Balancing Act

THE CONDITION OF MAN -- Lewis Mumford -- Harcourt, Brace ($5).

In 1915 a 20-year-old U.S. engineering student discovered his dream man. The student was Lewis Mumford. His dream man was Sir Patrick Geddes, a thin, agile Scot with a beard like the gorse on his native moors.

Sir Patrick had been a student under great Biologist Thomas Huxley. He was one of those versatile men who are referred to every decade as "the last Renaissance man." When he felt that his scientific writings were detracting from his civic obligations, Geddes switched to town-planning and slum clearance in Edinburgh. Because he believed that Scotland owed a great debt to Hindu philosophy, Geddes taught hygiene and town-planning in India for ten years. He was "one of the fathers of modern geography," and author of such classic studies as The Evolution of Sex, Chapters in Modern Botany. The essential condition of man, Geddes used to say, is that man is "always attempting the impossible and achieving it." Intellectual Cement Tester. Young Mumford decided to be a Renaissance man, too. So he got a job as an investigator in the dress and waist industry, became an assistant cement tester in the U.S. Bureau of Standards, a U.S. Navy radio operator in World War I. He was also an unsuccessful playwright, a student of philosophy, education, socialism, editor of two highbrow magazines (Dial, The Sociological Review) and the American Caravan, an anthology of promising U.S. writers. In 1931, aged 36, Mumford sat down "to bring together, within a common frame, the ideas I had so far formulated on machines, cities, buildings, social life and people."

The Condition of Man is Volume III of this massive project. Volumes I & II: Technics and Civilization, a history of man as a user of tools, machines and apparatus (TIME, May 7, 1934); The Culture of Cities, the growth of the modern "megalopolis" (TIME, April 18, 1938). Like the first two volumes, The Condition of Man is erudite, lengthy (467 pages), cocksure. It is jampacked with the "tangled elements of Western man's spiritual history," from the Mosaic tablets to the New Deal. Author Mumford is usually dogmatic, often insensitive, occasionally discerning. Sometimes he writes with the vehemence of an Old Testament prophet, sometimes with the horse sense of a veterinarian.

Betrayal and Fulfillment. One of the rules Author Mumford learned from Sir Patrick Geddes was that man should lead a "balanced life." A balanced life consists in using every element in man to the full -- but not to excess. Human history, according to Author Mumford, is the record of such attempts at balance.

History's most balanced lives, Author Mumford believes, were led by the Greeks. The great Greeks were men of action as well as thinkers. But ironically, says Author Mumford, their very sense of wholeness was the Greeks' undoing. Athenians began to see life not as a "spiral of change and development," but as a "superbly closed circle"--"life arrested meant art perfected." When mortal danger threatened them, in the form of Alexander the Great, the Greeks could not summon themselves to the excess of battle.

Devils of Neurosis. The second great attempt at human balance came from the teachings of Jesus, which Author Mumford explains with a little help from Sigmund Freud. To a Roman world ridden with war, poverty and the brutality of the arena, Jesus "sought to bring the inner and outer aspects of the personality into balance by throwing off compulsions, constraints, automatisms." "No one else had spoken of the moral life with fewer negations or with so many positive expressions of power and joy." To Author Mumford, Jesus' healings of the sick are no miracles but works of "psychotherapy" and psychiatry in which the "devils" of neurosis are cast out through "a vital insight into the unconscious."

Jesus' chief failing as a great man, says Mumford, was his "indifference" to art, philosophy, science and "political improvement." But Jesus is "hardly responsible," Author Mumford believes, for the "little men who guarded Jesus' memory, took him, drained off the precious life blood of his spirit, mummified his body . . . and over his remains . . . proceeded to erect . . . the Christian Church."

Though Author Mumford examines the ideas and behavior of medieval men at exhaustive length, he concludes that, since Jesus' time, the prevailing condition of man has been chiefly the ups & downs of imbalance. Man has spoiled even his best ideas by excess or by clinging to them long after they were dated. Thus: C]

P:Monasteries were admirable places for balanced thought and acts until success made them too proud and powerful.

P:The great Protestant "doctrine of private judgment," vital to the freedom of the individual Christian, often turned into personal despotism and religious schism, until, as a Vermont farmer said, "each generation grew wiser and weaker."

P:The passionate eloquence of St. Augustine (whom Mumford compares to "the wild eye and the snorting nostril of the stallion in heat") "degenerated" through the ages into the logical but lifeless dida tics of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke.

P:Renaissance man's splendid sensual joy and lust for life, as expressed by the 16th-Century Italian painter, Piero di Cosimo, in time degenerated into the jaded 19th-Century taste that produced Manet's famed "boy-like courtesan," Olympia.

Love of country, admirable as a natural passion, was distorted into a fierce nationalism by William Shakespeare ("this happy breed of men, this little world") and a host of Romantics-- including William Blake, who selfishly hoped to "build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land."

Machine Barbarism. Most unbalanced of all ages, Mumford believes, is the present. In the last 50 years, the machine has replaced the ideal of balance with the fatal "dogma of increasing wants. . . . In the name of economy, a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; in the name of efficiency, new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised." The telephone killed the "far more economic memorandum or postcard; the time-consuming human voice displaced the swift human eye ... in the consumption of daily news. . . . The massive actual result ... has been confusion, frustration, impotence." Pushed to the periphery of life by the machine, man has become an "automatism," whose world "has regressed so far toward political barbarism that it is scarcely conscious of the depths of its present degradation. . . . Death has now become the main goal of ... living."

If, concludes Author Mumford, we are to escape from this life-in-death, we must revise both our affairs and ourselves. Our economy must shift from a profit system to one "expressed in terms of direct biological, social and personal satisfactions." The "sterile individualism" of urban life (in which there is room for a dog, but not for a child) must be swept away, along with the "sleek ideal of comfortable gentility." Like Sir Patrick Geddes, we must raise up a new "balanced personality capable of treating economic experiences, and esthetic experiences, parental experiences and vocational experiences, as the related parts of a single whole, life itself."

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