“But you forget our art, our literature, all the other things we’ve created beside the machine you hate so,” Jimmie, now thoroughly aroused and interested in spite of himself, challenged.
“Our art? Our literature? As if other civilizations didn’t have art and literature, ethics and philosophies of life and codes of conduct many of them much better than anything we, busy as we are with material things, have created. Through luck and abundant natural resources we’ve become immensely wealthy—not through any particular effort on our part yet we pat ourselves on the back and think we’re God’s elect.”
Meekins was happy in finding an opponent who gave him opportunity to show the discovery he had made, even though the thing he had discovered had been in existence several thousands of years. Mimi had sat without speaking, glad to see Jimmie aroused from his habitual complacency, glad to hear Meekins confirm and make more concrete some of her own vague dissatisfaction.
“It seems to me you’ve both left out the worst thing of all in our civilization,” she remarked. They turned to her, apologetically. They had been so absorbed in the contest of opinions, they had almost forgotten her.
“All the things you’ve mentioned as faults of this civilization of ours aren’t so terrible in themselves. In time we might see them and take steps to rectify them. But the terrible thing to me is that though we’ve developed machines for giving us comfort we’ve devised at the same time machines for destruction in war, and that will wipe us all out and leave our civilization just an empty, deserted thing for them to discover a few thousand years from now—just like we’re digging up Tutankhamen’s tomb now—”
“I was reading a book by a man named Stoddard the other day—” Jimmie interrupted her, but Meekins snorted him into silence.