"This inquiry began with a deceptively simple question. How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all? The attempt to explain this anomaly – the persistence of a belief in progress in a century full of calamities – led me back to the eighteenth century, where the founders of modern liberalism began to argue that human wants, being insatiable, required an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satisfy them. Insatiable desire, formerly condemned as a source of frustration, unhappiness, and spiritual instability, came to be seen as a powerful stimulus to economic development. Instead of disparaging the tendency to want more than we need, liberals like Adam Smith argued that needs varied from one society to another, that civilized men and women needed more than savages to make them comfortable, and that a continual redefinition of their standards of comfort and convenience led to improvements in production and a general increase in wealth. There was no foreseeable end to the transformation of luxuries into necessities. The more comforts people enjoyed, the more they would expect. The elasticity of demand appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events, not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century. Those wars, indeed, gave added energy to economic development. ~~~ The True and Only Heaven – Progress and its Critics (Christopher Lasch – 1991).
“Achievements of the Megamachine – The first exhibition of the megamachine comes from the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, constructed under the architect, engineer, scientist, and physician, Imhotep, who well earned his later deification. The Pyramid of King Zoser, the dominant feature of a whole city dedicated to the dead, surpassed all contemporary works – Lewis Mumford “The Myth of the Machine – Technics and Human Development (1966)
"This inquiry began with a deceptively simple question. How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all? The attempt to explain this anomaly – the persistence of a belief in progress in a century full of calamities – led me back to the eighteenth century, where the founders of modern liberalism began to argue that human wants, being insatiable, required an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satisfy them. Insatiable desire, formerly condemned as a source of frustration, unhappiness, and spiritual instability, came to be seen as a powerful stimulus to economic development. Instead of disparaging the tendency to want more than we need, liberals like Adam Smith argued that needs varied from one society to another, that civilized men and women needed more than savages to make them comfortable, and that a continual redefinition of their standards of comfort and convenience led to improvements in production and a general increase in wealth. There was no foreseeable end to the transformation of luxuries into necessities. The more comforts people enjoyed, the more they would expect. The elasticity of demand appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events, not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century. Those wars, indeed, gave added energy to economic development. ~~~ The True and Only Heaven – Progress and its Critics (Christopher Lasch – 1991).
“Achievements of the Megamachine – The first exhibition of the megamachine comes from the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, constructed under the architect, engineer, scientist, and physician, Imhotep, who well earned his later deification. The Pyramid of King Zoser, the dominant feature of a whole city dedicated to the dead, surpassed all contemporary works – Lewis Mumford “The Myth of the Machine – Technics and Human Development (1966)
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