"In most places, oral traditions eventually gave way to writing. Later, ordinary writing was transformed by the printing press. As great a blessing as writing and the development of affordable printing have been to human culture, even these changes came with trade-offs. People in oral cultures tend to memorize much more than people with written languages; but only a very foolish brand of nostalgia would wish all the printing presses destroyed and the secret of writing forgotten. The real question, here as with all technological innovations, isn’t whether there is a downside. There almost always is. The question is whether the overall benefits outweigh the costs.
It is easy to wax nostalgic about the "sacramental" value of working with the land to produce food and to conjure up an image of Hobbits peacefully tending their crops in the Shire. Appreciating the genuine good in such work is itself a good. But nostalgia is another matter. The danger in such nostalgia is seeing the past only benefits, and in the present only costs.
--Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed, and God (2009 A.D.)
"It is not improbable conjecture that the feeling that humanity was becoming over-civilized, that life was getting too complicated and over-refined, dates from the time when the cave-men first became such. It can hardly be supposed- if the cave-men were at all like their descendents- that none among them discoursed with contempt on the cowardly effiminacy of living under shelter or upon the exasperating inconvenience of constantly returning for food or sleep to the same place instead of being free to roam at large in wide-open spaces"
--Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, quoted in Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, (45).
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| Jay W. Richards |
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| Arthur Lovejoy |
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| George Boas |
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