Machine in the Garden

We've been reading some good books for our PhD program. Lots of them actually. We'd hoped to keep you, our faithful readers, up on some of the works. Sadly, we've slacked on that end. One of the better ones read was Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. It's a classic work about pastoralism, industrialization and aesthetics. A few points worth knowing -

• The pastoral idea masks troubles of industrial society and allows for escape from complexity
• America has always been a contrast between two consciousnesses
• "Geography controls culture" therefore if man wants to control culture he must control geography
• There has always been an American technophobia, mainly deriving from Puritan ideals
• Nothing is inherently ugly about scenes of industrialization, what is ugly is the dislocation/detachment from the whole which they represent when seen only from the limited perspective of that understanding