Life & Wisdom Quote by L. Sprague de Camp

Civilization, de Camp suggests, isn’t primarily a tale of kings, creeds, or great artworks; it’s a running account of people learning how to bargain with physics. The line is pitched with a science-fiction writer’s pragmatism: history is less a romance than a user manual, revised by trial, error, and a lot of broken prototypes. Calling it “in a sense” is the tell. He’s smoothing off the obvious objections (culture isn’t only pipes and pulleys) while still sliding engineering into the driver’s seat.

The phrase “long and arduous struggle” does two things at once. It honors engineering as labor rather than genius-myth, and it quietly demotes “progress” from destiny to work. Nature isn’t a benevolent backdrop; it’s a set of indifferent forces that must be understood, measured, and coerced. That’s a bracingly modern view, shaped by a 20th century that watched electrification, aviation, antibiotics, and nuclear power remake daily life at terrifying speed. De Camp lived through the era when “engineering” could mean rural light bulbs or Hiroshima, which makes “for man’s good” feel less like a guarantee than a moral stipulation.

The subtext is a kind of technocratic humanism: if civilization is engineering, then the central civic question becomes who gets to define “good,” who bears the risk, and who collects the benefits. The sentence flatters builders, but it also hands them an ethical burden. Mastery over nature is not the endpoint; the argument is that the only defensible mastery is one disciplined by social purpose.