The Machine Becomes Hateful To US
pictured above is a young Edward Abbey
“But all of this is changing in the last decades, in all the countries where large scale industry is of old standing. The Faustian thought begins to be sick of machines. A weariness is spreading, a sort of pacifism of the battle with Nature. Men are returning to forms of life simpler and nearer to Nature; they are spending their time in sport instead of technical experiments. The great cities are becoming hateful to them, and they would fain get away from the pressure of soulless facts and clear cold atmosphere of technical organization.
And it is precisely the strong and creative talents that are turning away from practical problems and sciences and towards pure speculation. Occultism and Spiritualism, Hindu philosophies, metaphysical inquisitiveness under Christian or pagan coloring, all of which were despised in the Darwinian period, are coming up again. It is the spirit of Rome in the Age of Augustus. Out of satiety of life, men take refuge from civilization in the more primitive parts of the earth, in vagabondage, in suicide. The flight of the born leader from the Machine is beginning. Every big entrepreneur has occasion to observe a fall-off in intellectual qualities of his recruits. But the grand technical development of the nineteenth century has been possible only because the intellectual level was constantly becoming higher. Even a stationary condition, short of an actual falling off, is dangerous and points to an ending, however numerous and however well-schooled may be the hands ready for work.”
-Oswald Spengler, “Man and Technics” (1931)
Relevant excerpt from Spengler.
A tangential personal comment: Many decades ago as a young man, having returned from Viet Nam and then sojourning in the desert and mountains of New Mexico I read and re-read two of Ed Abbey’s books: The Monkey Wrench Gang, his best known work, and Desert Solitaire, a blend of autobiography and philosophical musings which I regard as the more noteworthy. Like him, I slowly acquired a love and reverence for the desert Southwest that I’ve never felt elsewhere with the same intensity, though I have always found much beauty and fascination in nearly all of the many places where my military / government career and my private exploratory jaunts have taken me. It seemed superficially odd at first that the arid expanses, rugged terrain, and harsh extremes of the Sonoran desert would resonate with my Scandinavian temperament. But as I came to understand only in the second half of my life, Aryan men in general and the Vikings in particular were inveterate adventurers and explorers who were always bonded, moreso than any other race, with Nature in all her manifestations.
I have spent a lot of time in the southwest as well. And I agree with you. The landscape is fascinating. It feels like a different planet.