Epigraph from Wendell Berry on machines.
Xvi - Robinson Jeffers on machines
3 - Mythic beginnings in Eden; PK falls into trap of thinking Garden is goal, when Man was meant to take Garden into world. Make world the garden (requires machines, nonne?)
13 - Culture war is a dead end because we have no culture. We are in a “darkness between times.” A new time is coming, though. Could be that the battle is over what culture will look like on the other side. Good Work Mag assumes that the only thing that could exist after cultural annihilation is Good Work. We don’t have to worry about fighting for Christian culture. It will grow out of Christian worship.
14 - “natural” = “imperfect” See C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words, on the difficulty of defining “nature”
15 - quote from Weil on the need for roots; fruitful soil for an argument in favor of the arts
17 - PK claims to have made arguments. I haven’t found one yet.
18 - Definitions: “However we dissect it, though, I believe that the heart of the crisis that is enveloping so much of the world today—cultural, ecological and spiritual—is this ongoing process of mass uprooting. It is also, as this book will explore further, the root of the West's current turmoil. We could simply call this process modernity, which is not a time period so much as a story we tell ourselves. But I prefer to call it the Machine, because a machine—as the poets showed me—is what it feels like. This process, which has been going on for centuries, of uprooting us from nature, culture and God, leads us into a mass society, controlled by and for technology, in which we have been on course to become, since at the least the Industrial Revolution, mere cogs in a giant mechanism that we have no control over.”
23 - Summary of Oswald Spengler: peasant > idea > civilization ($$$) > cosmopolis
28 - culture = story. [Whence this obsession with stories?]
28 - quoting Campbell on rebirth
31 - “The more machines there are to replace men, the more men there will be in society who are nothing but machines.
LOUIS DE BONALD”
34 - Weber: disenchantment. I disagree that machines inevitably disenchant. Listen to gearheads talk about cars. Take your washing machine apart. The problem is lack of knowledge, not anything inherent in the machine. Lack of responsibility, in Crawford’s words. (Why do planes keep so much magic?)
35 - Mumford
37 - The Machine is spiritual: “This, then, is the Machine. It is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up—cars, laptops, robot mowers and the rest. In fact, such technics', as Mumford calls them, are the product of the Machine, not its essence. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition.” Given this definition, Ashurbanipal could have presided over the Machine.
38 - Standard suburb as the purview of the Machine? Prioritizes individual. Do whatever you want as long as you do it in private. Suspicious of public-facing activities.
38 - Mumford on pyramids. Convenient story, but probably not true. Certainly not how any of them thought of their own work.
39 - ok, admits that all such grand projects are done for religious ends.
40 - Mumford again: machine’s magic spell: it is for your benefit.
45 - “Fen Tigers”
56 - French Rev. lead by “liberal nobility.” Common people found the king too modern, not too medieval.
Dawkins: “the monkey is a machine for reproducing genes up trees” or something to that effect
97 - E. F. Schumacher
99 - “This is our faith: that breaking boundaries leads to happiness.”