Guns And Butter Dept.

Books, Gadgets, and Freedom by Mario Vargas Llosa | Wilson Quarterly

... since there is no way of eradicating man’s destructive drive — which is the price he pays for the faculty of invention — we should try to direct it toward books instead of gadgets. Literature can mitigate this drive without much risk. ...Unlike the scientific civilization that has made us more fragile than our ancestors were before they learned to fight the tiger, under a literary civilization more impractical, passive, a...