Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dilemma: The Conflict of Technology and Human Values

Throughout his life, Lindbergh’s value structure, interests, and activities shifted and moved, yielding a conflict between instinct and intellect. Both its presence in his life and his readjustment of values in accordance with it are representative of his time and culture. He moved, with the twentieth century itself, from a faith in technology to a disenchantment with it and finally to a balanced resolution that synthesized the seeming oppositions of technology and the human spirit. This emphasis on a balance between technology and humanity, and Lindbergh’s belief that maintained the complementarity rather than the opposition of the two forces, finally culminated in a post-technological mysticism, a teleological worldview of science and nature as aspects of the same physical and spiritual environment.