Man of Tomorrow?

Man of Tomorrow? THE CONDUCT OF LIFE (342 pp.)-- Lewis Mumford--Harcourt, Brace ($5).

Lewis Mumford's new book is the crown of 20 years' hard labor, the last volume of a tetralogy that includes Technics and Civilization (1934), The Culture of Cities (1938), and The Condition of Man (1944). In these, Mumford plotted directions for the development of the machine, the city, and society. In The Conduct of Life he undertakes the more ambitious task of creating human beings fit to live in the structures of Volumes I to III.

As Mumford sees him, contemporary man is about as well suited to a place in the Mumford futurama as a Rhode Island rooster is suited to cooing like a dove and soaring like an eagle. Modern man has but one real belief: "Modern man can do no wrong." He regards all strong emotions (with the exception of violence) as "hysterical or funny." The "morality of the 'dead-pan'" is so exclusively his basic morality that by the time he reaches college he has one chance in three of being a "moral imbecile." He is "too numb even to hate what is hateful," and the only aspects of the future that arouse his jaded interest are those which promise escape from boredom, e.g., "rocket flights to the moon." As for the present:

"Radio and gambling, cocktails and promiscuous fornication, soporifics and aphrodisiacs, television and motor trips and sports, preferably sports that threaten loss of limb, are all the fillers-in of deficient forms of life: witnesses to the disruption of the family, the renunciation of parenthood, the retreat from citizenship, the failure of education to make whole persons."

In such passages Author-Mumford reveals himself as a familiar type of preacher. The difference between Preacher Mumford and others is the passionate effort he makes to translate a host of old truths into a single new creed.

The Culture of Bathrooms. Mumfordian man must not just look Mumfordwards. He must sense that the day is gone when millions could look to one great teacher for guidance. "The task of the individual Messiah . . . now devolves equally on all men"; tomorrow's model society must be a universal democracy of self-teachers. Candidates must begin not by enlisting in a party or signing a pledge, but by withdrawing into self-analysis and contemplation. Mumford realizes that a man can't just throw up his job and become a hermit, but he can "escape from [the] time cage" by cutting down on the nonessentials that prevent concentration. "No house in the future will be generously planned," says he, "that does not have its closet or its cell, to supplement the only equivalent for it today, the bathroom."

Mumford's pilgrim will thus lead a double life -- "once in the actual world, and once more in [the mind]." His next step must be to "resist every kind of automatism: buy nothing merely because it is advertised, use no invention merely because it has been put on the market, follow no practice merely because it is fashionable." He must calculatedly inspire in himself "a vast increase of effective love," and keep the heartless machine in its place by, for example, never using an automobile when his feet will do. He will make his own bed, clean his own room, take his turn at the cooking. And having thus proved his self-responsibility and independence (and cut down on his smoking and drinking to boot), he must reunite with the rest of the world, particularly with those "who have been undergoing a like regeneration."

Secular Evangelism. Cellularly organized, much like the early Christians, Mumford's regenerated men will work for the ideals of One World, public service, individual freedom, universal love. They will be profoundly religious men -- but with the difference that, in accordance with Mumford's theology, they will believe that God is simply the end, not the beginning of man: He will not disclose Himself until man has reached Him.

Philosophers and theologians will have a busy, and often easy, time blasting holes in Lewis Mumford's magnum opus. Moreover, almost any reader is bound to feel that at many decisive points Mumford is talking about Man and showing blank ignorance of men. But its flaws do not take away the fact that The Conduct of Life is a work of strong and imaginative conception, inspired on every page by deep anguish, conviction, horror and hope: the hallmarks of a sincere if secular evangelism.

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