Lewis Mumford

In 1975, I was 30 years old and had just started at the Brookdale Center on Aging of Hunter College, where I was the only staff member with an uncertain future. I was also teaching a course, at New York University, on “The Crisis of Civilization,” where I expounded on thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Arnold Toynbee. I was also deeply interested in the thinker and environmentalist Lewis Mumford, whose two-volume Myth of the Machine had appeared a few years before. Mumford was then 79 years old and had no idea who I was, but I wrote him a personal letter. He replied to my letter and invited me to visit him upstate in the charming town of Amenia, New York. I did visit him and spent a day listening to the story of his life, while I was given given a tour of his beautiful garden. The man himself was who I hoped he would be: a source of inspiration for the course I was teaching, as shown in Mumford’s own words: “Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.”

Why was Lewis Mumford willing to meet an unknown young man a half century younger than him? Perhaps his reason is found in his statement expressing understanding of the real ties between generations: “Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.” Being part of the generation of the Sixties myself, I was certainly looking for a grandfather figure, and Mumford fit the bill. Despite being of a far younger generation, I was uncomfortable with the eco-pessimism reflected in The Limits of Growth (1973), published just a few years earlier and treated in my crisis of civilization course. That book was inspired by the Club of Rome, whose President, Alexander King, was an eco-elder I would be able to meet years later. But Mumford’s hope in the future was an abiding gift to all generations. Lewis Mumford would continue to be a productive thinker and a critic of society during his old age. He would die, at age 94, many years after our meeting. Mumford once said “I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, ‘This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!’ “ This testament of hope is one that I have never forgotten.