More from The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century (”the one book from 1906 you should read today”) — which, warning warning forever, if you do read it, will continue operate after a month’s time:
Both in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitable thing that looms up in modern life over us and around us, for better or worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes little difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. It has come to stay. It is going to stay until we do see what it is for. We cannot move it. We cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. We are born in the machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. We breathe the machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any more than he can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes, even by destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry in machinery — that is if there is no beautiful and glorious interpretation of machinery for our modern life — there cannot be poetry in anything in modern life. Either the machine is the door of the future, or it stands and mocks at us where the door ought to be. If we who have made machines cannot make our machines mean something, we ourselves are meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine above our lives is meaningless, the winds that blow down upon us from it are empty winds, and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of darkness. There is one question that confronts and undergirds our whole modern civilization. All other questions are a part of it. Can a Machine Age have a soul?
If we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-idea in its simplest form, for machinery itself — that is, the machines of steel and flame that minister to us — it will be possible to find a great hope for our other machines. If we cannot use the machines we have already mastered to hope with, the less we hope from our other machines — our spirit-machines, the machines we have not mastered — the better. In taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected with machinery, we are taking a stand for the continued existence of modern religion — (in all reverence) the God-machine; for modern education — the man-machine; for modern government — the crowd-machine; for modern art — the machine in which the crowd lives.
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