Quotes from Bryan Appleyard

Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

Science has taken away our religion.

The cyborg is now the ideal to which all our most advanced technology is tending.

In AI, Spielberg is bleaching the dirt out of the human mind and leaving behind only the vacant gaze of machine 'love'. Coca Cola ads do much the same thing - and they don't take two hours.

Science is not a neutral or innocent commodity which can be employed as a convenience by people wishing to partake only of the West's material power. Rather it is spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions. It cannot really co-exist with anything.

Scientists need to be observed and criticized more than any other members of society. I say this not just because of the horrors that might emerge from their laboratories, but also because of the necessity for making them as morally and philosophically answerable as the rest of us.

The whole point I am making is that a hard, irreducible sense of our own self-awareness has been progressively denied us by the inroads of science both as a form and as a creator of our society.

An adolescent act of defiance has now become a familiar form of virtue. 'Going with the flow' has become an imperative, a clear version of the good life. Chance is sentimentally evoked in popular fictions. We 'change' to move on from tragedy or difficulty, we 'change' to overcome trauma, we are frequently told to accept 'change' as some perennial fact of life, the contemplation of which brings wisdom.

hot-rodding lasted until the 1980s when, as Matthew Crawford observes, electronic engine management made everything under the bonnet 'a little opaque'. It is hard to rod a computer.