On Baconian premises Europeans began, according to Mumford, to save time, shrink space, augment power, multiply goods, overthrow organic norms and displace real organisms with mechanisms that stimulated them or vastly magnified some single function they performed. All these imperatives, which have become the groundwork of science as technology in o

Bureaucratically guaranteed survival under such circumstances means the expansion of industrial economics to the point where a centrally planned system of production and reproduction is identified with the guided evolution of the Earth. If such an industrially minded solution becomes generally accepted as the only way of preserving a viable environ

Guilds were neither unions nor professional associations.

The same can be said about physical artifacts and about the set of rules that define formal institutional arrangements. Cars are machines that call for highways, and highways pretend to be public utilities while in fact they are discriminatory devices. Compulsory schools constitute a huge bureaucratic system; no matter how convivially a teacher tri

Crucial to how much anyone can learn on his own is the structure of his tools: the less they are convivial, the more they foster teaching.

Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splinterin

Other industrial institutions have passed through the same two watersheds. This is certainly true for the major social agencies that have been reorganized according to scientific criteria during the last 150 years. Education, the mails, social work, transportation, and even civil engineering have followed this evolution. At first, new knowledge is

Poets and clowns have always risen up against the oppression of creative thought by dogma. They expose literal-mindedness with metaphor. They demonstrate the follies of seriousness in a framework of humor. Their intimate wonder dissolves certainties, banishes fears, and undoes paralysis.

At present articulate minorities–often claiming the leadership of majorities–seek equal treatment. If one day they were to seek equal work rather than equal pay–equal inputs rather than equal outputs–they could be the pivot of social reconstruction. Industrial society could not possibly resist a strong women’s movement, for example, which would lea