"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages"
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Edison, the patron saint of applied ingenuity, reaches for a moral voltage here: progress is meaningless if it only powers bigger appetites. The line flatters the modern faith in evolution and improvement, then flips it into an indictment. If evolution has a destination, he argues, it is ethical refinement, not just smarter tools. That’s a shrewd move from an inventor whose reputation is built on making life more efficient; he’s quietly warning that efficiency without restraint is just a faster kind of brutality.
The phrasing is doing deliberate work. “Highest ethics” sounds like a technical benchmark, as if morality can be engineered, measured, upgraded. It’s a culturally savvy pitch to an industrial age that worshiped optimization. Then comes the insult: “savages.” It’s blunt, even inflammatory, and it reveals the period’s moral hierarchy language, where “civilization” is a badge and “savage” a cudgel. Edison weaponizes that binary to shame the reader into identifying with the “advanced” side - and to suggest that violence toward animals (and, by implication, the natural world) is the tell that we’re still primitive.
The subtext is also self-protective: if the 20th century is going to remake the planet with electricity, factories, and mass production, it needs a counterweight that keeps “innovation” from becoming an alibi. Nonviolence becomes not saintliness but a definition of what real progress would look like: extending the circle of consideration beyond our species, or admitting that our celebrated modernity is just savagery with better lighting.
The phrasing is doing deliberate work. “Highest ethics” sounds like a technical benchmark, as if morality can be engineered, measured, upgraded. It’s a culturally savvy pitch to an industrial age that worshiped optimization. Then comes the insult: “savages.” It’s blunt, even inflammatory, and it reveals the period’s moral hierarchy language, where “civilization” is a badge and “savage” a cudgel. Edison weaponizes that binary to shame the reader into identifying with the “advanced” side - and to suggest that violence toward animals (and, by implication, the natural world) is the tell that we’re still primitive.
The subtext is also self-protective: if the 20th century is going to remake the planet with electricity, factories, and mass production, it needs a counterweight that keeps “innovation” from becoming an alibi. Nonviolence becomes not saintliness but a definition of what real progress would look like: extending the circle of consideration beyond our species, or admitting that our celebrated modernity is just savagery with better lighting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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