Metropolis and Necropolis

Lewis Mumford’s analysis of civilization is hard to find. His Myth of the Machine is unavailable online, his Pentagon of Power has become a rare publication. He swam against the tide of 20th Century boosterism, the optimism of the technological society, and became unpopular.

Lews Mumford: not optimistic enough for the roaring twenties

However, many of his ideas have been adopted by those who value the idea of “Small is Beautiful,” such as economist E.F. Schumacher. Some of the ideas Mumford pioneered in the 1930s, for example, Appropriate technology and sustainable development have become watchwords of the post-modern industrial world.

Mumford’s analysis is worth looking at, since he was writing before the collapse of the economic system in the United States. He correctly predicted trends in urban development long before they happened. At the same time, he analyzed the problems that would arise with that development and questioned the ethos of the paradigm of absolute growth.

In the early part of the twentieth century the lack of development in “third world” countries was seen as the great human tragedy. The solution to the humanitarian disasters of the 1930s was seen in increasing agricultural and industrial production. Stalin’s policy of agrarian collectivization after the shortfalls in grain production is a notable example. While grain production was increased, Stalin’s policies had disastrous results. Stalin’s determination to grow wheat devastated the culture and spiritual growth of entire sectors of Russia and Ukraine where his growth policies were adapted.

Analogous to Stalin’s “growth” policies in the communist world the economic growth policies in the West have had similar devastating results.

While the 20th Century was a period of great economic growth and development, the focus on infrastructure and the creation of employment for people in urban centers has avoided more humanistic concerns, especially those of personal and spiritual development.

While many of the development programs undertaken in the twentieth century have certainly contributed to a more prosperous society in the material sense, the focus on economic concerns has impoverished the human spirit with disastrous results.

How would one explain the recent massacre in Las Vegas to a time traveler from the 1930s? One would need to explain how a small town in the desert became a mecca to gamblers and prostitutes and an entertainment venue for Frank Sinatra. For that matter, one would have to describe how Frank Sinatra became a star, how the mafia rose to prominence, and why hotels built in the middle of nowhere attract great crowds.

To our astonished listeners ground down by the poverty of the great depression of the 1920s this future would seem incredible indeed. That the mafia together with prostitutes, gamblers and movie stars had built a giant metropolis based only on sin, cheap alcohol, slot machines, prostitutes and strip shows would strain all belief. But to go further and report to our shocked listeners that in this decadent milieu of moral blight everyone is allowed to carry handguns would further strain belief and stagger the imagination. Perhaps some of our ancestors from the 1930s would remember the need for shotguns to scare off varmints. But they certainly knew better than to carry their shotguns into town or to church.

To learn that sophisticated fire-arms are not only legal but endorsed and encouraged, that shotguns are primitive compared to the light-weight and deadly machine guns that can be carried openly would certain surprise our grandfathers.

And to discover that an entire arsenal might be carried into a luxury hotel with no one raising an eyebrow would further baffle our ancestors. A traveler who ventured into 1930 from our own time would lose his audience if he began to describe the attack carried out on country fans by an enraged madman armed with machine guns.

That it would be possible and permissible for a millionaire to rent a luxury hotel room in Las Vegas with the purpose of murdering a large number of country fans would be dismissed as the worst kind of pulp fiction by any thinking intellectual of the 1930s.

No such city as Las Vegas could exist in the first place, since it would contradict all moral sense and decency to allow mafiosos and prostitutes to create a city with the express purpose of carrying out sinful activities. In the second place, even if such an atrocity as Las Vegas could exist in a weird science fiction story, the author of the story defies all common sense by setting his city in a desert with no water for the millions of residents. How could they possibly survive? Such a metropolis is obviously a fiction. In the third place, even if shotguns might be allowed on the ranch for self-protection in the Wild West, there is no way that any sane society would allow people to roam the streets of a town dedicated to alcohol, gambling, and prostitution armed with machine guns. All these premises of the science fiction story are unthinkable.

But Lewis Mumford saw this coming. An American social critic, he wrote about cities and the metropolis. As a public intellectual writing on architecture and society for the New Yorker in the 1930s he found that there were 6 levels of urban development. He describes the Culture of Cities from primitive tribal life to the decadence of the Nekropolis as follows:

1.Polis

Tribes and communities grow together into a town on the basis of a shared agricultural economy. From prehistoric times to the feudal townships of small nobles and princes.

2. Eopolis

The town grows gathering into it a collection of smaller villages whose tribes and communities have developed not only agricultural economies but small industries, trade, and commerce. The town gradually becomes a city. Ancient Eopolis include Cairo in Egypt and Hastinapura in India, Timbuktu in Africa and Macchu Picchu in Peru.

Towns and villages are gradually knitted together into larger communities coalescing around cities. In Europe, Rome was built as a number of settlements that began on seven hills and grew to include a Coliseum for games and a senate fore governing an empire that lasted 1000 years.

In Mexico, the Toltecs and Mayans, Aztecs and Mixtecs coalesced around Teotihuacan, forerunner of Mexico City where merchants would trade honey, feathers, obsidian glass, ceramic pots, weapons, women, slaves, avocados and tomatoes and thousands of other products, goods, and services in their vibrant markets in the shadow of the pyramids.

In Indochina the various peoples of the Khmer civilization created Angkor Wat and the city of Bayon around the Tonle Sap Lake and the Mekong River in land rich for rice cultivation. Ruled by Jayavarman VII this peaceful Buddhist Eopolis grew to a population of over 100,000 long before London and Paris figured in the imagination of the Western mind.

3. Metropolis

With the dawn of the machine age, technology is a blessing. The town is now a complete city, reaching full stature, its population dense with complex systems of water and energy. Mechanical energy abides. Electricity is introduced along with the exploitation of steam engines or petroleum products and heavy industry: This level of development begins in cities like London, Bombay, and Paris and continues well into the 20th Century. Small communities morph into cities, and soon achieve the status of metropolis. The metropolis is cosmopolitan; driven by a vibrating economy, it pulses with culture and absorbs peoples from all walks of life, all nations, all languages.

4. Megalopolis

A Megalopolis is an overgrown machine, a giant city. The city has snarled into a mass of urban blight and decadence over more than a century. Gardens and breathing spaces have disappeared. Since land must be developed and subdivided into apartments and commercial space it is too expensive to allow for green areas. Economy exists only to feed the machine. Growth is pursued as an end to itself. Since growth fuels the machine it is a virtue. Unbridled growth is cancer; but cancer is necessary for all growth is good, even mutation.

Cultural values are being lost; religion is subordinate to money and economics. Corruption is rampant. Crime becomes normal.

The Megalopolis can no longer breathe. Public Transportation is choked with human bodies struggling to arrive to work areas on time. The original residential areas are chopped into smaller spaces and further subdivided to allow for more shops and stores. Houses become apartments. The gentry disappear from urban centers and are replaced by low-income residents. Overcrowding and poverty breeds misery, epidemics, and violence.

A Megalopolis is a city bursting with its own capacity. Human culture is no longer the essential define feature of a city this large. Economy is the only common denominator.

Lewis Mumford: “Megalopolis ushers in an age of cultural aggrandizement: scholarship and science by tabulation: sterile research: elaborate fact-finding apparatus and refined technic with no reference to rational intellectual purpose or ultimate possibilities of social use: Alexandrianism. Belief in abstract quantity in every department of life: the biggest monuments, the highest buildings, the most expensive materials, the largest food supply, the greatest number of worshipers, the biggest population. Education becomes quantitative: domination of the cram-machine and the encyclopedia, and domination of megalopolis as concrete encyclopedia: all-containing. Knowledge divorced from life: industry divorced from life-utility: life itself compartmentalized, dis-specialized, finally disorganized and enfeebled.

“Over-investment in the material apparatus of bigness. Diversion of energy from the biological and social ends of life to the preparatory physical means. Outright exploitation of the proletariat and increasing conflict between organized workers and the master classes. Occasional attempts at insurance by philanthropy on the part of the possessing classes: justice in homeopathic doses. Occasional outbursts of savage repression on the part of frightened bourgeoisie, employing basest elements in the city. As conflict intensifies rise of a coalition between landed oligarchy, trained in combat, and a megalopolitan rabble of speculators, enterprisers, and financiers who furnish the sinews of war and profit by all the occasions for class-suppression, price-lifting, and looting that it gives. The city as a means of association, as a haven of culture, becomes a means of dissociation and a growing threat to real culture. Smaller cities are drawn into the megalopolitan network: they practice imitatively the megalopolitan vices, and even sink to lower levels because of lack of higher institutions of learning and culture that still persist in bigger centers. The threat of widespread barbarism arises. Now follow, with cumulative force and increasing volume, the remaining downward movements of the cycle.

When do we become machines?

5. Tyrannopolis

The next to last step in the downward movement of urban life is what Mumford calls “Tyrannopolis.” The City is in decline: it can no longer contain or control its inhabitants through culture, religion, common heritage or other normal restraints. Force and military control are necessary to maintain order. Citizens are registered and their movements monitored. The is Orwellian. Economies swing between boom and bust, between wild prosperity and bankruptcy. Inflation, monetary devaluation, and poverty are endemic. The machine is out of control. Culture has collapsed into popular entertainment. Traditions are cannibalized into trends and fashions. People do meaningless work just to feed the machine. Values have fallen. Morality is nil. Disorder is the new norm. As Orwell put it, Ignorance is Knowledge and War is Peace.

In the Culture of Cities, Lewis Mumford describes the Tyrannopolis as follows:

Extensions of parasitism throughout the economic and social scene: the function of spending paralyzes all the higher activities of culture and no act of culture can be justified that does not involve display and expense. Politics becomes competition for the exploitation of the municipal and state exchequer by this or that class or group. Extirpation of organs of communal and civic life other than “state.” Caesarism. Development of predatory means as a substitute for trade and give-and-take: naked exploitation of colonies and hinterland: intensification of the cycles of commercial depression, following overexpansion of industry and dubious speculative enterprise, heightened by wars and war-preparations. Failure of the economic and political rulers to maintain the bare decencies of administration: place-hunting, privilege-seeking, bonus-collecting, favor-currying, nepotism, grafting, tribute-exacting become rife both in government and business. Widespread moral apathy and failure of civic responsibility: each group, each individual, takes what it can get away with. Widening of the gap between producing classes and spending classes. Multiplication of a Lum pen proletariat demanding its share of bread and shows. Overstress of mass-sports. Parasitic love of sinecures in every department of life. Demand for “protection money” made made by armed thugs and debased soldiery: organized looting, organized blackmail are “normal” accompaniments of business and municipal “enterprise. Domination of respectable people who behave like criminals and of criminals whose activities do not debar them from respectability.

Imperialistic wars, internal and external, result in starvation, epidemics of disease, demoralization of life: uncertainty hangs over every prospect of the future: armed protection increases all the hazards of life. Municipal and state bankruptcy. Drain of local taxes to service increasing load of local debt. Necessity to appeal to the state for further aid in periods of economic disorganization: loss of autonomy. Drain of national taxes to support the growing military establishment of the state. This burden penalizes the remnants of honest industry and agriculture, and further disrupts the supply of elementary material goods. Decrease in agricultural production by soil-mining and erosion, through falling off in acreage, through the withholding of crops from the city by resentful husbandmen. Decline in rate of population-increase through birth control, abortion, mass slaughter, and suicide: eventual absolute decline in numbers. General loss of nerve. Attempt to create order by external military means: rise of gangster-dictators (Hitler, Mussolini) with active consent of the bourgeoisie and systematic terrorism by pretorian guards. Recrudescence of superstition and deliberate cult of savagery: barbarian invasions from “within and without. Beginnings of megalopolitan exodus. Material deficiencies and lapses of cultural continuity: repression and censorship. Cessation of productive work in the arts and sciences.”

6. Necropolis.

The last stage in the rise and decline of the metropolis is the necropolis. Mumford is prolix; his prose is dense and often difficult, but it is worth quoting him at length. Mumford applies the term Nekropolis to Babylon and Nineveh and the decadence of Rome.

But let’s see if the definition of Necropolis or “the dying city” may be applied to Detroit or Las Vegas, to Los Angeles or Mexico City, to Paris or London, Bombay or Moscow. Is this not a refined intellectual’s description of the final days of the age of Kali?:

“War and famine and disease rack both city and countryside. The physical towns become mere shells. Those who remain in them are unable to carry on the old municipal services or maintain the old civic life: what remains of that life is at best a clumsy caricature. The names persist; the reality vanishes. The monuments and books no longer convey meaning; the old routine of life involves too much effort to carry on: the streets fall into disrepair and grass grows in the cracks of the pavement: the viaducts break down, the water mains become empty; the rich shops, once looted, remain empty of goods by reason of the failure of trade or production. Relapse into the more primitive rural occupations.

“if at all, in the provinces and the remote villages, which share the collapse but are not completely carried down by it or submerged in the debris. First the megalopolis becomes a lair: then its occupants are either hunted out by some warrior band, seeking the last remnants of conquest in gold or women or random luxuries, or they gradually fall away of their own accord. The living forms of the ancient city become a tomb for dying: sand sweeps over the ruins: so Babylon, Nineveh, Rome. In short, Nekropolis, the city of the dead: flesh turned to ashes: life turned into a meaningless pillar of salt.”

Lewis Mumford’s critique was considered alarmist in his day. It was not optimistic enough for an American society recovering from the Gread Depression. In later life he had the audacity to criticize American involvement in the War in Vietnam. His writings were ostracized and forgotten. Americans like a more hopeful message.

Recently interviewed by late-night talk-show host Steven Colbert, another public intellectual, Ta-nehisi Coates waxed pessimistic about racism and the future. Colbert encouraged him to end his analysis on a note of hope. Coates refused, saying, “To answer your question in a positive way, I would have to make shit up.”

“So there’s no hope?” asked Colbert.

“No,” replied his guest.

Mumford’s critique is not meant to deprive us of hope, but to provide us with a realistic picture of what’s going on. The word “vision” may mean a dream or divine hallucination; it may also mean just seeing what is. Returning to my imaginary time traveler and his 1930 ancestors: if they had read Mumford’s analysis of the decline of cities they would not at all be surprised at a sin city in the desert where millionaire visitors rent hotel rooms to shoot country fans with machine guns. It would not be the stuff of fiction to discover that the President of the United States occupies his time by shooting rolls of toilet paper at hurricane victims while maniacally laughing about the “calm before the storm” and the prospect of nuclear war with hydrogen bombs. This is not the stuff of science fiction, but the reality of the nekropolis in Kali-yuga.

The great prophet Chaitanya Mahaprabhy appeared in the 16th Century in Bengal and advised that the best hope in the nekropolis of Kali-yuga is to take shelter of the holy name by vibrating the great chant for peace:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna

Krishna Krishna Hare Hare

Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama

Rama Rama Hare Hare.

We would do well to take his advice.