Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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So where does this cosmic perspective leave us? Inspired? Depressed? As helpless in the face of technology's onslaught as ever?
For 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...
Indeed, if you believe, as I do, that intelligent, culture-generating animals were a likely outcome of biological evolution, then you might even say the first great evolutionary process naturally spawned the second, which has since taken over as the great molder of the material world. In this view, the...
This aura of inexorability has led some people to wax poetic about cosmic purpose. The Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing at midcentury, long before the Internet, nonetheless discerned a "thinking envelope of the earth" that he dubbed the "noosphere." This was the divinely ordained outcome of the two...
And, for all the benefits that keep us plugging into the Internet, it can be alienating. (Is it just me, or is e-mail a much poorer substitute for face-to-face contact than a phone call is? And if so, why am I letting e-mail crowd out my...