Modern people
	"find themselves searching for new value commitment, for new religious synthesis and ultimately for a new identity."   (p. 11, Harvard University "IBM Report", 1972)

 

Mechanical Viewpoint | Critics | Index of related ideas | Original Unity | Delusions| Thoreau | Adam's Warning | Machine in the Garden | Hope | regression | antonyms |

Machine, machinery: "a system of usually rigid bodies, formed & connected to alter, transmit, and direct applied forces in a predetermined manner to accomplish a specific objective such as the demonstration of useful work."

 

those devices having a source of motive power to do work.

 

"science will be master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control." 

(Charles Francis Adams, in Marx, 350)

"Development is primarily a matter of adapting and extending an invention so that it can be integrated into both a technological system and a business and cultural system."

(Hindle, 74)

"the image of the machine connotes a loss of inner freedom even as it provides outward power." free in hand and foot. we are shackled in heart and soul" 

(Marx, 173)

---

The "cutting of an umbilical chord"  (Marx 346)

"the original unity " the all sufficing beauty & abundance of the creation."

---

"Every technological advance has come at a price -- but the full price is seldom known until long after the achievement" The technology of industrialization has moved us into an increasingly complex world". Humankind has reached a point where it must work consistently to exercise its new power over technology and social organization." 

(Hindle, p. 279)

 

"The complement to prudent technology is the ecological approach to science."

"It is the ecological wisdom of cooperating with  nature rather than trying to master her." 

(Goodman in Teich, pp. 247-248)

 

"the laboring man has not the leisure for a true integrity" he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men;  he has no time to be anything but a machine."

Thoreau in Marx, p. 248

"Even if this were dismissed as a long-term view there is the immediate question of whether " modernisation," as currently practiced without regard to religious and spiritual values, is actually producing agreeable results."

"You may think all is nonsense, but I tell you these are great times.  Man has mounted science and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world."

a critique of misplaced sentimentality in America.

 

"Ours is an intricately organized, urban, industrial, nuclear armed society."

"he is unaware of the artificial, almost incredible, character of civilization."

"rural myth & the technological fact." (354)

"the spontaneous fruit of the edenic tree" (7)