¶ … Moral and Philosophical Implications
Well technology has existed with humans from the time they have started moving in the world. At first it was quite simple as the objective of humans was to hunt animals for their daily meals and this was done by both men and women. This is no surprise as God, or whoever put humans into the world probably did not distinguish between the sexes, except for their roles in procreation and continuation of the species. This is now being forgotten by the species and the number of children per pair is falling, and may be that would lead us to a situation where the species would have to be sustained through the test tube. Whether that would improve the quality of the specie one doubts, as is seen through the situation that has now developed in agriculture where the crops have to be sustained with the support of a lot of chemicals and other fertilizers, etc. when man comes to this state, their possible contribution to mankind would be doubtful. Well, it is probably true that we are digressing from the authors that we are to talk about, and that is only natural as every human being prefers to blow his own trumpet and that is what we have been doing till now, blowing our own trumpet or giving out our own philosophy about man and societal development.
The first of these pieces "The Dynamo and the Virgin" by Henry Adams is probably the most technical and the language does not reflect English language as it has developed today. A lot of bombastic words, and probably those show off his personal education do not do much good for the poor reader. He probably does not understand what has been written and this would probably stop him from reading somewhere in between. Let us first remember that the age of the printed literature has probably ended and most of the reading by today's young men is done on the computer, and here the stoppage of reading is simple -- press a button on the computer. The writing talks about the introduction of an ordinary person...
This is natural as technology was only at that level when the piece was written, and this makes it not worth reading today except as a historical piece and probably only for the purpose of reviewing it. It also talks about the fact the person who was supposed to be the expert in technology and taking the visitor around the place also did not know much. This is true as the job of attending to visitors is not jobs for experts. Have you ever dreamt that Einstein would have had a job taking people around in an exhibition, and if he had, would he have been Einstein? Again, we are getting into semantics and criticism, and that is not the job, the job is to review the piece. The philosophy in the piece is correct and probably true at all times. The morals are probably neutral as there is no clear morals in the entire write up. At the same time, the language is very bombastic and that would probably drive away a lot of the readers today. When we take into account changes, let us remember that changes take place in every part of human development, and it is through the process of change that human development takes place. The reference to dynamos are real life dynamos and in the piece it is written as "To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity." The virgin that is referred to is also a concept that is found very difficult to understand by Americans and is referred in the book as "The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Schools." (The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900))
The second book that we are to talk about, "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque is quite famous and has had much appreciation through criticism and films made on the book. The concentration of Remarque is on the…
