/lit/ - Literature

>>11888725
>these guys
sorry, forgot pic. them, the Masters of Suspicion. everything that blew up in the 20C was planted in the 19C and the hangover extends into the 21C. and land is an heir to this. all Death of God stuff. but -

>The present analysis of technics and human development rests on belief in the imperative need for reconciling and fusing together the subjective and the objective aspects of human experience, by a methodology that will ultimately embrace both. This can come about, not by dismissing either religion or science, but first by detaching them from the obsolete ideological matrix that has distorted their respective developments and limited their field of interaction. Man’s marvellous achievements in projecting his subjective impulses into institutional forms, esthetic symbols, mechanical organizations, and architectural structures have been vastly augmented by the orderly cooperative methods that science has exemplified and universalized. If we are to save technology itself from the aberrations of its present leaders and putative gods, we must, in both our thinking and our acting, come back to the human center: for it is here that all significant transformations begin and terminate.

>The nature of this interplay and this union between the subjective and objective aspects of existence defies any extensive description, since it involves nothing less than the entire history of mankind. So it was left for a poet to sum up this underlying reality in a few words. What Goethe said about nature applies equally to every manifestation of culture and personality. “Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.” It is on that assumption that I have given equal weight, in describing man’s technological advances, to every part of his organism, not to the hand and its derivative tools alone. And this is why, too, I have emphasized the part played by wishes and projects, by symbols and fantasies, upon even the most practical applications of technology. For it is through all the activities of the mind, not alone the intelligence and the dynamic instruments of intelligence, that radical departures from conventional practices are made in technics itself.

>This approach, if sound, carries with it a conclusion that challenges those who imagine that the forces and institutions now in existence will go on indefinitely, becoming bigger and more powerful, even though their very bigness and power threaten to nullify the benefits originally sought. If human culture in fact arises, develops, and renews itself through fresh activities in the mind, it may be modified and transformed by the same processes. What the human mind has created, it can also destroy. Neglect or withdrawal of interest works as effectively as physical assault. This is a lesson that our machine-oriented world must quickly assimilate, if it is to preserve even its own successful innovations.

this is very much how i feel as well.

>>11886590
in the end it's still all about these guys and life after them.