"People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too"
About this Quote
Speed is the oldest confidence trick of modern life: make everything move faster and we start mistaking motion for progress. Morley’s line needles a distinctly early-20th-century faith in machinery as a moral upgrade. Trains, telegraphs, assembly lines, elevators, automobiles: the world was becoming a series of accelerations, and the temptation was to assume the human mind was being upgraded along with the hardware. Morley refuses the flattering story. His target isn’t technology itself so much as the lazy metaphor that equates velocity with intelligence.
The sentence is built like a gentle reprimand. “People like to imagine” frames the belief as wishful, almost childlike. The phrasing implies comfort: it’s nicer to believe you’re keeping up than to confront the possibility that the pace is simply dragging you. The real barb is in the “too,” a tiny word that punctures a whole ideology. Machines can be made to go faster with better fuel and tighter engineering; thought doesn’t obey the same physics. In fact, speed often taxes it. Faster circulation of information can produce not sharper insight but quicker reflexes, thinner attention, more confident error.
Morley writes before the internet but after the first great wave of industrial time-discipline, when clocks and schedules began to colonize private life. The subtext reads like a warning against confusing responsiveness with reasoning, output with understanding. The modern twist is how perfectly it anticipates our current delusion: that a faster feed, a faster workflow, a faster reply means a faster mind, when it may just mean less time to be wrong in private.
The sentence is built like a gentle reprimand. “People like to imagine” frames the belief as wishful, almost childlike. The phrasing implies comfort: it’s nicer to believe you’re keeping up than to confront the possibility that the pace is simply dragging you. The real barb is in the “too,” a tiny word that punctures a whole ideology. Machines can be made to go faster with better fuel and tighter engineering; thought doesn’t obey the same physics. In fact, speed often taxes it. Faster circulation of information can produce not sharper insight but quicker reflexes, thinner attention, more confident error.
Morley writes before the internet but after the first great wave of industrial time-discipline, when clocks and schedules began to colonize private life. The subtext reads like a warning against confusing responsiveness with reasoning, output with understanding. The modern twist is how perfectly it anticipates our current delusion: that a faster feed, a faster workflow, a faster reply means a faster mind, when it may just mean less time to be wrong in private.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Christopher
Add to List
