Books: Back to the Luddites?

THE MYTH OF THE MACHINE by Lewis Mumford. 342 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $8.95.

Deep in the breast of every intellectual burns the desire to play God; to know the symbiosis of mind and body that led to the walking, talking, feeling creature called man; to create a total rationale for his actions and to predict his destiny.

Thus Culture Critic Lewis Mumford (The City in History, The Highway and the City) decides that present ideas of man's inevitable dependence on science and technology are nonsense. Modern man, he says, is a victim of a "radical misinterpretation" of human development. Furthermore, the machine will either turn him into a collectivized, automatic non-person or blow him back to the jungle. The Myth of the Machine is hybrid literature—part history, part anthropology, part poetry. It is a violent, splenetic attack on much that has happened in civilization for the past several millennia, and it occasionally approaches the absurd. But the range of its erudition and imagination makes it good intellectual entertainment. It is a book to start arguments and speculation.

In the Beginning the Word. Currently accepted theory, says Mumford, suggests that man has moved logically from the primeval invention of tools to conquest of nature and finally to detachment from organic habitat by means of ultra-machines. With support from a big-think bibliography of 370 sources, Mumford argues that making and using tools didn't signal man's rise from slime. Dreams, language, ritual—all first products of the mind—did. And because the mind is father to the hand, it can reverse the mechanized march to doom. How that might happen will have to wait until Mumford's sequel; this book ends in the 16th century with Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Copernicus metaphorically anticipating the end machine—the bomb.

Already anthropologists have attacked Mumford as an armchair expert and dismissed his notions on the origins of speech as unknowable. He says language comes from dreams. "Before man achieved speech, his own unconscious alone must have been the only impelling voice he recognized, speaking to him in its own teasingly contradictory and confused images. Only a kind of dull doggedness can perhaps account for man's ability to get the better of these treacherous gifts and make something of them," and only by command of language was man able to embrace technics and articulate the significance of his achievements. Words told man what he wanted and got.

The Great Container. Primitive rituals, continues Mumford, were "basic to the whole development of human culture"; they stabilized Paleolithic man through repetitive acts that produced predictable effects. Early man was first a collector and later a hunter; from animals he learned how to gather food before discovering how to kill for it. Kings created the prototype machines from people: they organized manpower to build monuments and wage war.