Age of science and technology: The beginning of the end?
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.
Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world — I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home. Because science and industry do decide wars, or so it seems.
Culture and Value, a selection from LW’s notebooks, 1946; quoted in Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 485
