Abstract

The flight of the gods, the desecration of the earth, the transformation of humanity into a mass, the darkening of the world - these are all ways, Wade Sikorski argues in Modernity and Technology, of describing the modern condition. Because of our technical orientation, our insistence that our freedom comes only with our power to control, choose and use things, everything in the world is present to us only as an object of utility, as a means for our mastery of the earth. That, Sikorski argues, is our great tragedy. The beauty of the world, the poetry of being, and true mastery of the earth have been concealed by the imperatives of our technology.