The Pentagon of Power: Redux
The current unease seems to have reminded us of the deadliness of our technological prowess. In light of these findings, perhaps Lewis Mumford’s 1970s classic The Pentagon of Power should be revisited and reread.
Lewis Mumford began his writing career with the Story of Utopias in 1922. Almost half a century and twenty-three books later, Mumford gave us The Pentagon of Power, the second volume in The Myth of the Machine series. Throughout his career, the Flushing, New York, native managed to critique everything from urban planning to architecture, neotechnics to politics, never ceasing to remind us that our giant technological leaps for mankind have, in fact, been regressive steps for man.
With Pentagon of Power, Mumford completes the historical analysis begun in Technics and Human Development, Myth of the Machine’s first volume. Arguing that the cosmic order discovered by Descartes, Galileo, and Newton became a model for social order, Mumford posits that the mechanized world dangerously mixed with scientific hubris. The concoction led to loss of all things organic, and the fate of civilization took a drastic turn for the worst. For Mumford, that turn, and the forever souring of mankind, occurred as far back as the construction of the Tower of Babble.
The anti-hero here is the megamachine – a metaphorical contraption, a saccharinely alliterative complex, designed by the brainiacs the 17th century and propagated by modern industry and government. The result is, yes, a Pentagon of Power where each side – political absolutism, property, productivity, profit, and publicity reinforce each other and the final structure, of course, bears uncanny similarity to our Nation’s puissant military complex.
Mumford goes to great lengths to tie the birth of analytical thinking, “with its dissociation from organic complexities,” to the creation of the machine. Analytic thinking allowed for the reduction of an object into its component parts and then the recombination of those parts into something else. That was ingenious at the outset.
Unfortunately, now we have come to see the machine as an extension of ourselves, and that view, Mumford asserts, is not merely misguided – it is dangerous. No machine, however resourceful its human inventor, will ever be able to draw from man’s billions of years of diversified experience. “Scientific knowledge,” Mumford writes, “overlooks the totality of human experience as not something simply known but as being lived.
According to Mumford, war has always been the ideal condition for promoting the megamachine, and the very threat of war is the best way to keep that megamachine charging its batteries. And charging it has. Tracing the meaning of the word “power” from its 1297 definition of “possession of control or command over others” to its later entry in 1717 as “any form of energy or force available for an application to work,” Mumford contends the connotation of the word changes as society advances technologically.
Indeed the first factories appeared well before the industrial revolution of the 18th century. Venice established the first state-organized arsenals where standardization, prefabrication, and mass production were all used. Automatism and absolutism have intertwined in every military organization henceforward, but it is only in the last few hundred years that the damage has been done.
The tornado of economic dynamism has gathered up the world only to set it down in a new Oz where rapid capital accumulation, constant reinvention of the methods of production, and exorbitant profits propagate the incessant revolutionizing of technology. This continuous modernization yields greater power to the government, which in turn, orders more yellow in the path of destruction to be laid.
Critics have scolded Mumford’s long-winded (the work sweeps across millennia of historical progress – from the creation of the Egyptian Pyramids to McLuhan’s medium as message) doomsday tome for its barbaric yawp that shouts with more thrill than ever before. The National Review saw the book as a formulaic recipe: “simmer one eschatological theme in the Erasmus mentality, and serve hot in the style of Dante’s Comedy.”
Others saw the dish as overcooked, for Mumford’s writing, though ripe with an acerbic lucidity that is both unusual and inspiring, is also self-righteousness, didactic, and castigating. The Pentagon Power does not slap our wrist; it handcuffs us to a nuclear ballistic missile heading straight for the local Wal-Mart.
In a New York Times Book Review of the Pentagon of Power, Eric Hobsbawm argued that Mumford’s main weakness is taking that which is actually valid and miring it in pop-criticism. What Mr. Hobsbawm forgets is that pop-criticism is really the most tangible weapon we have when we are dealing with complexes bigger than ourselves, bigger than our nation.
Besides, it is such censure that gives Mumford’s work its piquancy. Mumford holds no qualms asking questions from whom answers Americans shirk: “We must ask ourselves,” Mumford writes, “Why does every permission turn into a compulsion? Why is our secret motto of our power-oriented society not just, ‘You can therefore you may,’ but ‘You may, therefore you must.'”
Regardless of being well written, on-cue, and pungent, Mumford’s work does posses some serious deficiencies. For a man with such a wide range of talents and so many criticisms in his dossier, Mumford leaves his work vulnerable to attack by coming of as an equal-opportunity hater, loathing almost all modern ideas and modern accomplishments without discrimination.
All embodiments of the modern day and the modern message are evil. “The trouble will such a global indictment,” as Lewis Coser of Contemporary Sociology points out, “is that it becomes self;-defeating. If everything is evil, nothing is evil.”
Furthermore, Mumford points a finger, yet proposes no solution. We basically need to either regress technologically or advance morally. In reality, neither will happen any time soon. So what are we to do? Up or Valiums, lock ourselves in air-raid shelters, and hope for the best? Click our heals together and wish for a better place and a better time?
The failure to recognize the cosmic and organic history of our age has led to massive world destruction. Or as Mumford observed, “Between the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, lies the mystery of life. Destroy the indefinable subjective component, and the whole cosmic process, like the process of time-keeping becomes meaningless – indeed unimaginable.”
Perhaps Mumford is allowed to be cynical and arrogant – he has watched over us with a wary eye, spent time analyzing and agonizing over our society and educating our youth. He has put a microscope to our history on this planet, pointed out our problems, and offered little answers. His work is a masterpiece in its composition and reinterpretation of history; his writing is eloquent, saucy, and clear.
Sadly though, when all is said and done, Mumford’s Pentagon of Power will more than likely find its place on the dusty bookshelf with the rest of the works that talk about the Spanish Flu, Genocide in Rwanda, the AIDS epidemic. In some households it will probably even be wedged between some trite biography of Kurt Cobain and Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men. And in the end, after another September 11th, or God-Help-Us something worse, Mumford can still say he was right. And we, if still as obdurate as we are now, probably won’t be alive to argue.
