"If this is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations"
About this Quote
A chill runs through Wallace's "If this is not done" because he refuses to name the deed and still makes it feel urgent. The vagueness is strategic: it turns the reader into a co-conspirator, already aware that some corrective action is overdue, already implicated in the delay. Coming from a scientist best known for co-formulating natural selection, the line lands as a rebuke from someone trained to think in time-scales bigger than a news cycle and in consequences that outlive their authors.
The real sting is in the imagined tribunal of "future ages". Wallace isn't forecasting technological progress or national glory; he's forecasting moral embarrassment. It's a rhetorical inversion of Victorian self-congratulation: the era that congratulated itself on industry and empire might be remembered for a narrower achievement - getting rich while missing the point. "Immersed" suggests drowning, not thriving, and "blind" frames wealth not as a neutral goal but as a sensory deprivation that blocks "higher considerations" - ethics, beauty, public welfare, ecological limits, maybe even spiritual meaning. He doesn't argue those higher values in detail because the accusation assumes the reader knows them and has chosen to discount them.
Context matters: Wallace spent decades critiquing how industrial capitalism, land ownership, and scientific triumphalism could coexist with poverty and environmental degradation. The sentence reads like an early warning against a culture that treats markets as destiny. He aims not to shame individual greed, but to indict a civilization's priorities before they fossilize into history.
The real sting is in the imagined tribunal of "future ages". Wallace isn't forecasting technological progress or national glory; he's forecasting moral embarrassment. It's a rhetorical inversion of Victorian self-congratulation: the era that congratulated itself on industry and empire might be remembered for a narrower achievement - getting rich while missing the point. "Immersed" suggests drowning, not thriving, and "blind" frames wealth not as a neutral goal but as a sensory deprivation that blocks "higher considerations" - ethics, beauty, public welfare, ecological limits, maybe even spiritual meaning. He doesn't argue those higher values in detail because the accusation assumes the reader knows them and has chosen to discount them.
Context matters: Wallace spent decades critiquing how industrial capitalism, land ownership, and scientific triumphalism could coexist with poverty and environmental degradation. The sentence reads like an early warning against a culture that treats markets as destiny. He aims not to shame individual greed, but to indict a civilization's priorities before they fossilize into history.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wealth |
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