Word: faustian
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...Sidney Benson is a modest mid-century schoolteacher clarinetist, separated husband and blocked novelist of the 1960s who floats on nostalgia rather than tradition. Blake is a character in Benson's novel-in-progress. Both are characters in Irvin Faust's fourth novel, Foreign Devils, a typically Faustian fiction that generates considerable warmth by rubbing heroic fantasies against drab realities...
...progress came at a price. It was the genius of science that also made possible such horrors as the exploding mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, the chemically ruined forests of Indochina, the threat of a shower of ICBMs, a plant increasingly littered with technology's fallout. It is this Faustian side of science, with its insatiable drive to conquer new fields, explore new territory and build bigger machines, regardless of costs or consequences that worries so many critics...
...gadgets," not to mention "the computers," represent "mankind tyrannized by the work of his own hands." Furthermore, he sees "objectivity," the scientific act of knowledge, as an act of alienation, if not of sacrilege. "Break faith with the environment," reads Roszak's version of the scientist's Faustian compact, "and you will surely gain power...
What's a nonpolluting culture, a non-growth, a non-Faustian Western culture going to be like? The people who have really been doing the research and development on that kind of culture have obviously been in the counterculture. The non-growth culture is closer to the Hopi Indian way of life* than it is to that of the jet-setting industrialist's. Frank Waters' Book of the Hopi is the most directly relevant book to something like The Limits to Growth. It's very clear that if you are going to humanize technology...
...things that go through the head of Willy T. Kleinhans, a 93-year-old Spanish-American War veteran, are typically Faustian. From the limbo of an old soldiers' home, Willy recalls a confusion of dates, events, cultural artifacts and personal history. It is as if the roll of film in a home movie had been doubly and triply exposed. Willy is not un like an Uncle Sam suffering from advanced arterial sclerosis - a symbol of a nation that sometimes seems to have gone from a vigorous, righteous innocence to a befuddled old age in less than 100 years...