Mumford: The Prophet as Statesman

...He sees the country in the grip of "galloping fascism," being rapidly converted into a "police state" where "reason is cowed by governmental purges and subverted by irrational measures for counteracting subversion," where "people who still retain and still cherish all their human attributes" are "marked men...

...Churchill recently took the trouble to explain), we would hardly have been in a position to launch the Marshall Plan, since Europe would very probably have been overrun by Soviet armies...

...and as though what keeps us and Russia apart is our addiction to "mammon-ism and mechanism," which presumably alienates the less "materialistic" spirits in the Kremlin...

...Mum-ford's illusions lead to may be gathered from the conclusions he himself reaches in a communication to the New York Times (March 28, 1954), which must have been written just about when this book was being prepared for the press...

...A more profound, and at the same time more realistic, view of the critical situation in which we and the free world find ourselves today would not fail to recognize that neither with high-minded ideals nor with the atom bomb are we in a position to coerce history and force it to accept our "All...

...Mumford's defeatism is the other side of his pseudo-apocalypticism...

...When the illusions of "conciliation" and "world government" lead to such conclusions, they are no longer innocent...

...to Mr...

...Mumford's root error is his pseudo-apocalypticism, his fin-du-mondeism, to use a phrase introduced by Sidney Hook some years ago...

...All this is emphatically to the good, but unfortunately Mr...

...How the "impossible" claim of love may become relevant to the actual life of man in society without being foolishly reduced to a simple possibility, Reinhold Niebuhr has shown in his many writings...

...also Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Illusion of World Government," Foreign Affairs, April 1949...

...He is, it seems to me, wrong on both counts, as Hanson W. Baldwin and others have pointed out.2 But more important than any mistaken guess as to the outcome of the cold war is the psychology of fin-du-mondeism as Mr...

...Is there any need for taking these fantasies seriously...

...The worst of these alternatives, submission to Communist totalitarianism, would still be far wiser than the final destruction of civilization...

...When we talk about a solution of all the world's problems, we are talking about the millennium...

...A man who can believe that in the face of what has been happening in the past thirty years can believe anything and is therefore not open to the small voice of remonstrance...

...But if history cannot be coerced to accept our solutions, it may yet be beguiled and "managed," if we have but the realism and wisdom to do so...

...Mumford means the totalitarian state and regime of terror and enslavemerit, are something purely extrinsic which the Soviet leaders are free to take up or lay aside at will...

...His basic position is that the so-called "East-West" conflict leads straight to all-out atomic war and that against the atom bomb there is no defense, so that the total extermination of mankind is imminent...

...All that remains is to strike an all-or-nothing attitude...

...He is aware that "the human situation is always desperate," that "man's life is by nature precarious and mutable," and that man can neither understand nor fulfil himself in simply naturalistic terms...

...Mumford presents to us quite solemnly "in the name of sanity...

...It is not cynical to be realistic," Mr...

...Mumford assures us: "Our works of love have marvelously succeeded...

...But Mr...

...Mumford is to be listened to only with the gravest reservations...

...1 For a sharp critique of Mr...

...This psychology of an imminent atomic "end of the world" breeds panic and hysteria, in which neither realistic thinking nor effective action is possible...

...Without the atom bomb (as Mr...

...Mumford's picture of contemporary America is a gross caricature that ill comports with his plea for sanity...

...Mumford's book is evidence of this fact...

...Mumford essays for our time...

...Today, it is a question of All or Nothing"??which in practice, of course, always means nothing...

...Baldwin, in the article already referred to, reminds us in quite a Niebuhrian vein...

...Mumford exhibits it...

...There you have it: It is better to submit to totalitarian slavery than to take the chance of all-out war, which might destroy civilization...

...But Mr...

...Mr...

...We simply have to learn the hardest lesson which history teaches: that history knows no final solutions, no "All or Nothing...

...Amid the actualities of history, Mr...

...Mum-ford is no cloistered philosopher, and the most innocent of illusions have a way of becoming dangerous when they are made to serve as a guide to practical action...

...Partial, provisional, tentative solutions, abhorrent though they are to the idealist, may prove possible of achievement and at critical moments may make all the difference in the world for the men who labor and suffer in history...

...Italics supplied...

...And is the atom bomb simply an instrument of naked power, with no relevance at all to the issues of freedom and slavery, totalitarianism and democracy...

...All this Mr...

...how utterly destructive another world war would be for them as well as for us, we could persuade them to abandon their wicked ways and join us in a democratically organized "world government...

...Mumford vitiates his own claim to the prophet's mantle by his pretensions in another and very different direction...

...And, in a sense, his is indeed a prophetic voice...

...Against such demoralizing counsel we can only repeat the truly American maxim which serves as the motto of the State of New Hampshire and which President Dickey of Dartmouth recently made the text of a stirring address: "Live free or die...

...What Mr...

...Mumford's latest illusions about "world government," see Rein-hold Niebuhr, "A Century of Cold War," The New Leader, August 2, 1954...

...In politics, such absolutist thinking is particularly dangerous...

...There is no half-way point along the road to world cooperation at which we may safely stop...

...contributor to "Commentary," "Partisan Review" Lewis Mumford is a high-minded man, with a deep moral purpose...

...This is still the best wisdom for our time??and the counsel of sanity...

...Mumford continues immediately after the passage just quoted: "As for the best of these alternatives, a policy of working firmly toward justice and cooperation and free intercourse with all other peoples, in the faith that love begets love as surely as hatred begets hatred, would, in all probability, be the one instrument capable of piercing the strong political armor of our present enemies...

...Mumford, however, the old naive and nebulous "love-idealism" still appeals as the highest wisdom of mankind...

...all we have to fall back upon is judicious combinations of military and non-military means, in both of which "love" and "power" are compounded beyond our ability to distinguish and separate...

...To meet the dreadful menace of Communist totalitarianism, it is vain to look to "world government" panaceas or the magic cure-all of "love...

...On the other hand, though he knows that the Soviet Union is a "savage despotism more ruthless than the Tsars," he still believes that, by appealing to the "reason" of the men in the Kremlin and showing them (through a "congress of scientists...

...The same extravagant notion is reiterated in various forms on several occasions in this book...

...In it, he says: "There are many alternative courses to the policy to which we have committed ourselves, practically without debate...

...We must have wisdom and patience, a sense of history, and the knowledge that there are no permanent solutions to global problems in the world of man...

...We need be under no illusions as to the finality or perfection of our solutions: At the very climax of the Civil War, Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural, reminded the nation that over and above and beyond the purposes of both North and South "the Almighty has his own purpose...

...In his communication to the New York Times, Mr...

...witness the rebuilding of Europe under the Marshall Plan...

...Mumford's philosophy, is apparently capable of accomplishing anything, even of melting the hearts of the men in the Kremlin to the point where they will abandon their aggressive courses, while "power" never achieves anything worthwhile...

...Almost every page of Mr...

...A reading of the book should convince even his admirers that, as an adviser on contemporary world affairs, Mr...

...Mumford's intention and desire, to promote the Kremlin's strategy of breaking our will to freedom by brandishing the dreadful specter of the atom bomb...

...Are they not, it may be asked, merely innocent illusions, the naive dreams of a cloistered philosopher remote from the affairs of the world...

...But he was quick to add: "With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in...

...Mumford's version of love as a substitute for power transforms love into irresponsibility...

...they serve, however much against Mr...

...And the sooner Americans learn that there is no final solution and that there is no absolute security, the better for the world...

...Mumford's reasoning is not only corrupted by his basic defeatism (remember the radical teachers group in France which in 1939 declared, "Better live as slaves than die as heroes") ; it is also vitiated by his utter failure to understand the complex and paradoxical relation between love and power in the real world...

...Throughout, he strives to champion the freedom of the human spirit against mass society and the machine-run-wild...

...Mumford is a yes-or-no, all-or-nothing man, who knows no qualifications or distinctions and has nothing but contempt for the limitations reality places upon the imagination...

...In this book, a collection of essays originally published separately from 1947 to 1954, he bears vigorous witness against the corruptions and idolatries of the age, against the mechanization of life, against dehumanization and depersonalization, against callousness and inhumanity, against the "reign of Caliban...

...History shows there is never a final solution...

...He aspires to be guide and counselor to the nation at this critical moment of its history...

...Mumford appears to be in dead earnest about this role, it is on this level that he must be judged, at least so far as this book is concerned...

...He has some very cogent things to say about the contemporary problem of crisis and renewal in the arts...

...But our works of power have miserably failed...

...And is the distinction between "'works of love" and "works of power" after all so clear and absolute...

...And since Mr...

...Love," in Mr...

...This has naturally led to his being hailed as a prophet for our times...

...No prophet, so far as I know, ever set himself up as a statesman with a four-point program for converting the Assyrian through an "appeal to reason," thereby establishing "world government...

...Have they really...

...Mumford not only believes it, he has worked out a step-by-step program for bringing it about.1 He seems to regard it as quite within the bounds of possibility for the United States and the Soviet Union not merely to "coexist" but to "compose their differences and work for a common end," provided we contrive an "honorable method to meet each other half-way...

...So strangely do the "works of love" depend upon "works of power" in the real world...

...Russia," he earnestly admonishes, "will have to abandon its fascist methods ; we, in our turn, will have to give up, not the institutions of democracy, but the notion that mammonism and mechanism are the be-all and end-all of human existence"??as though Russia's "fascist methods," by which Mr...

...Was the Marshall Plan conceived purely as a "work of love' with no ingredient of power and no consideration of self-interest...

...he also commands a strong admonitory style...

...Thus, Mr...

...Yet, that is precisely what Mr...