Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition

The interesting question seems to be whether man, having succeeded after all these years in bringing so much of the natural environment under his control, can now manage the imposing system he has created for the specific purpose of enabling him to manage his natural environment.

For instance, no man ordinarily can get out very far ahead of the state of the art, or to put it another way, he can’t rise very far above the thresholds of existing knowledge. No intellectual heroism or psychic leap will take you from the development of the wheel immediately to the internal-combustion engine and the automobile. On the other hand,

Military organizations are societies built around and upon the prevailing weapons systems. Intuitively and quite correctly the military man feels that a change in weapon portends a change in the arrangements of his society.

The basic elements, the gun, gear, and sight, were put in the environment by other men, men interested in designing machinery to serve different purposes or simply interested in the instruments themselves.

He and his colleagues were opposed on this occasion by men who were apparently moved by three considerations: honest disbelief in the dramatic but substantiated claims of the new process, protection of the existing devices and instruments with which they identified themselves, and maintenance of the existing society with which they were identified.

Those who had spent their lives in the nineteenth century had worked with forces large enough to give them a sense for the first time in history that they were in possession of power sufficient to profoundly change the conditions of life. But the forces were never sufficiently developed to fulfill the promise they gave. The two great influences at

The opposition, where it occurs, of the soldier and the sailor to such change springs from the normal human instinct to protect oneself, and more especially, one’s way of life.

Societies have not been very successful in reforming themselves, accommodating to change, without pain and conflict.

This was the second stage—the attempt to meet Sims’s claims by logical, rational rebuttal.

First stage: At first, there was no response.