Lately I’ve been missing the old sense of wonder and enthusiasm I once had for the future. It seems to be a natural development in the life cycle: it was easier to get excited “when I didn’t know any better,” or hadn’t “seen it all before.”
I’ve been able to get some leverage on that since reading an essay called “Awe and the Machine,” by Christine Rosen. She wrote that “we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called ‘machine-made helplessness.’” Her point of historical perspective is the experience related to us by Henry Adams upon seeing a dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition:
… to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,—scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power,—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.
By comparison, Rosen points out that “our machines are often portable and are such a central part of our everyday lives that we barely notice their presence.”
It’s a very convenient comparison in support of the essay’s sentiment.
The paragraph I excerpted above, from The Education of Henry Adams, is one of the key passages of one of the greatest non-fiction books of the 20th century, written by an intellectually ambitious historian who went out of his way to experience such moments as part of his personal quest to understand the general “motion” of history. It was written as a sequel to another book, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, about ”thirteenth-century unity” represented by cathedrals and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. That’s when culture seemed to have been unified to the same degree it had since become fragmented and pluralized. As he explained in chapter 29,
From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: “The Education of Henry Adams: a study of twentieth-century multiplicity.” With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should know better.
In other words, it doesn’t represent a normal person’s experience. People certainly marveled at machines, but few people were as transfixed as Adams. To compare Adams’s once-in-a-lifetime experience with how we feel (or don’t feel) walking walking around every day with iPods in our pockets is a bit of a stretch…
It’s important to take in a bigger picture, rather than thinking in terms of individual iPods and Kindles. The device itself can’t be separated from the larger system that distributes sound and images to it — not to mention the multitude of other services available. And consider e-books that allow us to read half of a book on one device, and when we open it up on another device it knows which page we’re on. It’s the aggregate effect that’s most impressive.
It isn’t so different from the sense of awe we experience when walking into a cathedral: what matters most is the imperceptible way that so many different elements work together: the mosaics, the sculptural relief, the structural geometry, the ornamented pillars and arches, the light coming in through the stained glass… A network of digital devices (not to mention content and users) generates a richer yet no less profound sense of awe than Adams’s dynamo a century ago, just as a cathedral generates a richer yet no less profound sense of awe than the Great Pyramids. Instead of standing outside, marveling at the direct and instantaneous experience, we have to enter into it, actively, inter-temporally, repeatedly adjusting our focus between particular components and the emergent sense of the whole.
And there’s no reason to assume we won’t see something invented this decade that’s more appropriately analogous to the dynamo. I’m roughly half the age Henry Adams was in 1900. I’ve spent years trying to understand technology — something I wouldn’t do if I wasn’t awed by it in some way. By comparison, there’s little indication that Adams had much interest in machines at all. Politics, history, and art induced most of his fascination. He was apparently more interested in geology.
A useful point of reference is Adams’s statement that in 1900 he was “almost exactly the same age” as the locomotive steam engine. He was 62 (actually younger than the locomotive). So let’s say the Internet is to us what the locomotive was to Adams. There are a few dates we could give for the Internet’s birth, but let’s be generous and say it’s 1969, when the first connection was made between two nodes on ARPANET. That puts it at 41. That means we have almost two more decades to find something that produces a sense of awe analogous to what Adams felt beside the dynamo.
(Noting that awe may or may not be diminishing, but patience certainly is.)
It might have happened to you already: e.g. while playing a massive multiplayer game with countless strangers, following “the raw feed of history” as breaking news about a big events arrives instantaneously from different directions, waking up to find your blog post or video suddenly discovered and shared by thousands of people, seeing a Wikipedia article updated within seconds of news confirming someone’s death, noticing someone you know “liked” an article you were reading (and thinking it was sheer coincidence — before you realized “the Internet knows” you know each other), etc…
None of those experiences alone is likely to generate the profoundest sense of awe, but by meditating on all of them and seeking, like Henry Adams, to understand the “forces” moving around them, eventually (if you’re lucky) we might have a profound experience on seeing something that symbolically brings it all together.
But Rosen nevertheless raises an important thought, with is very much worth addressing: something has changed about our attitude towards technology. What is it? Will it be good or bad? Does it indicate we’re stuck on a giant hedonic treadmill, looking for more, more, more, more, and more information every minute? (Numb to the power of our machines while hyper-sensitively tuned to the most mundane experiences — to use a cliché, “OMFG the best cat picture evarrrrr!!!!!!!”)
Are we in the throes of an accelerating addiction? (As Paul Graham recently asked.)
Or have we outgrown technological naivety that led people in past generations to marvel at machines and associate them with utopian possibilities? (As Virginia Postrel recently argued in a piece about Americans’ declining interest in expositions like the one Adams visited in 1900.)
By reading and thinking about history, I’ve been able to find some answers (or a sense of confidence that will suffice). Coincidentally, among my biggest influence I’d include The Education of Henry Adams, as well as much of the work of Jacques Barzun, who Rosen quoted about “machine-made helplessness.”
Barzun is critical of technology and progress — but he’s critical of everything, very nuanced, wary of utopian fallacies (e.g. lamentations about the loss of simpler, better times), and just as critical of other critics and most of what came before our time. While he expressed concern about the social effects of machine, he expressed optimism as well — or what he called “spirited pessimism”: an appreciation that “experience is neither fixed nor finished; it grows as we make it by our restless search for truth.” That is, after all, the spirit that led Henry Adams to lurk around the dynamos — not just in awe of the machines themselves but of what they represented. My assumption is that it’s the same spirit that will ultimately make the most of what we have now, and create the next great, awe-inspiring objects.
Barzun expressed that hope himself at the very end of From Dawn to Decadence, his massive study of Western cultural life from 1500 to 2000. His treatment of decadence doesn’t dwell on decline; he also emphasizes rebirth, or literally “renaissance” — not unlike the rebirth and reformation that happened five centuries ago — enabled by centuries of accumulated knowledge and artifacts, sparked by new technology (then it was the printing press) and kindled by , sparked frustration and boredom, until finally a few members of some generation decide enough is enough and start rediscovering their past “and [using] it to create a new present.”
That’s where I see us right now.
It isn’t simply that enthusiasts like me “don’t want to admit” that our machines “ensure that we directly experience less,” as Rosen claims. Whether or not it’s true, it’s a trade-off we’re willing to accept and in order to explore our unique, unprecedented advantages. And to many of us, too many awe-inspiring spectacles and direct experiences had already lost their allure — being too generic, contrived, impersonal, over-intoxicating, non-generative, and unsustainable — and we consciously turned to digital technology as an opportunity to develop positive alternatives.
Awe is something we naturally get over with experience. Having written this I’ve been reinvigorated not by generating naive enthusiasm but by coming to terms — realizing that it’s those of us who grow bored with our own time and place who create the most awe-inspiring inventions… to say nothing of the most enduring histories.
Thanks also to Arts & Letter Daily for linking to Rosen’s piece, and Alexis Madrigal for Postrel’s piece (at the promising-looking Big Questions Online).
