"Today this unquestioned faith in the machine has been severely shaken. The absolute validity of the machine has become a conditioned validity: even Spengler, who has urged the men of his generation to become engineers and men of fact, regards that career as a sort of honorable suicide and looks forward to the period when the monuments of the machine civilization will be tangled masses of rusting iron and empty concrete shells. While for those of us who are more hopeful both of man's destiny and that of the machine, the machine is no longer the paragon of progress and the final expression of our desires: it is merely a series of instruments, which we will use in so far as they are serviceable to life at large, and which we will curtail where they infringe upon it or exist purely to support the adventitious structure of capitalism."
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ConservativesPhilosophers from GermanyHistorians from GermanyNon-fiction authors from GermanyPolitical authors from Germany
Original Language: English
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Sources
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch. VIII "Orientation"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler
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