Word: emerson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first step is to delete the word suddenly from that last sentence. For this giant social brain has been taking shape, and hastening change, for a long, long time. Not just since Emerson's day, when the telegraph--sometimes called the "Victorian Internet"--made long-distance contact instantaneous, but since the very dawn of the human experience. For tens of thousands of years, technology has been drawing humanity toward the epic, culminating convergence we're now witnessing...
This fact is best seen from a perspective that flourished more than a century ago, as Emerson was fading from the intellectual scene. In the wake of Darwin's theory of natural selection, some anthropologists started viewing all human culture--music, technology, religion, whatever--as something that evolves rather as plants and animals evolve. "In the mental sphere the struggle for existence is not less fierce than in the physical," observed the British anthropologist Sir James Frazer. "In the end the better ideas carry...
...starters, if you equate nature with beauty--as Emerson and other transcendentalists tended to--then there is a kind of beauty in the unfolding of technology. It is a process of natural evolution, and may deserve the tribute that Darwin paid to organic evolution: "There is grandeur in this view of life...
...than a phone call is? And if so, why am I letting e-mail crowd out my phone calls?) There is indeed the sense sometimes that, like neurons, we subordinate ourselves to the efficiency of the larger whole--that technology wins in the end, that culture trumps biology. As Emerson put it, "There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled,--Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking...
...free to use the technology however we want, even if it takes real effort, inspired by a touch of resentment toward our would-be technological master. We can in theory follow Emerson's advice: "Let man serve law for man; Live for friendship, live for love." Maybe all along it was the destiny of our species to be enmeshed in a web that would give us the option to exercise either amity or enmity over unprecedented distance, with unprecedented power. There are worse fates than to have a choice like that...