What I love about this is how you simultaneously hold an appreciation for the marvels of our modern existence and a clear-eyed observation of the existential risk embodied within it. Thank you for not condemning modernity. At the same time, and more important in my view, thank you for seeing it clearly and articulating the challenges we face. This is a gift.
Well said Peter, and thank you Brian for another excellent article. If there is one thing that I've learnt from Archaeology it is the importance of taking the long view which this article brilliantly does. Perhaps a future article might explore the "longue duree" trends on which our short term gyrations pivot ?
Another difference I want to add (that's tied to trends you've already addressed): In the past few generations, music went from being something that nearly everyone participated making in to something that only a tiny minority of people participate in making, but that it's much easier than it was in the past to passively consume.
You note the bar in Togo playing the Pussycat Dolls--an example of this passive consumption of homogenized global pop culture. But if we go back to 1900, basically everyone in Togo--and London, and West Virginia, and everywhere else--makes music with other people on a very regular basis. There's no real way of sharing recorded versions of this music yet, which keeps Togo's music very distinct from West Virginia's; but also since it's passed down mainly orally and through practice, songs do evolve over time.
I think it's easy for us moderns to forget what a universal experience music-making was in the past, because we're so used to it being something for experts like, say, the Pussycat Dolls, and we assume other people were like we are now, except that maybe just the wealthiest people got to see performances. But actually, just normal people were singing all the time at work and at worship, and figuring out how to make new musical instruments with whatever was available. This is a once-universal avenue of creativity we've largely cut ourselves off from.
Music-making is also a previously near-universal means of community-building. Playing/singing music with other people has psychological effects that tie people together in a way I never understood until I took up an instrument and started playing with others as an adult. Speaking for myself, a former appreciator of music I passively consumed and current producer of (not nearly as polished!) music with my friends, I think that moderns who merely listen to music are profoundly ignorant of what we gave up when we stopped making music together.
Great point -- this is certainly true for storytelling, too, and plenty of other communal activities which are now outsourced to specialists as we become ever-more narrow in our activities.
... as we become ever-more narrow in our activities.
We become (ever-more) comfortable in our narrowness.
(Why not, after all, leave 'it' to the experts, the specialists: all of the music-making, the writing, the poetry, the art, the manufacturing of our societies and culture...?
When we participate in the above we are practicing at being human. Getting better at it, hopefully. Also, we are sharing something- a human activity that improves the individual and the collective.)
Excellent point. When I read “I typed a few keystrokes on a magic device that allowed me to listen to virtually any music recorded, anywhere on the planet, in the last century or so” my first thought was how extraordinary it is that we can record music in the first place.
I turn 77 this month and so am among the oldest living humans comprising your three current generations. As a woman I kept noticing things other than you, as a man, have noticed changing (all of which I've also noticed but not as intimately). Most fall into the category of labor saving devices or technologies, which all humans have been party to, and which is not much discussed in your piece. I cook with gas and electricity, so I don't have to chop down trees, stack and season wood, load up and keep feeding an oven or a stove. Clean safe water runs out of three indoor and one outdoor taps in my little retirement home. Compare this to walking to and from the town well. I have two robot vacuumn cleaners, an Instapot, and any number of permanent pressed items of clothing. If I do have to iron, it is seldom and I have an electric, not a coal holding iron. I can have most things I need delivered at low to no cost, eliminating a lot of time and energy formerly spent 'hunting and gathering' food and other household necessities. I have a dozen or so other gadgets that have reduced household maintenance chores by at least 50% in terms of time and effort. I even have an electric toothbrush to maintain my dental health, and so have all my teeth, whereas my grandmother had a full set of dentures in her sixties. All this is not as earth shattering as the internet in its effects, but in terms of the mundane quality of life, has really made a difference for those of us who still labor with our hands. Comparable changes in agriculture and some other industries have also accrued to our potential benefit.
I too thought of the profound societal changes brought about by the washing machine. It was supposed to be a labor saving device (marketed to women). Not only did it spawn a new industry for cleaning products (detergents, softeners etc), but it also made possible the idea of disposable clothing or fast fashion. Because the machine made it easy to wash clothes, women were expected to wash more often-not just ‘washing day,’ but all week long. The smell of freshly laundered clothes became the social norm since you weren’t expected to wear them for days / weeks on end before laundering. Clothes therefore wore out more quickly, so they became more cheaply made.
So a technology that was marketed to free women from toil has made this chore take up more of their time and has made it more expensive to be clothed. We likely smell better than previous generations but we are much poorer in time and wealth. Consider how much time and $$ you spend on clothing. This is an anomaly in human history for all but the 1%.
Excellent points! I do wash all the time. And I've started to think once, twice, three times before I buy anything I really don't need. And I buy used way more than I used to. It's just idiotic to fall prey to nonsensical standards of cleanliness, much less 'fashion,' which is more or less an admission that you're aping the rich. Argh. We all need to respect our 'real' as opposed to brainwashed selves.
In a hundred years will citizens get an appointment from the Ministry of Neuroscience for their psychopath screening test - a positive would disqualify you from public office. A white ball from the giant urn of possibility (perhaps).
Great post! I think your comments about estrangement from nature are spot on. I was thinking about this as I flipped on the light switch when I came home. With minimal effort on my part, the darkness was illuminated. This is extraordinary in history of humanity. But it is so easy and reliable today that I think we come to think of that artificial light as the actual new “state of nature” - seldom considering all that has gone into making it possible: scientific research, engineering, power grids, safety codes, electricians and line workers, etc. It is unsettling and disorienting when there comes the inevitable, periodic power outage: sudden darkness, the silence from the loss of the hum of the current, the storm outside. All of that can now seem “unnatural” - but that nature is what our forebears knew - beautiful and majestic, but random, capricious, often terrifying, indifferent to our individual needs, and imbedded with the truth of our mortality. The illusory power over nature that modernity provides separates us not only from that nature but also from the wisdom of our forebears who understood that human existence is ultimately precarious and subject to the vicissitudes of nature . S*** happens. But now, believing the illusion that we fundamentally control nature, some of us blame our institutions: government, science, education, etc. for the fact that the world is not perfect; threatening the very things that have mitigated the harshness of human existence. Maturity has always entailed coming to the realization that ultimately the world is not about us individually and that decent human life depends on us acting responsibly within communities. I worry that the relative ease of modern existence has blinded us to that.
This excellent summary leaves me in grief because with everything laid out here we still can't execute simple task like kindness, sharing, compassion, tolerance, respect, or cooperation.
When I was younger (I'm now nearly 79) I often thought about all the changes that my Mom, born in 1911 had seen, from the Model T to the 747, the common use of telephones and TV...but looking at this article I am led to reflect on the changes during my own life...a simple one from a manual typewriter to word processing, and now AI written essays (I thank God I am no longer a classroom teacher trying to deal with that! Thank you, Brian, for such a reflective and thought provoking piece!
This article echoes Isaac Asimov’s point in his 1989 presentation to the Humanist Society: our technological advancement has given us the ability to write our own history.
Around 1995 (when use of html lead to browsers), we changed from making copies using atoms to using bits. So it became trivial to make a million copies, easy to comment/criticize on anything, and steal records which use to on paper and now where in bits on a disk. The world became very noisy and privacy disappeared.
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction by Walter Benjamin lives in my head rent free—- not because he was concerned about the implications of photography and film as means for propaganda and influence and brainwashing but because he was concerned with how altering perception of things disrupts human ritual based behaviors and meaning making. But thankfully, neuroaesthetics is a new field that’ll help us maybe remember. I doubt we’ll be able to rebuild or preserve brain structures generationally… considering photography/film is child’s play compared to AI and data mining population behavioral data en masse but, who knows. I’ve been in and out of Plato’s cave so many times you gotta unmask some puppeteers for posterity while we’re here yanno? (And yes, this was all about how we conceptualize consciousness and the implications of how fragmented that has become.) lol 🙃
You illuminate our situation and remind us where we have been and the paths that vector our origins and perhaps our destinations. Thank you for your brilliant and resonant writing!
In a relatively short span of time I've gone from using my Dietzgen Polymath Multiplex Decimal
trig Type Log Log Rule to simply asking Claude to resolve my mathmatical inquiry. The physical process of moving a piece of clear glass with a thin line etched down the center while simultaneously sliding the middle section and finding an ~ answer was, and is, a marvel to me. At times I wonder "If I don't think, therefore what am I" - not much.
So many different parts of this essay resonate with me!
Particularly "climate." Recently I traveled from my home in So Cal to the Florida keys and felt the intense joy that came with the humidity- and the vagaries of weather, then back into the climate controlled hotel rooms and shops. That forced me to realized how intent we are in cutting ourselves off from the natural, exterior world. 25 years ago teaching in a public school portable, with just a sliver of high up windows letting natural light in; currently teaching three classes at a university, two of which have no windows whatsoever. And so many, many building blind to taking advantage of the natural beauty around us. I would grumble that no restaurant or cafe had a view of the beautiful San Gabriel mountains.
I'm more worried about human arrogance/ignorance/apathy than artificial intelligence or bioengineering. Some of humanity's gifted observers and problem solvers have created an "irreversible timeline of progress" in the realms of materials and technology. I wish we had the same "irreversible timeline of progress" in the realm of empathy and governance. What new tools of democracy can we create to avoid the reoccurrence of our present failures? (Amendments? Restructuring? Instant consequences for lawless presidential edicts?)
Yep, I'm still hoping for better tools for world peace.
What I love about this is how you simultaneously hold an appreciation for the marvels of our modern existence and a clear-eyed observation of the existential risk embodied within it. Thank you for not condemning modernity. At the same time, and more important in my view, thank you for seeing it clearly and articulating the challenges we face. This is a gift.
Thank you, Peter! Awe-inspiring, disorienting, and scary all at once.
Well said Peter, and thank you Brian for another excellent article. If there is one thing that I've learnt from Archaeology it is the importance of taking the long view which this article brilliantly does. Perhaps a future article might explore the "longue duree" trends on which our short term gyrations pivot ?
Awesome post!
Another difference I want to add (that's tied to trends you've already addressed): In the past few generations, music went from being something that nearly everyone participated making in to something that only a tiny minority of people participate in making, but that it's much easier than it was in the past to passively consume.
You note the bar in Togo playing the Pussycat Dolls--an example of this passive consumption of homogenized global pop culture. But if we go back to 1900, basically everyone in Togo--and London, and West Virginia, and everywhere else--makes music with other people on a very regular basis. There's no real way of sharing recorded versions of this music yet, which keeps Togo's music very distinct from West Virginia's; but also since it's passed down mainly orally and through practice, songs do evolve over time.
I think it's easy for us moderns to forget what a universal experience music-making was in the past, because we're so used to it being something for experts like, say, the Pussycat Dolls, and we assume other people were like we are now, except that maybe just the wealthiest people got to see performances. But actually, just normal people were singing all the time at work and at worship, and figuring out how to make new musical instruments with whatever was available. This is a once-universal avenue of creativity we've largely cut ourselves off from.
Music-making is also a previously near-universal means of community-building. Playing/singing music with other people has psychological effects that tie people together in a way I never understood until I took up an instrument and started playing with others as an adult. Speaking for myself, a former appreciator of music I passively consumed and current producer of (not nearly as polished!) music with my friends, I think that moderns who merely listen to music are profoundly ignorant of what we gave up when we stopped making music together.
Great point -- this is certainly true for storytelling, too, and plenty of other communal activities which are now outsourced to specialists as we become ever-more narrow in our activities.
... as we become ever-more narrow in our activities.
We become (ever-more) comfortable in our narrowness.
(Why not, after all, leave 'it' to the experts, the specialists: all of the music-making, the writing, the poetry, the art, the manufacturing of our societies and culture...?
When we participate in the above we are practicing at being human. Getting better at it, hopefully. Also, we are sharing something- a human activity that improves the individual and the collective.)
Excellent point. When I read “I typed a few keystrokes on a magic device that allowed me to listen to virtually any music recorded, anywhere on the planet, in the last century or so” my first thought was how extraordinary it is that we can record music in the first place.
I turn 77 this month and so am among the oldest living humans comprising your three current generations. As a woman I kept noticing things other than you, as a man, have noticed changing (all of which I've also noticed but not as intimately). Most fall into the category of labor saving devices or technologies, which all humans have been party to, and which is not much discussed in your piece. I cook with gas and electricity, so I don't have to chop down trees, stack and season wood, load up and keep feeding an oven or a stove. Clean safe water runs out of three indoor and one outdoor taps in my little retirement home. Compare this to walking to and from the town well. I have two robot vacuumn cleaners, an Instapot, and any number of permanent pressed items of clothing. If I do have to iron, it is seldom and I have an electric, not a coal holding iron. I can have most things I need delivered at low to no cost, eliminating a lot of time and energy formerly spent 'hunting and gathering' food and other household necessities. I have a dozen or so other gadgets that have reduced household maintenance chores by at least 50% in terms of time and effort. I even have an electric toothbrush to maintain my dental health, and so have all my teeth, whereas my grandmother had a full set of dentures in her sixties. All this is not as earth shattering as the internet in its effects, but in terms of the mundane quality of life, has really made a difference for those of us who still labor with our hands. Comparable changes in agriculture and some other industries have also accrued to our potential benefit.
I too thought of the profound societal changes brought about by the washing machine. It was supposed to be a labor saving device (marketed to women). Not only did it spawn a new industry for cleaning products (detergents, softeners etc), but it also made possible the idea of disposable clothing or fast fashion. Because the machine made it easy to wash clothes, women were expected to wash more often-not just ‘washing day,’ but all week long. The smell of freshly laundered clothes became the social norm since you weren’t expected to wear them for days / weeks on end before laundering. Clothes therefore wore out more quickly, so they became more cheaply made.
So a technology that was marketed to free women from toil has made this chore take up more of their time and has made it more expensive to be clothed. We likely smell better than previous generations but we are much poorer in time and wealth. Consider how much time and $$ you spend on clothing. This is an anomaly in human history for all but the 1%.
Excellent points! I do wash all the time. And I've started to think once, twice, three times before I buy anything I really don't need. And I buy used way more than I used to. It's just idiotic to fall prey to nonsensical standards of cleanliness, much less 'fashion,' which is more or less an admission that you're aping the rich. Argh. We all need to respect our 'real' as opposed to brainwashed selves.
“I didn’t know we ‘ad a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.”
"How do you know he's a king?
"He hasn't got shit on him."
In a hundred years will citizens get an appointment from the Ministry of Neuroscience for their psychopath screening test - a positive would disqualify you from public office. A white ball from the giant urn of possibility (perhaps).
This is a comment that only makes sense to someone who knows my previous writing very well. Bravo!
….and long may your writing continue.
Great post! I think your comments about estrangement from nature are spot on. I was thinking about this as I flipped on the light switch when I came home. With minimal effort on my part, the darkness was illuminated. This is extraordinary in history of humanity. But it is so easy and reliable today that I think we come to think of that artificial light as the actual new “state of nature” - seldom considering all that has gone into making it possible: scientific research, engineering, power grids, safety codes, electricians and line workers, etc. It is unsettling and disorienting when there comes the inevitable, periodic power outage: sudden darkness, the silence from the loss of the hum of the current, the storm outside. All of that can now seem “unnatural” - but that nature is what our forebears knew - beautiful and majestic, but random, capricious, often terrifying, indifferent to our individual needs, and imbedded with the truth of our mortality. The illusory power over nature that modernity provides separates us not only from that nature but also from the wisdom of our forebears who understood that human existence is ultimately precarious and subject to the vicissitudes of nature . S*** happens. But now, believing the illusion that we fundamentally control nature, some of us blame our institutions: government, science, education, etc. for the fact that the world is not perfect; threatening the very things that have mitigated the harshness of human existence. Maturity has always entailed coming to the realization that ultimately the world is not about us individually and that decent human life depends on us acting responsibly within communities. I worry that the relative ease of modern existence has blinded us to that.
This excellent summary leaves me in grief because with everything laid out here we still can't execute simple task like kindness, sharing, compassion, tolerance, respect, or cooperation.
Your writing informs and relaxes simultaneously. Such a beautiful talent. Thank you.
What a lovely compliment -- thank you!
When I was younger (I'm now nearly 79) I often thought about all the changes that my Mom, born in 1911 had seen, from the Model T to the 747, the common use of telephones and TV...but looking at this article I am led to reflect on the changes during my own life...a simple one from a manual typewriter to word processing, and now AI written essays (I thank God I am no longer a classroom teacher trying to deal with that! Thank you, Brian, for such a reflective and thought provoking piece!
This article echoes Isaac Asimov’s point in his 1989 presentation to the Humanist Society: our technological advancement has given us the ability to write our own history.
Around 1995 (when use of html lead to browsers), we changed from making copies using atoms to using bits. So it became trivial to make a million copies, easy to comment/criticize on anything, and steal records which use to on paper and now where in bits on a disk. The world became very noisy and privacy disappeared.
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction by Walter Benjamin lives in my head rent free—- not because he was concerned about the implications of photography and film as means for propaganda and influence and brainwashing but because he was concerned with how altering perception of things disrupts human ritual based behaviors and meaning making. But thankfully, neuroaesthetics is a new field that’ll help us maybe remember. I doubt we’ll be able to rebuild or preserve brain structures generationally… considering photography/film is child’s play compared to AI and data mining population behavioral data en masse but, who knows. I’ve been in and out of Plato’s cave so many times you gotta unmask some puppeteers for posterity while we’re here yanno? (And yes, this was all about how we conceptualize consciousness and the implications of how fragmented that has become.) lol 🙃
I haven't read that - I'll check it out!
You illuminate our situation and remind us where we have been and the paths that vector our origins and perhaps our destinations. Thank you for your brilliant and resonant writing!
In a relatively short span of time I've gone from using my Dietzgen Polymath Multiplex Decimal
trig Type Log Log Rule to simply asking Claude to resolve my mathmatical inquiry. The physical process of moving a piece of clear glass with a thin line etched down the center while simultaneously sliding the middle section and finding an ~ answer was, and is, a marvel to me. At times I wonder "If I don't think, therefore what am I" - not much.
So many different parts of this essay resonate with me!
Particularly "climate." Recently I traveled from my home in So Cal to the Florida keys and felt the intense joy that came with the humidity- and the vagaries of weather, then back into the climate controlled hotel rooms and shops. That forced me to realized how intent we are in cutting ourselves off from the natural, exterior world. 25 years ago teaching in a public school portable, with just a sliver of high up windows letting natural light in; currently teaching three classes at a university, two of which have no windows whatsoever. And so many, many building blind to taking advantage of the natural beauty around us. I would grumble that no restaurant or cafe had a view of the beautiful San Gabriel mountains.
In any case, thank you for this.
I'm more worried about human arrogance/ignorance/apathy than artificial intelligence or bioengineering. Some of humanity's gifted observers and problem solvers have created an "irreversible timeline of progress" in the realms of materials and technology. I wish we had the same "irreversible timeline of progress" in the realm of empathy and governance. What new tools of democracy can we create to avoid the reoccurrence of our present failures? (Amendments? Restructuring? Instant consequences for lawless presidential edicts?)
Yep, I'm still hoping for better tools for world peace.
Sortition.
Given what we've got, why not? 😉