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PARTISAN REVIEW
society to defend him." To the Europeans, this is one of the things Ber–
nanos has to say: "The last peace was indeed a fine trap for rats, but
this one will be built on the scale of a pit to catch wild elephants."
Beside detesting Rome and the Romans, Bernanos hates the modern
State, likes the outspoken and has a preference for the ignored. He is
a captivating man. And if one wonders why, with all the pungent and
pertinent remarks he makes, his polemic does not finally reach under the
surface of things, the reason is that his preconceptions prevent him
from drawing any particular conclusion. So that, in the end, things re–
main very much as they were.
NICOLA CHIAROMONTE
THE ARMED OBSCURANTIST
THE CONDITION OF MAN.
By Lewis Mumford. Harcourt, Brace.
$5.00.
T
His
BOOK
is the third of a series which Lewis Mumford has devoted
to the study of "organic humanism," the first two being
Technics
and Civilization
(
1934) and
The Culture of Cities
(
1938). Starting with
the premise that modern man has been dehumanized by industrialism
and positivist philosophy (the two are practically identical in Mum–
ford's mind) and that consequently his society is disintegrating, Mum–
ford looks forward to the renewal of the organic personality and the
society which organic man will create. The reader is led through the
European past, from the Greeks to the present, while the author describes
how other societies have disintegrated and then achieved a new birth.
The fragmentary personality of the Greek, the wages of too much
rationalism, was made whole by the fertility god Dionysus; the cult of
Cybele was a social response to the excessive practicalness of the Roman
mind; Jesus made whole the fragmentary rigidities of the social thinking
of Moses and the Pharisees. The "Medieval Synthesis" was a crowning
achievement of the rounded personality. Modern man must try to
achieve such a synthesis. Like the Chicago-St. John's school of edu–
cators, Mumford has taken to ransacking the past in search of guid–
ance and understanding. But Mumford's collocation of the past and
the present reminds me of the scene in Cocteau's
Blood of a Poet
where
an eighteenth-century man watches glassy-eyed over a dimly defined
twentieth-century game of cards. The past is clearly there, but its rela–
tion to the present remains a mystery. The card-playing hero does not
seem to be concerned with the eighteenth century; and all the eighteenth
century can do is gasp slightly when it becomes apparent that the hero
has been condemned to destruction.
The first three words of the Introduction-"What is man?"-do
not impress the reader with Mumford's ability to ask fruitful questions.
