Public Addresses 85
is bound to discover how trying the Time Being really is. For
the choreography of your lives, daily and personal, public
and climactic—will be shaped, on the one hand, by visions
that have faltered, and, on the other, by prospects that waver
between astounding promise and unspeakable dread.
It’s hard for us to realize how long and strong the hope
has been that if men could fully and finally domesticate na-
ture—and pass from an economy of scarcity and competition
to an economy of abundance and welfare—this human life
would bloom and fruit in happiness and peace. The best
way to comprehend this is to see the same vivid, unquestion-
ing, imperious faith in technology in the underdeveloped
countries, among people who have just begun to believe that
dearth is not a natural condition of human life. Every time I
talk to an educated man from Asia or Africa, I am baffled
by his scorn of American materialism and his passion for
something that looks suspiciously like it for his own country.
And I am baffled to know how best to react, for it will do no
good to discourage his faith in technology, even though it
seems plain that this faith is going to betray him sooner or
later, even as ours has betrayed us. For we’ve come to tire
Jordan’s bank of the Promised Land of technology—and with
it has come a profound disillusionment in our faith that
things can make life good. Tire triumph of technology has
been no apocalypse of the good life for modern man. Yet
technology will go on, must go on. The problem is how are
we, in this Time Being, to find the good life in this strange
new world? Again, we live in a Time Being between the
soaring hope that the democratic way of life would rid the
world of tyranny and the mounting fear that the last worst
tyranny of them all may yet do us in. The older ones among
us have had the excitement of a dramatic sequence of tri-