CATHOLICISM AND THE PROBLEM Of TECHNICAL CIVILIZATION IN AMERICA
I want to say something to-day about this great question of technological
power which confronts the modern world and raises so many problems for modern
Western man. It is essentially or primarily a problem for Western man for fy it
was he who created it all. The Qriental man is anxious to take it because it
seems inseparable from power and he wants power in order to be free. Bat we have
had freedom and we have used our freedom to create technological power. And
this is most of all true of America where Western man has had the most freedom
and where he has gone furthest in creating the new patterns of technological
culture,
Of course my knowledge of American culture is very one-sided. I speak as
an historian who looks at the world pattern of American power, not as one who
knows American society from inside and that means that one misses a Dart of the
picture: especially I think one misses the side of American life which is repre-
sented by the South which I. am seeing now for the first time. It seems to me that
here technological culture is quite a newcomer and that the pattern of social
life still reflects an earlier order. When I was a young man, 50 years age,
I imagined that life in Louisiana was very different from what it is to-day -
a good deal poorer but also much more leisurely and not very much mechanized.
And. north of this in that great tract of country which is still for Catholics
a foreign land - one of the most purely Protestant regions in the world - the
influence of the past must be even stronger and the contrast with the mechanized
pattern of culture even sharper. And so when I talk about American culture
I do not want you to think that I am making generalizations about an essentially
complex phenomenon, as travellers are so apt to do. What I am trying to do is
rather to concentrate attention on that new element in American culture, which
has emerged primarily in the North East and the Middle West and has developed
Original format : Manuscript (12 leaves) ; 8.5 x 11 in.
Parent Collection
Christopher Dawson Papers
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Transcript
CATHOLICISM AND THE PROBLEM Of TECHNICAL CIVILIZATION IN AMERICA
I want to say something to-day about this great question of technological
power which confronts the modern world and raises so many problems for modern
Western man. It is essentially or primarily a problem for Western man for fy it
was he who created it all. The Qriental man is anxious to take it because it
seems inseparable from power and he wants power in order to be free. Bat we have
had freedom and we have used our freedom to create technological power. And
this is most of all true of America where Western man has had the most freedom
and where he has gone furthest in creating the new patterns of technological
culture,
Of course my knowledge of American culture is very one-sided. I speak as
an historian who looks at the world pattern of American power, not as one who
knows American society from inside and that means that one misses a Dart of the
picture: especially I think one misses the side of American life which is repre-
sented by the South which I. am seeing now for the first time. It seems to me that
here technological culture is quite a newcomer and that the pattern of social
life still reflects an earlier order. When I was a young man, 50 years age,
I imagined that life in Louisiana was very different from what it is to-day -
a good deal poorer but also much more leisurely and not very much mechanized.
And. north of this in that great tract of country which is still for Catholics
a foreign land - one of the most purely Protestant regions in the world - the
influence of the past must be even stronger and the contrast with the mechanized
pattern of culture even sharper. And so when I talk about American culture
I do not want you to think that I am making generalizations about an essentially
complex phenomenon, as travellers are so apt to do. What I am trying to do is
rather to concentrate attention on that new element in American culture, which
has emerged primarily in the North East and the Middle West and has developed
