The danger most immediately to be feared in "technological progress" is the degradation and obselescence of the body. Implicit in the technological revolution from the beginning has been a new version of the old dualism, one always destructive, and now more destructive than ever. For many centuries, there have been people who looked upon the body, as upon the natural world, as an encumbrance of the soul, and so have hated the body, as they have hated the natural world, and longed to be free of it. They have seen the body as intolerably imperfect by spiritual standards. More recently, since the beginning of the technological revolution, more and more people have looked upon the body, along with the rest of the natural creation, as intolerably imperfect by mechanical standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind--the mind, that is, as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines--and so they hate it and long to be free of it. The body has limits that the machine does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea.

Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," from What Are People For?