Neotechnic

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION -- Lewis Mumford--Harcourt, Brace ($4.50).

Though preachers (usually) must be licensed, politicians elected and princes born, anyone is free to become a prophet. From Major Prophet Marx to Minor Prophet H. G. Wells there has been a swarm of soothsayers laying down the law, but rarely have their tables of stone weathered the drizzle of a single generation. Of the modestly minor interpreters of the modern U. S., Lewis Mumford has one of the most respectful followings. No Jeremiah, no hard-shell Marxian, with no patent axe to grind, he goes at the complex mass of modern civilization with all five senses. Technics and Civilization, scholarly, ambitious, big (495 pp.), does not attempt to be a Bible for any creed, but it may well prove to be a milestone in the circuitous study of the Machine Age.

Author Mumford denies that the Machine Age began with the harnessing of steam, points out that "the modern machine age cannot be understood except in terms of a very long and diverse preparation. The notion that a handful of British inventors suddenly made the wheels hum in the eighteenth century is too crude even to dish up as a fairy tale to children." The real machine age, which he says has been with us 1,000 years, Mumford divides into three overlapping, interpenetrating phases: eotechnic, paleotechnic, neotechnic.

The Eotechnic Phase (1000-1750) brought into being new inventions (mechanical clocks, telescope, printing press, magnetic compass), improved older ones (lathe, loom), invented the experimental method in science. "Measuring the gains not in horsepower originally used but in work finally accomplished, the eotechnic period compares favorably both with the epochs that preceded it and with the phases of mechanical civilization that followed it."

The Paleotechnic Phase ("the second industrial revolution") began about 1700, reached its high point about 1870, began to go rapidly downhill in 1900. "The entire paleotechnic period was ruled . . . by the policy of blood and iron. . . . The human gains . . . were small: perhaps for the mass of the population nonexistent. . . . But a multitude of detailed advances were made in technics itself. . . . The state of paleotechnic society may be described, ideally, as one of wardom. . . Competition: struggle for existence: domination and submission: extinction. With war at once the main stimulus, the underlying basis, and the direct destination of this society, the normal motives and reactions of human beings were narrowed down to the desire for domination and to the fear of annihilation--the fear of poverty, the fear of unemployment, the fear of losing class status, the fear of starvation, the fear of mutilation and death." But, while "humanly speaking the paleotechnic phase was a disastrous interlude, it helped by its very disorder to intensify the search for order, and by its special forms of brutality to clarify the goals of humane living."

Though industry and politics are still largely dominated by paleotechnic ideals, and though "one cannot say confidently that a single region, much less our Western Civilization as a whole, has entirely embraced the neotechnic complex." Author Mumford thinks the world is well on its way into the neotechnic phase. But the New Deal will be more revolutionary than the Democratic Party supposes: "The planned and integrated industry of neotechnic design promises so much greater efficiency than the old that not a single institution appropriate to an economy of parsimony will remain unaltered in an economy of surplus. . . ."

Mumford criticizes Mahatma Marx, calls him in some respects a false prophet. But he is no upholder of the capitalist system ("capitalism has not come within miles of satisfying the most modest standard of normalized consumption"), looks forward to what he calls "post-Marxian"' communism. The Neotechnic Age will scrap many a paleotechnic machine: "As social life becomes more mature, the social unemployment of machines will become as marked as the present technological unemployment of men." Constitutionally and architecturally cheerful, he foresees no ultimate chaos, thinks the machine has taught mankind at least one lesson: "Nothing is impossible."

The Author. Precocious, Lewis Mumford began writing for popular technical magazines when he was 14. Ill health and three Manhattan colleges helped him to a wider education than most of his stouter contemporaries got, diversified but did not scatter his interests. He writes as an accredited expert in four fields--architecture, city-planning, modern art, U. S. literature. Sticks and Stones, The Golden Day, The Brown Decade gave him the reputation of an unusually well-rounded U. S. critic-in-general. Married, 38, still living on his native Long Island. He is earnest, enthusiastic, with an almost eotechnic courtliness, talks rapidly in a hot-potato voice.

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