Christmas Pot-Pouri, Volume 13 #6

Battle of the Titans

The year 1995 marked the centennial of the two great "holistic" theorists of technology and human values America produced in the twentieth century: Lewis Mumford and Buckminster Fuller. Unfortunately, these two giants almost never agreed. The rift that divided Fuller and Mumford--the designer of global systems and the conserver of living traditions--has polarized thinkers about technology ever since.

R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller has been characterized as a mathematician, architect, inventor, philosopher, even a prophet, and caricatured as a wide-eyed technocrat with big plans for the industrialization of practically everything. He called himself a "comprehensive anticipatory designer," summing up in this phrase five decades of unparalleled Yankee ingenuity.

Besides geodesic domes, Fuller introduced us to "Spaceship Earth." He thought in terms of globe-girdling whole systems, and tried to "make the world work" by improving technology. He claimed to have found "Nature's Coordinate System," a triangulated matrix that has turned out to be an astonishingly accurate model for natural structures.

Fuller called his geometry "Synergetics," or the "geometry of thinking." Its basic approach is "the exploratory strategy of starting with the whole." Synergy, for Fuller, meant "the behavior of whole systems unpredictable from the behavior of their components considered separately." From thinking about housing in this way, he came up with the startling innovations for which he is justly famous, notably geodesic domes and the "Dymaxion Dwelling Machine." Fuller's geometry is founded on triangles and tetrahedra--as is all the carbon chemistry of organic life on our planet--and leaves behind the square, cubical and gridiron forms that still saddle most conventional architecture.

Bucky's innovations spanned several fields of science and engineering; Marshall McLuhan was surely not far off the mark when he dubbed Fuller "the Leonardo da Vinci of our time." Bucky saw in technology the human mind at work finding ways to do "more and more with less and less," using nature's bounty without abusing its limits. He came to consider all his inventions and buildings no more than graphic demonstrations of what could be done by a mind in tune with nature. His works offer the possibility of exploring natural and human potential for "livingry," as he called it, rather than "weaponry."

Maybe because Fuller was himself such a maverick,
his ideas have often appealed to nonconformists
who apply them in their own distinctive ways.

Fuller can be situated within the tradition of American transcendentalism best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who happens to have been a close friend of his famous great-aunt, Margaret Fuller. Human beings, Bucky always maintained, were meant to be a success on this planet. Work against nature's principles, and you will find yourself thwarted at every turn. Work with them, and you just might find that the universe itself pitches in to help. A larger mind is at work in every human endeavor. Harking back to this ancient tradition of the living Universe or anima mundi, Emerson spoke of the "Over-Soul," and Fuller of the intellectual integrity of Universe.

To be sure, Fuller had his flaws. He was the consummate monologist, able to hold an audience for hours but by the same token not readily able to enter into dialogue with many of the other leading thinkers of his time. He also had a positivistic streak, believing that technology (or at least his own alternative technologies) would solve most of the world's problems without much regard for cultural, religious or political factors. He thought that if you reformed the environment by designing better artifacts, people would just naturally see the error of their ways and reform themselves.

Fuller expected his geodesic domes, for instance, to become overnight a planet-wide housing industry that would mass-produce cheap, efficient "dwelling machines." (He almost never designed just one artifact or another, but prototypes for vast new industries that never entirely materialized.) What happened instead quite probably surprised him: people who built and lived in domes did so to express their choice of an alternative lifestyle more or less detached from the mainstream commodity culture. Maybe because Fuller was himself such a maverick, his ideas have often appealed to nonconformists who apply them in their own distinctive ways.

Yet the "magnificent failure" of many of Fuller's projects should not minimize his very real achievements. He practically reversed many of the structural biases inherent in the way western peoples have always gone about building things. We westerners have always relied mainly on compression (push)--lintels nailed atop posts, bricks piled on bricks. Fuller observed that nature builds its large structures, from spider webs to solar systems, by relying instead on tension (pull), and managed to demonstrate elegantly with the Dymaxion "House on a Pole" and the many varieties of geodesic domes that it is feasible for human constructions to follow suit.

Beyond the large structures he actually built, Fuller's discovery of "Nature's Coordinate System" remains his greatest legacy. This "omniintertriangulated" matrix with its webwork of vectors at 60-degree angles has so far had its most profound repercussions in the natural sciences. As science delves ever more deeply into the structures of both organic and inorganic matter, Fuller's patterns keep turning up, as with the posthumously-named "Buckminsterfullerene," Science magazine's 1991 "Molecule of the Year."

As a matter of fact, his "discovery" seems to have been really a rediscovery of patterns long familiar in the sacred geometries of many traditional cultures--you should not be surprised to find them in the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals, the patterns of Tibetan mandalas and Persian carpets, the yantras (meditation diagrams) and Shiva temples of India, and the coiled intricacies of Celtic knots. Anywhere Euclid, Descartes and the abstract analytic geometry they spawned never took hold, you tend to find patterns allied to those Fuller developed--with both the technical resources and the pragmatic biases of a twentieth-century scientist-engineer-artist.

As a culture, we are today profoundly ambivalent about our own technological artifacts. Since industrial manufacturing techniques were first applied to warfare in the First World War and grotesquely exaggerated by the Bomb and crematoria of the Second, we have seen all too much of the eclipse of nature and distortion of human nature latent in our technologies. Along with Bucky Fuller's centennial, 1995 also marked that of Lewis Mumford, who might well be considered Fuller's archcritic. The divergences between these two thinkers highlight an intractable split in contemporary attitudes toward technology.

The passing century has only magnified Lewis Mumford's stature as a preeminent American architecture critic, and the importance of his groundbreaking work as a historian of technics. His first book, The Story of Utopias (1922), outlined with prescient accuracy the fatal flaw in all "planned" communities. On paper, utopias appear to be reasonable alternatives to the status quo. In practice, however, they tend to have no room for alternative utopian visionaries--anybody whose own views might be at variance with the original plan--which is why utopias, from Plato's Republic to the many utopian experiments on American soil, tend all too easily and often to become totalitarian.

Much the same impulse lay behind his first book on American architecture, Sticks & Stones (1924), which formed the basis for his later and more famous City in History (1961). Here Mumford extolled seventeenth-century New England towns for continuing the medieval polytechnic tradition, where every artisan was a master and an autonomous source of innovation. He shared the admiration for the "socialist" virtues of early American communities expressed by Emerson and de Tocqueville. He saw the cooperative communitarian dimensions of town life as the root of the American spirit in early New England, and decried its fatal erosion by both the mercantilism of the great commercial cities and the slash-and-burn profiteering of the pioneer mentality.

In his later books on technics and civilization, he took a hard look at the irrational streak (wars, persecutions, intolerance) accompanying the most rational plans for civilization from its Mesopotamian origins to the present. In the American context, he resisted the increasing domination of architecture (since the nineteenth century) by architects and industrial engineers, and of community life by social "engineers." The only town plans he endorsed maximized green space and open areas for interaction--indeed, a variety of "unplanned" spaces in which people might freely associate. Otherwise, the organic growth of community could only be cramped by the limitations of the artificial plan.

Given such a stance as early as 1924, it should come as no surprise that Mumford in later life would resist Bucky Fuller's more grandiose designs, along with other megaprojects. Mumford stood for local knowledge, for the traditional wisdom of the place, for the organic growth of communities from the inside out, for the human roots in land and custom that Fuller's grand design conceptions not only lacked but intentionally cast aside:

"Out of the interaction of the folk and their place, through the work, the simple life of the community develops. At the same time, each of these elements carries with it its specific spiritual heritage. The people have their customs and manners and morals and laws; or as we might say more briefly, their institutions; the work has its technology, its craft-experience, from the simple lore of peasant and breeder to the complicated formulae of the modern chemists and metallurgists; while the deeper perception of the `place,' through the analysis of the falling stone, the rising sun, the running water, the decomposing vegetation and the living animal gives rise to the tradition of `learning' and science."

In Technics and Civilization (1934), Mumford hailed Fuller's plans for the Dwelling Machine and the Dymaxion Transport as intriguing prospects worth watching. By the sixties, in The Myth of the Machine (1967/1970), he had soured on a society that had opted for mechanism rather than organic life, weaponry rather than the arts of living, giantism rather than scaled invention, and a global economy rather than regional self-sufficiency. He took a famous passage of Fuller's that begins by describing Man, with some humor perhaps, as "a self-balancing, 28-jointed adaptor-based biped" as an occasion to mock what he saw as Bucky's seriously underdimensioned appreciation of human nature: "Fuller's parallels are neat; the metaphor is superficially precise....Only one thing is lacking--the slightest hint, apart from measurable physical components, of the nature of man." Bucky, for his part, dismissed Mumford's concerns as "esthetics."

For Mumford, technology was mechanism,
and the total submission of organism
to mechanism was lethal.

It was clear by this time that the two thinkers, both of whom had high public profiles, had stopped listening to each other. By the time of his Findings and Keepings (1975), Mumford dismissed Fuller as "that interminable tape-recorder of `salvation by technology,'" and lumped him with Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Bell and Arthur Clarke as "giant minds whose private dreams all too quickly turned into public nightmares."

If Fuller extolled alloys and metallurgy as proof that human beings evolved by learning how to do "more and more with less and less," Mumford excoriated mining as the rape of the earth and the first instance of wage-slavery for the miners, hapless human digging tools forced to work underground. If Fuller expected the space program to provide a "black box" kit for human dwelling here on Earth, Mumford instead saw the astronaut as "Encapsulated Man,...a faceless ambulatory mummy...coordinating his reactions with the mechanical and electronic apparatus upon which his survival depends...whose existence from birth to death would be conditioned by the megamachine, and made to conform, as in a space capsule, to the minimal functional requirements by an equally minimal environment--all under remote control."

That remote control would of course be provided by the computers Bucky hoped might help coordinate worldwide information and planning for his Geoscope (a sort of Whole Earth planetarium) and World Game projects. Mumford found computers an excuse for not thinking, just one more abdication of human responsibilities to the "myth" that machines could bring about the human millennium. In puncturing all such futurist fantasies, Fuller's easily included, Mumford was taking aim at "the state that the mass of mankind is fast approaching in actual life, without realizing how pathological it is to be cut off from their own resources for living and to feel no tie with the outer world unless they are connected with the Power Complex and constantly receive information, direction, stimulation, and sedation from a central external source, via radio, discs, and television, with the minimal opportunity for reciprocal face-to-face contact."

It would be superficial to label Bucky a technological optimist and Mumford a pessimist--although the caricature readily fits some of their isolated pronouncements. Both were prophets of the ecological era long before most people even knew what the word meant. But what do prophets do? They announce (there's Fuller, looking forward), or they denounce (there's Mumford, looking warily back over his shoulder). So there they leave us, these two prophets, with the entire twentieth century as the ambivalent proving ground for their theories, making it more than a little difficult for those of us who follow them to discover exactly which "holistic" vision is the more real insight.

Bucky Fuller's great appeal was--and remains--his use of modern scientific and technical information to tell a different story from that of mainstream western technology, which has too often tended to bring us mainly better guns and bigger bombs, flashier cars and cheaper junk food. Fuller tells us instead a story of human beings who discover they belong to a living, responsive universe and find ways to work in partnership with nature. Mumford by contrast stands for the sensibility that has won over many of today's most articulate scholars of technology and human values. It is, with various nuances, an anti-technology, anti-development sensibility, critical of globalizing trends, respecting local knowledges and traditional customs, suspicious of planning and planners, mustering defences for threatened ecologies and endangered cultures alike.

An easy familiarity with Mumford's themes has long been perceptible in the programs of the German Green Party, for instance (even as the German auto industry reconsiders Bucky's three-wheeled Dymaxion Transport for mass production). Today we are, or ought to be, much more critical of universal "development" schemes, whether Fuller's or anybody else's; we rightly question whether everybody on the planet needs or wants to "develop" in the same way, or towards the same western goals.

We won't be able to get Fuller and Mumford together for the knock-down, drag-out conversation they should have had, but we can see why it is imperative to continue their dialogue as best we can in absentia. For one thing, if you never think about their divergences, you never have a chance to see the unexpected ways in which they converge. Fuller's was a cosmological vision. He looked mainly to the physical universe and discerned the holistic dimension of cooperation--synergy--between all its elements and principles, which he then extrapolated to human affairs. Mumford's was a humanist's vision. He looked mainly at the deeds and misdeeds of human societies and discerned there the holistic dimension of cooperation--community--swiftly being eroded by megatechnic schemes that ignore both cultural context and human scale.

Today the same split divides "deep" ecologists, who see human beings as one species in a living, interdependent cosmos, from campaigners for social justice who seek to liberate human beings from structures of oppression. Both Fuller and Mumford thought they had bridged C.P. Snow's "two cultures" of the sciences and the humanities, but for each, the bridge seemed to collapse where the other's viewpoints were concerned. Can we meaningfully coordinate the cosmological/scientific vision with the anthropological/humanistic one?

Surprisingly, there is common ground between the two titans. Both thought that modern technological culture had taken a wrong turn in the twentieth century. Both sought organic patterns and natural principles on which to base the turn to a more humane culture. Most alarmingly, both found the world's present direction suicidal, for equally firm ecological and social reasons.

Yet technology meant something quite different to each of them. For Mumford, technology was mechanism, and although a culture might benefit from some degree of mechanistic constraint (ritual tabus, for example), the total submission of organism to mechanism was lethal. Fuller regarded technology as what nature already does so elegantly (the hydraulic leveraging that holds up the branches of a tree, the tensile gravitation that keeps our planet in its orbit), and which we human beings mimic only clumsily and mechanistically.

In Fuller's view, we suffer from our ignorance of nature's highly efficient technologies, which could help us refine our own artifacts and enhance our lives. In Mumford's, we have let our technology come between us and nature, at the cost of our own human nature.

Two horns of the same dilemma?

Scott Eastham is a Canadian now teaching in the English department at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand.