Mr. Mumford’s Fixation

Lewis Mumford has studied Utopias for so many years that he can’t drop the habit of pushing everything to Utopian extremes. His The Transformations of Man (Harper, $3.50) is another contribution to a literature which demands, just for a starter, that everybody jump a mile-wide river at once. The mean-spirited will naturally object that Mumford wants everyone to be like Mumford; others will credit him with a good will that rises superior to curtains, whether they be made of iron, bamboo or merely good democratic cellophane.

In The Transformations of Man, the Mumford proposition starts from the incontestable thesis that man is no longer an ape-like creature with arms that reach to the ground. But Mumford quickly jumps to the conclusion that a mere technological imperative can force a biological mutation that will make man something other than the contentious hellion he has been for lo! these many centuries. Briefly, Mumford offers an “either-or”: either humanity will perish in a hydrogen-plutonium holocaust, or it will win through, by peaceable maneuver, to the millennial epoch of One World man.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Lewis Mumford has studied Utopias for so many years that he can’t drop the habit of pushing everything to Utopian extremes. His The Transformations of Man (Harper, $3.50) is another contribution to a literature which demands, just for a starter, that everybody jump a mile-wide river at once. The mean-spirited will naturally object that Mumford wants everyone to be like Mumford; others will credit him with a good will that rises superior to curtains, whether they be made of iron, bamboo or merely good democratic cellophane.

In The Transformations of Man, the Mumford proposition starts from the incontestable thesis that man is no longer an ape-like creature with arms that reach to the ground. But Mumford quickly jumps to the conclusion that a mere technological imperative can force a biological mutation that will make man something other than the contentious hellion he has been for lo! these many centuries. Briefly, Mumford offers an “either-or”: either humanity will perish in a hydrogen-plutonium holocaust, or it will win through, by peaceable maneuver, to the millennial epoch of One World man.