The Pentagon of Power

Any program sufficient to reverse the destructive success of technological affluence will demand not merely drastic restrictions; it will demand economic changes directed toward producing goods and services, modes of work and education and recreation, profoundly different from those offered by the power complex.

Reformers who would treat the campaign against environment and degradation solely in terms of improved technological facilities, like the reduction of gasoline exhaust in motor cars, see only a small park of the problem. Nothing less than a profound re-orientation of our vaunted technological “way of life” will save this planet from becoming a lifeless desert. And without such a wide-ranging preliminary alteration of personal desires, habits, and ideals, the necessary physical measures for mankind’s protection — to say nothing of its further development — cannot conceivably be carried out.

On this matter, one dare not become over-optimistic even though the first stir of a human awakening seems actually to be taking place. The unwillingness of millions of cigarette smokers to free themselves from their addiction to cigarettes despite the incontestable evidence of the probable consequences in lung cancer, gives a hint of the difficulties we shall face in redeeming the planet — and ourselves — for life. Our present addiction to private motor transportation alone may prove equally hard to break until every traffic artery is permanently clogged and every city is ruined.

For its effective salvation mankind will need to undergo something like a spontaneous religious conversion: one that will replace the mechanical world picture with an organic world picture, and give to the human personality, as the highest known manifestation of life, the precedence it now gives to its machines and computers. This order of change is as hard for most people to conceive as was the change from the classic power complex of Imperial Rome to that of Christianity, or, later, from supernatural medieval Christianity to the machine-modeled ideology of the seventeenth century. But such changes have repeatedly occurred all through history; and under catastrophic pressure they may occur again. Of only one thing we may be confident. If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine; he will rise up again in the human soul.

Reprinted from Lewis Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power.