A New Wave Swells Up

The machine has swept over our civilization in three successive waves. The first wave, which was set in motion around the tenth century, … was an effort tof achieve order and power by purely external means, and its success was partly due to the fact that it evaded many of the real issues of life and turned away from the momentous moral and social difficulties that it had neither confronted nor solved. The second wave heaved upward in the eighteenth century after a long steady roll through the Middle Ages. … In the course of this effort, various moral and social problems which had been set to one side by the exclusive development of the machine, now returned with doubled urgency: the very efficiency of the machine was drastically curtailed by the failure to achieve in society a set of harmonious and integrated purposes. External regimentation and internal resistance and disintegration went hand in hand: those fortunate members of society who were in complete harmony with the machine achieved that state only by closing up various important avenues of life. Finally, we begin in our own day to observe the swelling energies of a third wave: behind this wave, both in technics and in civilization, are forces which were suppressed or perverted by the earlier development of the machine. …As the result of this third movement, the machine ceases to be a substitute for God or for an orderly society; and instead of its success being measured by the mechanization of life, its worth becomes more and more measurable in terms of its own approach to the organic and the living.