Wittgenstein and TRP: Darkness Falling

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>From the biography of "Ludwig Wittgenstein The Duty of Genius," by Ray Monk, 
Chapter 24, 1st and 2nd paragraphs. While the words are mostly Monk's, he 
does an admirable job of encapsulating W.'s dark thinking.

"Wittgenstein's pessimism about the fate of humanity was not caused by the
catastrophic events that brought the Second World War to a close--as we have 
seen, it has    a much longer history; but those events seemed to reinforce 
in
him the certitude of a long-held conviction that mankind was headed for
disaster. The mechanical means of killing people that had been employed, and 
the fearsome displays of technological might that had been witnessed--the
fire-bombs at Dresden, the gas-ovens of the concentration camps, the atomic
bombs unleashed on Japan--established powerfully and finally that 'science 
and industry do decide wars'. And this seemed further to convince him in his
apocalyptic view that the end of mankind was the consequence of replacing
the spirit with the machine, of turning away from God and placing our trust
in scientific 'progress'.... [I do not think there is sufficient evidence to
support the notion that LW was particularly religious]....

...His notebooks of the post-war years abound with reflections of this sort.
A picture that intruded upon him, he wrote, was of our civilization,
'cheaply wrapped in cellophane, and isolated from everything great, from 
God, as it were.' The houses, cars, other trappings of our environment
struck him as 'separating man from his origins, from what is lofty and
eternal, etc. It was as though life itself was coming to an end, suffocated
by the trappings of our industrial age."

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