Lewis Mumford: Conduct for a Small Planet
In these volumes I have sought to deal in a unified way with mar^s
nature, his work, and his life-dramas, as revealed in the development
of contemporary Western civilization. By intention, these books outline
a philosophy, demonstrate a method of synthesis, and project further a
new pattern of life that has, for at least a century, been in process of
emergence. Though I reserved for The Conduct of Life — and my own
further maturity — a discussion of the final problems of man^s nature,
destiny, and purpose, the present volume, so far from being an epilogue,
is in fact a preface to the earlier books. While each volume
stands alone, they modify each other; and the full import of any one
cannot be grasped without an understanding of the other three.
....
... Schweitzer’s two-volume diagnosis of our Time of Troubles
counts among the earliest
contributions to an adequate self-analysis of our civilization: differing
from the earlier forecasts of Burckhardt and Henry Adams because
Schweitzer, like a good physician, regards his prognosis, not as et
death sentence, but as an incentive to rational action.
Here is an indication of Schweitzer’s intuitive grasp. Though he
himself followed the way of Jesus, he recognized the original limita-
tions of Jesus’s thought: it was the product of a parochial, self-centered
culture, obsessed by the myth of national deliverance through the
agency of a Messiah, while Jesus himself, as Schweitzer had demon-
strated, erroneously regarded the approaching end of the world as a
determining factor in human conduct. Schweitzer saw that the ethical
foundations for a world society had been laid, not by Jesus nor even
yet by the Christian Church, but by the great Chinese sages, Confucius,
Mencius, and Mo-Ti: the translation of their thought, even indirectly,
which accompanied the introduction of porcelain and silk and wall-
paper into Europe, had a formative effect on some of the best minds
of the eighteenth century and gave to its ethics, no less than to its
gardens or its tea-tables, a Chinese cast: Chinese in origin but as wide
in its province as humanity itself.
Coming from a Christian, a Christian by active consecration as well
as formal espousal, Schweitzer’s doctrine revealed the depth of his
insight; for against the formalism of theology, he saw that the eight-
eenth century had been, in fact, a time when Christian doctrine, often
abandoned in formula, was perhaps as active in actual life as it had
been in the Middle Ages, encouraging men to mildness of conduct,
even in the midst of war, to a common understanding and a tolerance
of imderlying differences, to universal enterprises that tended to make
the world one.
