Historical Eras

"The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society."

"One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world's problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive — it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men."

"Every conquered culture around the world, when given a taste of modernity, grab[s] it with both hands."

"Certainly, what nowadays we understand by personality is something quite different from what the biographers and historians of earlier times meant by it. For them, and especially for the writers of those days who had a distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the supra personal."

"As Lewis Mumford … explained at length, the modern world has developed a cult of technology. We look to technology to solve basic human problems that were formerly addressed by family, community, or personal toil. Machines inform us, connect us, transport us, feed us, and entertain us. Not only do consumers love their gizmos, but manufacturers do, too, since gadgets produce profits; so do workers and politicians, who benefit from jobs created by industrial expansion. Shopping for the latest smartwatch, drone, or mosquito zapper is a sacred ritual of consumerism. And we worship inventors and industrialists like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk."

"People discovered new energy sources – coal, then petroleum – in the nineteenth century, and then invented all sorts of new technologies to make use of this freshly released energy. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, lighting, heating – all were revolutionized, and the results reached deep into the lives of everyone in the industrialized world. Everybody became utterly dependent on the new gadgets; on imported, chemically fertilized food; on chemically synthesized and fossil-fuel-delivered therapeutic drugs; on the very idea of perpetual growth (after all, it would always be possible to produce more energy to fuel more transportation and manufacturing – wouldn’t it?). Well, if the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the upside of the growth curve, th[e twenty-first] century has been the downside – the cliff. It should have been perfectly obvious to everyone that the energy sources on which they were coming to rely were exhaustible. Somehow the thought never sank in very deep."

"Philosophy—reduced, as we have seen, to philosophical discourse—develops from this point on in a different atmosphere and environment from that of ancient philosophy. In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life, or a form of life—unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy."

"The effects of the automobile in the 1950s not only gave us dating, it also destroyed our communities. Resources were no longer grouped together, as walking from place to place became impossible and automobiles became a requirement for existence. Face-to-face interaction died off, and so did the habit of walking — resulting in our current obesity crisis. This doesn’t mean that cars and dating are bad — what it means is that we now live in a context to which we are not adapted."

"The Age of Empty Freedom ... does not know that man must first through labour, industry, and art, learn how to know; but it has a certain fixed standard for all conceptions, and an established Common Sense of Mankind always ready and at hand, innate within itself and there present without trouble on its part;—and those conceptions and this Common Sense are to it the measure of the efficient and the real. It has this great advantage over the Age of Science, that it knows all things without having learned anything; and can pass judgment upon whatever comes before it at once and without hesitation,—without needing any preliminary evidence:—'That which I do not immediately comprehend by the conceptions which dwell within me, is nothing,'—says Empty Freedom."

"Far from being fluid, modernity is the era in which words are stones, and in which the nightmare of “'verba manent”' is realised. (p. 78)"

"The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'T is the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind."

"How can he [today’s writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public."

"The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."

"Of course, Catholics have a terrible habit: thinking about the power of modernity and ignoring how this modernity, insofar as it seeks to deny religious transcendence, is currently experiencing its greatest crisis, as recognized even by certain secular writers."

"Modern man calls walking more quickly in the same direction down the same road “change.” The world, in the last three hundred years, has not changed except in that sense. The simple suggestion of a true change scandalizes and terrifies modern man."

"To be unaware of the putrefaction of the modern world is a symptom of contagion by it."

"The modern soul is a lunar landscape."

"Modern man does not love, but seeks refuge in love; does not hope, but seeks refuge in hope; does not believe, but seeks refuge in a dogma."

"Through industrialism, humanity set out to accomplish great things. And we have accomplished great things. Unfortunately, we have obviated ourselves in the process."

"We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance."

"We’ve been spoiled by the industrial revolution. For about 100 years, progress came quickly and easily, and people began to just expect constant revolution in science technology. Unfortunately, most of the technological progress has come from burning larger and larger amounts of fossil fuel."

"About 1800 AD, a new phase in the ecological history of humanity began. Carrying capacity was tremendously (but temporarily) augmented by a quite different method; takeover gave way to drawdown. A conspicuous and unprecedentedly large acceleration of human population increase got under way as Homo sapiens began to supersede agrarian living with industrial living. Industrialization made use of fossil energy. Machinery powered by the combustion of coal, and later oil, enabled man to do things on a scale never before possible. New, large, elaborate tools could now be made, some of which enhanced the effectiveness of the farming that of course had to continue. Products of farm and factory could be transported in larger quantity for greater distances. Eventually the tapping of this “new” energy source resulted in the massive application of chemical fertilizers to agricultural lands. Yields per acre increased, and in time acreages applied to the growing of food for humans were substantially increased—first by eliminating draft animals and their requirements for pasture land, but also by reclaiming land through irrigation, et cetera. This time mankind was not merely taking away from competitors an additional portion of the earth’s life-supporting capacity. (He was still doing this, and still not recognizing that this was what he had always done. But—worse—he was now also not recognizing the true nature of something else he was doing on a vast scale. So man was painting himself into a corner.) This time, the human carrying capacity of the planet was being supplemented by digging up energy that had been stored underground millions of years ago, captured from sunlight which fell upon the earth’s green plants long before this world had supported any mammals, let alone humans, or even pre-human primates. The solar energy had been captured by photosynthesis in plants that grew and died and were buried during the Carboniferous period, without the efforts of any farmers. Carrying capacity was this time being augmented by drawing down a finite reservoir of the remains of prehistoric organisms. This was therefore going to result in a temporary extension of carrying capacity; in contrast, previous enlargements had been essentially permanent, as well as cumulative. Being impermanent, this rise in apparent carrying capacity begged one enormously important question: What happens if population, as usual, increases until it nearly fills this temporarily expanded set of opportunities, and then, because the expansion was only temporary, the world finds itself (like the Indians on their shrunken territories) with a population excess? What are the implications of a carrying capacity deficit for mankind’s future? What happens, for example, when supplies of oil become scarce, when tractor fuel becomes unavailable or prohibitively expensive, and when farmers again have to take 1/4th to 1/3rd of the land on which they now raise food for humans and convert it instead to raising feed for draft animals? Such questions were not asked as long as we viewed our world with a pre-ecological paradigm. The myth of limitlessness dominated people’s minds. Had anyone conceived such implausible-seeming questions in the Age of Exuberance, the answer might have seemed equally incredible: post-exuberant nations and individuals would have a compulsive need to deny the facts so as to deny their own redundancy. Industrialization came about at a fast enough pace so that it enlarged per capita wealth and was not entirely devoted to enlarging population. In principle, any increase in carrying capacity—temporary or permanent–affords a choice between enabling the same number of individuals to live more lavishly or enabling a larger number of individuals to live at previous standards. When the enlargement of carrying capacity is modest and is spread over many generations, it tends to be used mainly to increase numbers; if it is enormous and comes so suddenly that human numbers just don’t rise at the same pace, it raises living standards. The European takeover of the New World had enlarged carrying capacity (for Europeans) just fast enough to begin having this salutary effect. By drawing down stores of exhaustible resources at an ever-quickening pace, industrialization (temporarily) augmented carrying capacity even faster, affording opportunity for quite a marked rise in prosperity and for a phenomenal acceleration of population increase. The welcome rise in prosperity reinforced the dangerous myth of limitlessness and obscured for a while the hazards inherent in the population increase."

"The poacher ... is asserting a right (and an instinct) belonging to a past time—when for hunting purposes all land was held in common. ... In those times private property was theft. Obviously the man who attempted to retain for himself land or goods, or who fenced off a portion of the common ground and—like the modern landlord—would allow no one to till it who did not pay him a tax—was a criminal of the deepest dye. Nevertheless the criminals pushed their way to the front, and have become the respectables of modern society."

"The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,—that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all."

"The office is to the modern world what the cloister was to medieval Christendom: a chaste arena with an unrivalled capacity to excite desire .If these two institutions have imposed harsh penalties on those who display signs of transgressive behaviour, it is because each is, or was, the locus of its society’s most cherished values: the teachings of Christ on the one hand, and money on the other. Money is to the office as God was to the nunnery."

"The disease of the modern character is specialization."

"Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with … Renan’s verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity. … The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim the intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of concrete advantage."

"That teaching of modern metaphysics ... exhorts man to feel comparatively little esteem for the truly thinking portion of himself and to honor the active and willing part of himself with all his devotion."

"All civilizations follow a similar pattern of growth, stagnation, and decline—ours is no exception... The rise and fall of this fossil fuel-based civilization... seems just as inevitable in hindsight as the formation of stars and galaxies."