The rise and rise of western civilization

From agrarian to industrial to digital, how our technologies shape humanity

The following post is a reprint from my previous blog, Positively Flummoxed (and yes, that’s another Hobbit reference). Just how have our technological revolutions marked shifts in our conception of society, humanity and reality itself? Here are my thoughts:

First, me

I was born in 1969.

On July 20th, when I am eight days old, Neil Armstrong becomes the first human being to set foot on the moon. He manually pilots the Eagle past strewn boulders, amid the sounding of alarms, to land in the Sea of Tranquility with 30 seconds worth of fuel to spare. 240 thousand miles away, his voice reaches through the television sets of half a billion people, including ours, to proclaim: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

I was born straddling two worlds.

I have heard it said that context is decisive. I take this to mean that all our impressions of reality — the world we see and touch, the thoughts that occupy our minds, the feelings that swell our hearts — do not exist absolutely, in and of themselves. They are manifestations of deeper premises. It is not just that context is the lens through which we see the world, nor that context shapes content, but that together they form a discrete whole. They are, quite literally, one. It follows, then, that all creation happens not at the level of content, through a change of circumstance, but perceptually, through the shifting of context.

Armstrong later said, of seeing the earth from space, “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

He had experienced a shift in context.

The Western Civ class some of us slept through

I am not the first person to observe that technological revolutions transform our perceptions of reality, our values, and our understanding of what it is to be human. Consider, in admittedly broad strokes, the evolution of Western civilization.

Feudal, agrarian societies experienced life as cyclical, like the seasons, and reality as immutable, fixed in a hierarchy between peasant and God. One did not rise above their station. Authority was conferred by one’s position in the hierarchy, which was codified in scripture and administered through the church and feudal state. Morality was quite literally written in stone, but its import could only be reached by resort to the hierarchy’s interpreters: the priests. The dominant metaphor was world as organism, in which each organ must fulfill its function for the whole to survive. Wealth was land; conquest was its agent; God was a king.

The industrial revolution introduced the idea of progress, of unlimited, directional, linear growth. The value of the natural world, and that of a human life, were reinterpreted in terms of their utilitarian value, as were the norms and morals of the time. The end justified the means; the exploitation of resources became an end in itself, and its own justification. The fixed, centralized hierarchy, validated by a universally accepted script, was replaced by a Darwinian hierarchy in which the winners were presumed to be the fittest. Predestination was reinterpreted as self-determination, and yet the rich still enjoyed the whiff of divine approval. Rationality usurped God; and the dominant metaphor was world as machine, hypothetically knowable, if one only had the blueprint. Wealth was capital; competition was its agent; reason was God.

And the digital age? No longer fixed, nor even linear, time and space proceed exponentially; shifts are immediate and tectonic. One image, one statement, may intersect with unknown variables to produce wholesale changes in the global mindset. Experience, divorced from both natural cycles and indeed physical reality, is mediated; one knows what one thinks, feels, and is through the process of packaging it for others. Form defines substance; the message is the meal. Gratification is instantaneous, stripped of both time and effort. The power structure is again subverted; authority is now conferred by influence. Self-determination is reinterpreted as self-invention. In this new game, perception trumps factual reality, and truth itself becomes irrelevant. Fame, be it notorious or meritorious, is its own accomplishment, stripped, like gratification, of its underpinnings. Knowledge is global; mystery, like God, is dead. The dominant metaphor is world as, not computer, but the computed. It is world as soundbite, world as meme. Wealth is display, influence its agent, and God is a new kind of machine, with digital, rather than analog, capacities.

A wide-open world in which everything is up for grabs, everything is at stake, and everything is possible, for better or for worse. May you live in interesting times.

The fulcrum generation

My fellow Gen X-ers may feel this shift more keenly than any other generation. We passed our formative years in analog time, before the rise of the personal computer, came of age with the internet, and entered our productive years with the smart phone, navigating realities essentially foreign to our upbringing. We have more in common with the Boomers before us, yet share sympathies with the Millennials who came after, sensing our complicity in a disaster not quite of our making. We were latch-key kids, the fulcrum generation, and if we didn’t believe in anything, it was because we sensed the old world had died, but the new one had not yet been born.

My heart still lives in the old world, even while my imagination is captured by the new. Perhaps that’s why I feel compelled to dig its treasures out of the trash bin and hold them up to the light, share them with others, chase people down the street and force them to look up from their phones. I sense there is something important to remember, even if I cannot remember quite what it is. We articulate in order to know; we share in order to have. And if I go searching for the spirit of the analog age, perhaps the search itself will be the finding. For context is decisive, or so I’ve been told.

Like Neil Armstrong, gazing at a world I’ve left behind, perhaps I will discover it for the first time.

Next time…

Hope you enjoyed this bit of food for thought. Next time I’ll share what I mean by analog and digital values, and then it’s back to unpacking observations and inquiries from my trip to Scotland.

I’m looking to grow my publication, so if you know someone else who might enjoy this post, please share it!

_{Photo attributions: From “Space Colony Art of the 1970s” NASA ID NUMBER; Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F079012-0030 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons}