A great division among the American people has begun–gradually, slowly–to take shape: not between Republicans and Democrats, and not between “conservatives” and “liberals,” but between people who are still unthinking believers in technology and in economic determinism and people who are not.  The non-believers may or may not be conscious or convinced traditionalists: but they are men and women who have begun not only to question but, here and there, to oppose publicly the increasing pouring of cement over the land, the increasing inflation of automobile traffic of every kind, the increasing acceptance of noisome machinery ruling their lives.  Compared with this division of the present “debates” about taxes and rates and political campaigns are nothing but ephemeral froth blowing here and there on little waves, atop the great oceanic tides of history.  That the present proponents of unending technological “progress” call themselves “conservatives” is but another example of the degeneration of political and social language. ~John Lukacs, At the End of an Age

George Grant likewise noted in his writings the absurdity of calling defenders of technological, progressive empire conservatives.  He also had some choice words for friends of “creative destruction” in Technology and Empire:

These days when we are told in North America that capitalism is conservative, we should remember that capitalism was the great dissolvent of the traditional virtues and that its greatest philosophers, Hobbes and Locke, Smith and Hume, were Britishers.  In the appeal to capitalism as the tradition it is forgotten that the capitalist philosophers dissolved all ideas of the sacred as standing in the way of the emancipation of greed.  For example, the criticism of any knowable teleology by Hume not only helped to liberate men to the new natural science, but also liberated them from knowledge of any purposes which transcended the economically rational.

I submit that this emancipation and liberation and the unchecked cement-pouring and exaltation of “growth” are all part of the same process, and all require the same opposition.