The following is excerpted from Lewis Mumford’s 1961: The City in History, c.18, “The Myth of Megalopolis”, an important source in our upcoming Difficulties of Technology seminar. Here we explore the themes of “total human annihilation”—particularly in its moral dimension.
Naïve Functionaries of Annihilation
Much of the thought about the prospective development of cities today has been based upon the currently fashionable ideological assumptions about the nature and destiny of man. Beneath its superficial regard for life and health lies a deep contempt for organic processes that involve maintaining the complex partnership of all organic forms, in an environment favorable to life in all its manifestations. Instead of regarding man’s relation to air, water, soil, and all his organic partners as the oldest and most fundamental of all his relations—not to be constricted or effaced, but rather to be deepened and extended in both thought and act—the popular technology of our time devotes itself to contriving means to displace autonomous organic forms with ingenious mechanical (controllable! profitable!) substitutes.
Instead of bringing life into the city, so that its poorest inhabitant will have not merely sun and air but some chance to touch and feel and cultivate the earth, these naïve apostles of progress had rather bring sterility to the countryside and ultimately death to the city. Their ‘city of the future’ is one levelled down to the lowest possibility of active, autonomous, fully sentient life: just so much life as will conform to the requirements of the machine. As we shall see, this would only carry the present forces at work in Megalopolis to their ultimate goal—total human annihilation. Such prophecies tend to be self-fulfilling. The more widely they are believed the better they work. But by the same token the more swiftly they work, the sooner they may come to a dire climax.
1961: p.527.
Commentary
Mumford was a powerful writer. His concerns over the use of technology and its influence on humankind have been vindicated many times over. In his City in History, he shows a rare insight into the interweaving of the technology with our built environments. Here, I want to focus upon one phrase, and likely the most evocative of this short passage: “total human annihilation”.
We can interpret this phrase in two ways. First, we can see it through a physically dystopian lens. Possibly we have seen science fiction films in which urban technology has advanced far but the populace is scarce. This seems the lesser interpretation, however. For, second, we can also interpret this annihilation to pertain not to human individuals but, rather, to the annihilation of individuals’ humanity. Outsourcing all our tasks to machines, processes of automation—from menial labor to communicating abstract thoughts—dries up the well of human living.
Many today have already outsourced the fundamental human act, that most essential to our humanity, of asking good questions. I think here of effective accelerationists, among others. They do not ask: is the good for human living something that can be improved by a machine? By technology? What are we? Asking questions only of “how” fouls the “what”. Excessive acceleration always imperils us; a thousandfold, when one does not even know how to ask where we are going. Naïveté indeed.
[Perhaps we will discover the questions that need to be asked in our seminar! We just might prevent total human / moral annihilation yet.]
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