“By our overvaluation of physical power and scientific truth, aloof from other human needs, we have paid the same price Faust had to pay when he made his compact with Mephistopheles: we have lost our souls, or to speak in more psychological terms, we have depersonalized ourselves and have turned our conscious thinking selves into automatons. Is it any wonder that our whole civilization goes on repeating processes it has once started, even when they have lost both of their original meaning and any valuable human end? Behold the way in which we continue to produce butter and wheat we neither eat nor share, goods that we do not have the social providence to distribute, knowledge we do not have the intellectual capacity to assimilate, instruments of mass extermination whose use might put an end to the human race.”
Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, 347
How not to create a unified world
“To be on friendly terms with every part of mankind, one must be on equally friendly terms with every part of oneself; and to do justice to the formative elements in world culture, which give it greater significance and promise than any earlier stage in man’s history, one must nourish the formative elements in the human self, with even fuller energies than axial men applied to this task. In brief, one cannot create a unified world with partial, fragmentary, arrested selves which by their very nature’ must either produce aggressive conflict or regressive isolation. Nothing less than a concept of the whole man — and of man achieving a consciousness of the cosmic and historical — is capable of doing justice to every type of personality, every mode of culture, every human potential. At this point a further human transformation, so far not approached by any recorded culture, may well take place.”
Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, p 444
Wholeness and love
“What is ideally desirable, at this stage of man’s development, does not exist in any past form of man, either biological or social: not the pure Hindu, the pure Muhammadan, the pure Christian, nor yet the pure Marxist or the pure mechanist: not Old World man nor New World man. The unity we seek must do justice to all these fragments, and be ready to include them lovingly in a self that shall be capable of transcending them. Any doctrine of wholeness that does not begin with love itself as the symbol and agent of this organic creativity can hardly hope to produce either a unified self or unified world; for it is not in the detached intellect alone that this transformation must be effected.”
Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, p 455