University of Virginia Library

Mumford Fears Rootless Society
From Technological Advances

By MIKE RANNEBERGER

"Modern civilization is possessed with a
compulsion to develop and utilize the
possibilities of technological innovation,
planning critic Lewis Mumford said
Wednesday night.

This preoccupation, which has
developed over the past 400 years, has
reached a crisis stage in the world today
and bodes ill for life in the future, he
added.

Speaking to a capacity audience in the
New Chemistry Building auditorium, Mr.
Mumford discussed "Tomorrow's World"
with emphasis on the consequences of
technology on men's lives.

Currently Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Foundation Architecture Professor at the
University, Mr. Mumford is a
distinguished social philosopher,
authority on architectural planning, and
author of many works, including two
books on technology and an
autobiography in preparation.

He labels himself a "very competent
diagnostician", although critics often call
him a "machine wrecker" and "prophet
of doom."

Depicting a society which has lost
sight of the individual in its pursuit of
machines and gadgets, Mr. Mumford
pointed to today's pace of life, in which
goods are produced and consumed
rapidly, and the rate of expansion is
constantly accelerating.

Photo by Charley Sands

Lewis Mumford Speaks To A Capacity Audience On "Tomorrow's World"

Architecture Professor Mumford Pointed Out That Today's Life Is Accelerating

The consequences of this technological
pace were visualized as early as the
seventeenth century by the scientist
Johann Kepler. Kepler described a society
with "no constants and no continuities",
he said.

Mr. Mumford fears this rootlessness
and depersonalization of modern society.
Man must control technology, and not
vice-versa, he stated.

Comparing "hippies" to early
Christians, Mr. Mumford praised
communal living experiments as attempts
to reassert personal relationships in the
face of a depersonalized, meaningless
society.

Aldous Huxley's nightmare vision of a
Brave New World is already partially
realized, Mumford asserted. However, he
offered hope that man may yet save
himself.