I think not. Fear of machinery for the discomfort and occasional harm it brings has (at least until very recently) not moved humanity to more than that occasional sigh. The love of the uses of machinery has always far overbalanced such fears, as we might judge if we consider that very rarely in the history of mankind has any culture voluntarily given up significant technological advance because of the inconvenience or harm of its side effects. There have been involuntary retreats from technology as a result of warfare, civil strife, epidemics, or natural disasters, but the results of that are precisely what we call a "dark age" and the population suffering from one does its best over the generations to get back on the track and restore the technology.
Mankind has always chosen to counter the evils of technology, not by abandonment of technology, but by additional technology. The smoke of an indoor fire was countered by the chimney. The danger of the spear was countered by the shield. The danger of the mass army was countered by the city wall.
This attitude, despite the steady drizzle of backwardist outcries, has continued to the present. Thus the characteristic technological product of our present life is the automobile. It pollutes the air, assaults our eardrums, kills fifty thousand Americans a year and inflicts survivable injuries on hundreds of thousands.
Does anyone seriously expect Americans to give up their murderous little pets voluntarily? Even those who attend rallies to denounce the mechanization of modern life are quite likely to reach those rallies by automobile.
The first moment when the magnitude of possible evil was seen by many people as uncounterable by any conceivable good came with the fission bomb in 1945. Never before had any technological advance set off demands for abandonment by so large a percentage of the population.
In fact, the reaction to the fission bomb set a new fashion. People were readier to oppose other advances they saw as unacceptably harmful in their side effects-biological warfare, the SST, certain genetic experiments on micro-organisms, breeder reactors, spray cans.
And even so, not one of these items has yet been given up.
But we're on the right track. The fear of the machine is not at the deepest level of the soul if the harm it does is accompanied by good, too; or if the harm is merely to some people-the few who happen to be on the spot in a vehicular collision, for instance.
The majority, after all, escape, and reap the good of the machine.
No, it is when the machine threatens all mankind in any way so that each individual human being begins to feel that he, himself, will not escape, that fear overwhelms love.
But since technology has begun to threaten the human race as a whole only in the last thirty years, were we immune to fear before that-or has the human race always been threatened?
After all, is physical destruction by brute energy of a type only now in our fist, the only way in which human beings can be destroyed? Might not the machine destroy the essence of humanity, our minds and souls, even while leaving our bodies intact and secure and comfortable?
It is a common fear, for instance, that television makes people unable to read and pocket computers will make them unable to add. Or think of the Spartan king who, on observing a catapult in action, mourned that that would put an end to human valor.
Certainly such subtle threats to humanity have existed and been recognized through all the long ages when man's feeble control over nature made it impossible for him to do himself very much physical harm.
The fear that machinery might make men effete is not yet, in my opinion, the basic and greatest fear. The one (it seems to me) that hits closest to the core is the general fear of irreversible change. Consider:
There are two kinds of change that we can gather from the universe about us. One is cyclic and benign.
Day both follows and is followed by night. Summer both follows and is followed by winter. Rain both follows and is followed by clear weather, and the net result is, therefore, no change. That may be boring, but it is comfortable and induces a feeling of security.
In fact, so comfortable is the notion of short-term cyclic change implying long-term changelessness, that human beings labor to find it everywhere. In human affairs, there is the notion that one generation both follows and is followed by another, that one dynasty both follows and is followed by another, that one empire both follows and is followed by another. It is not a good analogy to the cycles of nature since the repetitions are not exact, but it is good enough to be comforting.
So strongly do human beings want the comfort of cycles that they will seize upon one even when the evidence is insufficient-or even when it actually points the other way.
With respect to the universe, what evidence we have points to a hyperbolic evolution; a universe that expands forever out of the initial big bang and ends as formless gas and black holes. Yet our emotions drag us, against the evidence, to notions of oscillating, cyclic, repeating universes, in which even the black holes are merely gateways to new big bangs.
But then there is the other change, to be avoided at all costs-the irreversible, malignant change; the one-way change; the permanent change; the change-never-to-return.
What is so fearful about it? The fact is that there is one such change that lies so close to ourselves that it distorts the entire universe for us.
We are, after all, old, and though we were once young we shall never be young again. Irreversible! Our friends are dead, and though they were once alive, they shall never be alive again. Irreversible! The fact is that life ends in death and that is not a cyclic change and we fear that end and know it is useless to fight it.
What is worse is that the universe doesn't die with us. Callously and immortally it continues onward in its cyclic changes, adding to the injury of death the insult of indifference.