The higher aims of “technological progress” are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in “the future.”
— Wendell Berry
The various reductions I have been describing are fairly directly the results of the ongoing revolution of applied science known as “technological progress.”
This revolution has provided the means by which both the productive and the consumptive capacities of people could be detached from household and community and made to serve other people’s purely economic ends.
It has provided as well a glamor of newness, ease, and affluence that made it seductive even to those who suffered most from it. In its more recent history especially, this revolution has been successful in putting unheard-of quantities of consumer goods and services within the reach of ordinary people.
But the technical means of this popular “affluence” has at the same time made possible the gathering of the real property and the real power of the country into fewer and fewer hands. Some people would like to think that this long sequence of industrial innovations has changed human life and even human nature in fundamental ways.
Perhaps it has—but, arguably, almost always for the worse. I know that “technological progress” can be defended, but I observe that the defenses are invariably quantitative—catalogs of statistics on the ownership of automobiles and television sets, for example, or on the increase of life expectancy—and I see that these statistics are always kept carefully apart from the related statistics of soil loss, pollution, social disintegration, and so forth.
That is to say, there is never an effort to determine the net result of this progress.