Shutting Down the Mega Machine

Lewis Mumford wrote a two-volume work called The Myth of the Mega Machine.^* In that book his thesis is that there are what he calls the axial prophets — these prophets who come around from about a thousand BC until Muhammad, whom he considers the last of these axial prophets. And he said that what these prophets do is that they are really shutting down the mega machine: the idea of this massive social project that relates to the world. The pharaoh has his pyramids and he is going to build them, and there are a lot of people who are going to die in the process; but they are going to carry those rocks, and carry them, and do it all for the glory of the pharaoh, or the society, or whatever.

So Mumford said that he thought the Jewish tradition, the idea of the Sabbath, was a way of just shutting down the machine. Cannot do it, sorry. Not allowed to move anything. It literally shuts it down. The idea of five prayers a day is the same. A lot of Western people get very frustrated in some of these Muslim countries, where everything stops. They are frustrated about a lot of things, but the prayer is definitely something that is very frustrating for many Western people who go there: they have business to do, and the man says that we have to stop for prayer. So it is a problem. And Mumford saw it really as a way of shutting this thing down, because he saw it as a very negative thing.

One of the things that Mumford says is that there is a historical movement towards the mega machine whose nuts and bolts, in prior times, were human beings — the whole social project. And he thinks that Pharaoh and Mūsā is the best archetype of this phenomenon: that Mūsā comes in and is directly a challenge to the pharaonic project; that the prophets literally challenged this idea that we are here for the glorification of a hierarchy, and at the top is this elite.