is this Concord?" Young people today would probably admire Emerson--but they also like the Cream.