Freedom from barbarism and automatism: we must do that which seems impossible

Those who look for swift wholesale changes to take place in our institutions underrate the difficulties we now face: the inroads of barbarism and automatism, those twin betrayers of freedom, have been too deep. In their impatience, in their despair, such people secretly long to cast the burden of their own regeneration upon a savior: a president, a pope, a dictator-vulgar counterparts of a divinity debased or a corruption deified. But such a leader is only the mass of humanity writ small: the incarnation of our resentments, hates, sadisms, or of our cowardices, confusions, and complacencies. There is no salvation through such naked self-worship: God must work within us. Each man and woman must first silently assume his own burden.

We need not wait for bombs and bullets actually to strike us before we strip our lives of superfluities: we need not wait for events to bend our wills to unison. Wherever we are, the worst has already happened and we must meet it. We must simplify our daily routine without waiting for ration cards; we must take on public responsibilities without waiting for conscription; we must work for the unity and effective brotherhood of man without letting further wars prove that the current pursuit of power, profit and all manner of material aggrandizement is treason to humanity: trea son and national suicide. Year by year, we must persevere in all these acts, even though the restrictions are lifted and the urgencies of war have slackened. Unless we now rebuild our selves all our external triumphs will crumble.

There is no easy formula for this renewal. It is not enough for us to do all that is possible: we must do that which seems impossible. Our first need is not for organization but for orientation: a change in direction and attitude. We must bring to every activity and every plan a new criterion of judgment: we must ask how far it seeks to further the processes of life-fulfillment and how much respect it pays to the needs of the whole personality.

– Ernest Mumford in The Condition of Man (1944)

The collective squirrel cage

What, then, was man's true life? The utilitarian had a ready answer: it consisted in having more wants that could be supplied by the machine, and inventing more ways in which these wants could be varied and expanded. Whereas the traditional religions had sought to curb appetite, this new religion openly stimulated it: forgetting its hungry Olivers, who could with pathetic justice ask for more, it licensed its Bounderbys to unlimited consumption and surfeit. In the name of economy, a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; and in the name of efficiency, new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised: both processes gained speed through the nineteenth century and have come close to the limit of extravagant futility in our own time. But labor-saving devices could only achieve their end–that of freeing mankind for higher functions–if the standard of living remained stable. The dogma of increasing wants nullified every real economy and set the community in a collective squirrel cage.

Thus the universal use of the telephone has caused the abandonment of the far more economic written memorandum or postcard for brief intercommunication: the invention of the radio has caused the time-consuming human voice to displace the swift human eye even in the consumption of daily news: the cheapened cost of printing has added to the amount of needless wordage and unusable stimuli that assail modern man in newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, prospectus, folder, advertisement.

On the basis of its quantitative success, this untrammeled productivity and activity should result in boundless satisfaction: but its massive actual result is confusion, frustration, impotence. The mechanical expansion of human appetites, the appetite for goods, the appetite for power, the appetite for sensation, has no relation whatever to the ordering of the means of existence for the satisfaction of human needs. The latter process requires a humane scale of values and a priority schedule for their fulfillment which puts first things first. No such scale existed in the utilitarian ide. ology. Without critical inquiry it assumed that the new was better than the old, that the mechanical was better than the vital, that the active was better than the passive, that the financially profitable was a sufficient indication of the humanly valuable. All those unqualified assumptions were demonstrably false.

– Lewis Mumford in The Condition of Man (1944)

Every hour lived in peace was a gain

In his masterful work The Condition of Man (1944) Lewis Mumford beautifully describes European life in the Early Middle Ages (aka the Dark Ages):

The past was a faded dream: the present a nightmare: the future a golden illusion. In that subjective atmosphere the Christian personality formed itself and spread its way of life over the greater part of Europe.

For at least half a millennium daily life was ruled less by intelligence than by habit. The best one could hope for was that today would be like yesterday and tomorrow like today. To remember the customs of the past. was to know the rules for the present. Even irrational practices will wear the appearance of reason if one continues them long enough, and illusions will dominate reality if everyone participates in the same hallucinations at the same time. Yet invention and ordered intelligence were not altogether excluded from this life, even at its lowest level: water mills became more common and the tide-mill was invented, the horse-shoe came into general use, a correct harness for horses, which put the load against the chest, was finally devised, the folding camp-stool was in use as early as the time of Charlemagne, and steam was even used to pump an organ— the invention of Pope Sylvester II. The "rise of chivalry" is only a poetic paraphrase for the "increase of horsepower."

Nevertheless, life was hard, oppressive, difficult: provision for bare physical survival became all important. When the time for spring plowing comes, even the animals, half starved through the winter, will hardly have enough strength for the task; half a dozen oxen may be necessary to make the plow cleave the shallow topsoil. To make the stock of salt meats, barley, or rye last through the winter required ingenuity; few were rich enough to escape the need for parsimony, for the richer one was, the bigger the number of household dependents. A stunted life: many underfed bodies, many undernourished minds. If anyone lives well outside the monasteries, it is the hunter-warrior who adds to the trophies of the hunt the dues of the peasants he protects.

Animal hardships alternating with a muzzy, dreamful routine: this made up the sentient existence of Romanesque man. All his dominating institutions, monasticism, manorialism, Christian dogma, bore the sign of his period-protection. It was more important that there should be some continuity than that there should be rational criticism of the habits and values continued. Every hour lived in peace was a gain. To widen the span between birth and death, to punctuate the grievous days with repetitious tasks, to live like one's ancestors, obeying one's overlord and the priest, to look no farther than the close horizon, to remember Christ in one's prayers and always to make the sign of the cross against demons and magicians, to stand by one's neighbor in his trouble and to know that trouble is never far away, to keep one's station and be contented with one's lot-here was the essence of this life.