"That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding"
About this Quote
Abbey lands the punch where modern life still bruises: at the gap between data and wisdom. By calling science something that merely "calls itself" science, he’s not attacking inquiry so much as the technocratic posture that wears the lab coat as a costume. The line is engineered like a stomachache. "Indigestible glut" makes information feel less like enlightenment and more like force-feeding: calories without nourishment, volume without meaning.
The intent is political as much as philosophical. Abbey wrote as an anti-bureaucratic, pro-wilderness writer watching the American state and its corporate partners turn measurement into permission: surveys, environmental impact statements, cost-benefit analyses that can catalog a canyon right up to the moment it’s dammed. The subtext is that "science" in public life often arrives pre-translated into managerial language, where numbers become a substitute for moral argument. If you can quantify it, you can file it, fund it, or pave it.
What makes the quote work is its refusal to flatter the reader as a rational consumer of facts. Abbey implies we’re complicit: we crave the hit of new information because it feels like progress, even when it doesn’t reorganize our understanding or change our behavior. "Less and less understanding" isn’t a lament for ignorance; it’s an indictment of a culture that confuses accumulation with comprehension. In Abbey’s world, the real knowledge is experiential and ecological, the kind you don’t download - you submit to it.
The intent is political as much as philosophical. Abbey wrote as an anti-bureaucratic, pro-wilderness writer watching the American state and its corporate partners turn measurement into permission: surveys, environmental impact statements, cost-benefit analyses that can catalog a canyon right up to the moment it’s dammed. The subtext is that "science" in public life often arrives pre-translated into managerial language, where numbers become a substitute for moral argument. If you can quantify it, you can file it, fund it, or pave it.
What makes the quote work is its refusal to flatter the reader as a rational consumer of facts. Abbey implies we’re complicit: we crave the hit of new information because it feels like progress, even when it doesn’t reorganize our understanding or change our behavior. "Less and less understanding" isn’t a lament for ignorance; it’s an indictment of a culture that confuses accumulation with comprehension. In Abbey’s world, the real knowledge is experiential and ecological, the kind you don’t download - you submit to it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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