Word: pyramidal
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...fervent science of Galileo and his followers, says Mumford, was in part a revival of the sun worship of the ancient Egyptians. Other Egyptian parallels strike Mumford's fancy. Just as the Egyptians erected vast sterile pyramids at great cost, so did the industrial age begin to mass-produce valueless goods. A far-fetched analogy? Mumford finds pyramids lurking everywhere in modern life. He includes an illustration of a supercity proposed by Buckminster Fuller that looks like a pyramid but lacks any perceptible improvement in living conditions. Even the manned space capsule "corresponds exactly to the innermost chamber...
Life in the Ruins. The biggest pyramid of all today, writes Mumford, is the welfare state, which has created a helpless, dependent populace by ministering to its every material need-a common charge. Yet it is easy to fault the welfare state now that its benefits are taken for granted. What about those outsiders-blacks, for example-who still yearn to sample its delights? Are their stomachs to be denied for the sake of their souls? Mumford is silent on the subject. It falls outside the angle of his vision. He is persuaded that the overcentralized society cannot be reformed...
Mumford's vision is as Utopian as the "higher and farther" dreams of the technocrats. True believers are free to choose between the two. More skeptical readers may feel that Mumford, over the years of piling book upon book, has created something of a pyramid himself. If the view from the top is chilly, it makes more impressive those moments when Mumford climbs down and fixes his eye on his enduring earthly dream: humanity in intimate, loving touch with nature...
When someone talks about a pyramid, there is a flash cut of an erect nipple; when the hoodlum dyes his hair, there is a cut to the singer spray-painting a wall. James Fox is nevertheless excellent as the gangster, and Jagger seems to be having a lark. Few others will share his pleasure...
...should anyone care about the land mollusk, or even the Southern bald eagle? Because, as ecologists keep repeating, all species are interrelated in the biological pyramid. Destroying one can adversely affect many others. A prime example is Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which is being eaten away by starfish. Some scientists speculate that the ecological balance was upset when man began to remove their natural predators...