"The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent"
About this Quote
A sentence like this doesn not merely complain about technology; it stages a moral emergency. Dahlberg loads the line with old-fashioned ethical nouns - virtue, pity, love - then has "the machine" corrode them as if it were an acid in the cultural bloodstream. The diction is biblical in its severity ("pernicious"), but the target is modern: a mechanized life that trains the body and the conscience into passivity.
The specific intent is polemical. Dahlberg is warning that machines dont just replace labor; they replace habits of attention. "Induce inertia, and fear" is the crucial pairing: inertia suggests the narcotic ease of automation, while fear hints at the psychological dependence that follows. Once your daily competence is outsourced, the world feels less navigable without the apparatus; the user becomes timid, then obedient. That is the subtext beneath the ethical language: mechanization as a political temperament, not a gadget problem.
The provocation peaks in "near impotent", a deliberately shaming phrase that ties masculinity to agency and eros. Dahlberg is not offering a neutral sociology of youth; he is accusing a generation of being spiritually and even sexually blunted by mediated comfort. Coming from a 20th-century novelist steeped in modernist disgust for mass society, the line reads as part of a broader anti-industrial, anti-bureaucratic critique: the machine as a culture that prefers smooth functioning over messy human feeling.
Its rhetorical power lies in its refusal to be subtle. Dahlberg wants you to flinch - because flinching is, in his view, the beginning of waking up.
The specific intent is polemical. Dahlberg is warning that machines dont just replace labor; they replace habits of attention. "Induce inertia, and fear" is the crucial pairing: inertia suggests the narcotic ease of automation, while fear hints at the psychological dependence that follows. Once your daily competence is outsourced, the world feels less navigable without the apparatus; the user becomes timid, then obedient. That is the subtext beneath the ethical language: mechanization as a political temperament, not a gadget problem.
The provocation peaks in "near impotent", a deliberately shaming phrase that ties masculinity to agency and eros. Dahlberg is not offering a neutral sociology of youth; he is accusing a generation of being spiritually and even sexually blunted by mediated comfort. Coming from a 20th-century novelist steeped in modernist disgust for mass society, the line reads as part of a broader anti-industrial, anti-bureaucratic critique: the machine as a culture that prefers smooth functioning over messy human feeling.
Its rhetorical power lies in its refusal to be subtle. Dahlberg wants you to flinch - because flinching is, in his view, the beginning of waking up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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