Monday, October 4, 2010

Where human judgment abdicates

From A Jacques Barzun Reader by Michael Murray, the essay Toward a Fateful Serenity:
Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine give relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. Any ossified institution - almost every bureaucracy, public or private - manifests the mechanical. So does race-thinking - a verdict passed mechanically at a color-coded signal. Ideology is likewise an idea-machine, designed to spare the buyer all further thought. Again, "methods" substituted for reading books and judging art are a perversion of what belongs to science and engineering: "models," formulas, theories. Specialism too turns machine-like if it never transcends its single task.

No comments:

Post a Comment