Science & Tech Quote by Henrik Ibsen

Anxiety here isn’t aimed at “machines” so much as the smug timetable of modernity: invention first, human readiness later. Ibsen frames progress as a kind of theft - “bread snatched from their mouths” makes technological change visceral, not abstract. It’s labor politics translated into bodily panic. You can feel the street-level economy in that verb: snatched, sudden, unilateral, done to you.

The sharper edge is how he couples science and capitalism, refusing the flattering story that innovation is neutral and markets simply “distribute” its benefits. Science supplies the tool; capitalism decides who eats. That pairing is the subtextual accusation: the real engine isn’t curiosity, it’s profit seeking with an alibi. Ibsen’s skepticism lands because it targets a familiar moral loophole - people who would never steal a loaf will cheer a system that does the same thing through “efficiency.”

Then comes the sting of “What business has...got,” an idiom that doubles as indictment. He’s not merely asking who authorized this; he’s implying there was no legitimate authority to reorder working lives at speed. The final clause pivots from Luddite fear to civic failure: society hasn’t “produced a generation educated up to using them.” Progress becomes a pedagogical and democratic problem, not a mechanical one. In Ibsen’s industrial-century context - rapid mechanization, urbanization, and the fragility of wage labor - the line reads like an early brief against tech determinism: if you upgrade the factory but not the citizen, you get displacement dressed up as destiny.