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Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of MeaningWilliam Van Dusen Wishard
 Excerpt from Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning From Chapter One: At the Core of the Interregnum SUMMARY: Henry Adams's view of America in 1900. The accretion of mechanical power. The Outer Discovery—an expanding universe. Einstein fudges his seminal discovery. Technological advances of the century's first decade. Hubble proves existence of other galaxies. Making contact with the beginnings of time, space and matter. From knowledge to power—a shift in the purpose of science. The Inner Discovery—Freud and the unconscious. The central dynamic of this Interregnum period, this shift from one age to another, is growth in technical power. In 1900, no one understood this better or chronicled its significance more clearly than Henry Adams. Adams stood virtually alone among the thinkers of his generation in understanding the potential consequences of the new forces of science and technology. Indeed, he predicted the atom bomb a generation before its invention. It's impossible for us today to realize how radically life was being changed in 1900, how fundamentally space, time, tradition and belief were being reordered by the expanding forces of science and technology. Since Adams clearly saw the challenge these and other developments would pose not only to the Americans of his day, but also to the Americans of 2000, it's worth getting to know the man. Henry Adams was born in Boston in 1838 into what arguably stands as America's greatest family. For perhaps no other American family has combined a distinguished role in history with an astonishingly high level, generation after generation, of intellectual competence and achievement. Henry's great-grandfather, John Adams, was one of the four drafters of the Declaration of Independence, and he was the first vice president and second president of the United States. Henry's grandfather, John Quincy Adams, was not only senator from Massachusetts, secretary of state, and sixth president of the U.S., but he is the only American president to be elected to Congress after having served as president. For eight years following 1860, Henry Adams served as private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, who was then U.S. Minister to Great Britain. It was in this position that the wisdom and dignity of Henry's father was credited with preventing British recognition of the Confederacy during America's Civil War. The elder Adams's achievement stands as one of the great unrecognized accomplishments of American diplomacy, for English intervention might well have saved the Confederacy. Between 1869 and 1876, Henry Adams was assistant professor of history at Harvard University, where he introduced the seminar system of instruction. Like his two brothers, Henry was a prolific writer, and aside from his nine-volume The History of the United States, his two best-known books are The Education of Henry Adams, an autobiography for which he posthumously received the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, and Mont-Saint Michel and Chartres, a penetrating discussion of medieval life and culture. As a historian, Adams was absorbed with the question of the shift from the "unity" of life as represented by Chartres Cathedral and Thomas Aquinas's synthesis of Aristotle's naturalistic philosophy and Christian theology (Aquinas's Summa Theologica), to the "multiplicity" of life as shaped by the on-rushing age of electrical and mechanical power. The starting point for his concerns was the belief that, "measured by any standard . . . the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800;—the force had doubled ten times over." It would seem the Interregnum was at least visible by mid-19th century. Adams forecast the likely result of this increase in "progression" in a 1904 letter to the historian Henry Osborn Taylor: "The assumption of unity, which was the mark of human thought in the Middle Ages, has yielded very slowly to the proofs of complexity . . . [I]t is quite sure . . . that at the accelerated rate of progression since 1600, it will not need another century or half century [1950-2000] to turn thought upside down. Law, in that case, would disappear as theory or a priori principle and give place to force. Morality would become police. Explosives would reach cosmic violence. Disintegration would overcome integration." [Emphasis added] In 1905, Adams wrote The Education of Henry Adams, an autobiography written in the third person and written for a select Boston readership rather than for the general public. In his autobiography Adams expressed concern that proliferating scientific knowledge was extending the horizons of man's technical power more rapidly than the pace of man's ethics. In Adams's view, cosmic power coupled with moral nihilism led inevitably to disintegration. Thus he sensed that the world in which he spent his life was in such flux as to make the remarkable education he had received obsolete. Almost each day, he wrote, he awoke in an altered world. In a concluding chapter titled "A Law of Acceleration", Adams wrote: Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom . . . the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently coercive. [Holocaust and Hiroshima] The movement from unity to multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social mind [emphasis added] At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. Henry Adams's concern about the expanded degrees of power being placed in humanity's hands was expressed just at the moment in history when science was uncovering the formulae for the greatest expansion of power ever achieved. Just consider: In 1900, Max Planck announced the first steps toward the formulation of quantum theory, which is the basis for today's information technologies. In 1903, the Wright brothers inaugurated the age of flight. In 1905, the year Adams wrote The Education of Henry Adams, Albert Einstein published the Special Theory of Relativity, which determined that space and time are relative, rather than absolute, in terms of measurement. There is no universal time. Time and space are relative to each of us, that is, to our place and speed. This was vastly different from Newton's view of time and space as forming an absolute framework. The Special Theory went on to establish the law of mass-energy equivalence, eventually seen as the theoretical starting point for development of the atom bomb. As if that weren't enough for one year, Einstein also published the Browian theory of motion and the photon theory of light. In one year, Einstein established relativity as the understanding of the world not as events but as relations. Planck and Einstein represented the Himalayan heights of scientific discovery. But during the first decade of the 20th century, new scientific and technological developments were exploded in every field of research. Rutherford's theory of the atom, the submarine, the helicopter, the transatlantic telegraphic radio transmission, the arc generator, radiation pressure of light, high-voltage ignition for internal combustion engines, the electric locomotive, the ultra-microscope, the dirigible, the gyroscopic compass, the Geiger counter, the first practical photoelectric cell, the vacuum tube, artificial insemination, stainless steel, the directional radio antenna, the first artificial human joint, the ultraviolet lamp, superconductivity in mercury, the first telegraphic transmission of photographs, color photography, the technique for rejoining severed blood vessels, the electrocardiograph, the first railroad tunnel under the Hudson River—these developments and many more were placing in human hands scientific powers that would make changes in man's internal and external worlds never before envisioned even by the greatest minds of earlier centuries. A fundamental change in the character and meaning of human existence was taking place. Science was no longer simply interested in knowledge for the sake of knowledge; it now sought knowledge for the sake of power. As the great British art critic Kenneth Clark wrote, "From the time of Einstein, Niels Bohr and the Cavendish Laboratory, science no longer existed to serve human needs, but in its own right." What earlier eras had considered to be "God-like" powers were now being placed in human hands. Prometheus and Faust, the giant shadow figures of Western history, now walked the Earth. This new attitude had been foreshadowed in Christopher Marlowe's Faust (c. 1588): O what a world of profit and delight, With the onset of the 20th century, knowledge and power were expanding faster than were the moral capacities needed to control their consequences. This trend was to become the central theme and contradiction of the 20th century. What seemed dimly apparent to only a few was the reality that knowing more about the laws of nature, an increase in power over nature, demands a corresponding increase in integrity and wisdom. The heart of wisdom is self-knowledge, insight into one's own nature with all its good and evil. Thus the more man learns about the laws of nature, the more he must become aware of his own nature if he is to survive the destructive potential of his new powers. Henry Adams wrote that it would take a "new social mind" to cope with such enlarged degrees of power. Einstein echoed Adams when he wrote: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." Adams and Einstein seemed to be calling for awareness commensurate with the new powers being placed in man's hands in the 20th century. And who should know better than Albert Einstein? Discovering the Universe Just as early 20th century physics was yielding nature's secrets of the micro, so also did nature reveal new mysteries of the macro. From 3500 BC—when the Mesopotamians first developed elementary astronomy—up through the Greeks and Aristotle, on through Copernicus in the 16th century and Newton in the 17th century, right up until 1914, everyone thought we lived in a closed universe. The dimensions of the universe were seen as fixed and static. Not only that, the Milky Way was thought to be the only galaxy in existence. Then, in 1914, an extraordinary episode took place which Brian Swimme describes in his book, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. In 1914, as the clouds of World War I were gathering over Europe, Albert Einstein was the director of theoretical physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Three months after war broke out, Einstein did something which, in the longer sweep of history, had a greater effect on humanity than did the war. He articulated the gravitational dynamics of the universe in the form of his field equations. After four years of research, he created his General Theory of Relativity. To the layperson, those last two sentences don't mean much. But their actual significance is that, in developing the General Theory, Einstein's equations not only showed gravitation as a determinator of the curvature of the space-time continuum, but the equations also refuted four thousand years of accepted belief about the nature of the universe. His field equations were telling him that the universe is expanding in all directions. An expanding universe! A completely new scientific insight. Aristotle hadn't known it. Nor had Copernicus, Galileo or Newton. Einstein himself had lived his whole life believing the universe to be an unchanging space, a closed system, a vast and fixed place. Yet here he was writing down equations that were telling him that Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, the greatest scientific minds in history, had accepted an interpretation of the universe that was false. His equations were telling him that space was expanding in all directions, that it is infinite! Einstein's field equations stood conventional scientific belief on its head. If Einstein's equations were proved accurate—and he insisted on verifying his equations by three tests which he devised, and which were completed by 1923—it would smash the conclusions of history's greatest minds. It would be a change in the human view of ourselves and our place in the universe that was at least as great, if not greater, than when Copernicus told us in 1543, "Sorry, folks, the sun doesn't circle the earth. It's the other way around." To stand against the revered knowledge of the greatest minds of history required extraordinary courage, even for Einstein. Remember, in 1914 he had not yet been accepted as one of the great scientific geniuses of history. He was only 35 years old and still seeking his place in a competitive scientific community. And so it was that Albert Einstein, having made one of the seminal discoveries of history, doctored his findings. He could not bring himself to announce to the world the full significance of his discovery. He included in his field equations something known as the "cosmological constant," which left intact the effects of gravity on space-time, but which hid the deeper truth of his findings and preserved the concept of a static universe. Other scientists, however, were hard at work on the same questions that so absorbed Einstein. In 1917, while Harlow Shapley estimated the size of the Milky Way, a Dutch astronomer discovered that it takes 250 million years for our solar system to travel once around the circumference of the Milky Way. In 1924, Edwin Hubble proved the existence of other galaxies. For the whole history of the human race—Hammurabi, Plato, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln, Marx, Edison—not one of them knew what we know today; no one knew until 1924 that galaxies other than our Milky Way were in existence. (Even as late as 1950, we could identify only two galaxies. We now know there are trillions.) Hubble finally brought Einstein to the giant Mount Palomar telescope in California to view the cosmos for himself. It was then that Einstein knew: Yes, his field equations of a decade earlier had been correct. The universe is, in fact, a dynamic, expanding phenomenon. To visualize the universe Einstein, Hubble and others had discovered, picture yourself blowing up a black balloon that is covered with many small white dots. The larger the balloon expands, the further apart become the dots. That is what is happening to our universe. The discoveries made by Einstein, Hubble and a host of other scientists in the first half of the 20th century were enlarged and confirmed in succeeding decades. Hubble's confirmation of an expanding universe answered the question people have had since earliest history about how the universe began, a question which is at the heart of every religion. Hubble's theory became the basis of the view that the universe was created by a huge explosion, and that the galaxies are the debris flying in all directions. This hypothesis was supported in 1927 by Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian who proposed that the universe had started by the explosion of a "primeval atom"—the concentration of all the mass of the universe in an extremely small space. This explosion eventually became known as the Big Bang. The strongest confirmation of the Big Bang theory came in late 1965. Two Bell Telephone physicists, Arno H. Pensias and Robert W. Wilson, discovered cosmic background radiation. As Brian Swimme writes, "Here was the dim glow left over from the eruption of the universe at the beginning of time. Penzias and Wilson captured the photons—the particles of light—that had been set in motion fifteen billion years ago when the universe erupted into existence." "When the universe erupted into existence." In other words, in the 20th century, the human race appears to have made contact with the beginnings of time, space and matter. Make contact with the beginnings of time space and matter. That is a thought that is almost beyond comprehension, and we will be decades in absorbing its significance. For it raises the question of what was there before time. In what environment (if any) did space emerge? What was the nature of the Nothingness out of which time, space and matter exploded? We have arrived at the outer edge of human understanding. The Inner Discovery While Einstein and others were probing the essence of matter and the universe, Sigmund Freud was probing the core of the human mind. Freud's publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 (the first edition sold only 351 copies) represents the discovery of the unconscious mind as an empirical reality. Freud postulated that the phenomenology of the psyche contains more than simply the measurable facts of the natural sciences; it embraces the mystery of the mind. He moved this investigation from an earlier "suggestion theory" (hypnosis, etc.), to the demand that the cause of emotional disturbance be made conscious, a practice which became the basis of most forms of psychotherapy. Today, however, Freud is primarily remembered for his theory of sexual repression as the sole cause of neurosis, a theory which has been discarded even by Freud's own adherents. Freud's contemporary importance would seem to be indicated by a 1997 Harvard Magazine article reporting that a computer search of Harvard University's course catalogs for classes mentioning either Freud or psychoanalysis turned up nothing in the psychology department, but did turn up courses in literature (Freud is considered one of the 20th century's greatest writers of German prose). Freud's long-term impact on Western civilization may actually have been more in the realm of affecting established bonds of morality and religious belief than in developing psychological health. But Freud represented something quite deep taking place in the inner life of Western man. Ever since Descartes in the mid-1600s depreciated man's subjective life as irrelevant to external reality, the Western emphasis (with exceptions) has been on man's external estate—on the structure and laws of nature and society. From the Enlightenment to Hegel to Marx and Weber, the primary question asked was: "How do we discern and control the laws of nature, and apply what is learned to the shaping of society for the betterment of man?" Freud, on the other hand, represented a turning inward. With a growing inward orientation, America and the West once again faced the age-old subjective questions of human existence—individual meaning and purpose and their relation to freedom. "A Spool on Which to Wind the Thread of History" This, then, is the backdrop against which the Interregnum unfolded in the early decades of the 20th century. An infinite increase in automated power which has introduced technical possibilities only dreamed of in earlier ages; a new cosmological orientation that is affecting our ideas of who we are, where we came from and what our destiny might be; and an understanding of the deepest reaches of man's inner world that sheds fresh perspective on all the world's myths and religions. Historians are prone to seek the single cause of historical development. Some would say it's geography. Some say it's chance. Others say it's the Great Man theory. Darwin said it is biological evolution; Marx thought it to be dialectical materialism, the class struggle and economic causation. For Toynbee it was "challenge and response." There is, of course, no "single cause" of historical development. History is a tapestry, woven with many threads. And no one knew this better than Henry Adams. Nevertheless, Adams reached for some context within which to assess historical development. As he wrote, "One sought no absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it." For Adams, that spool was the "accretion of new forces, chemical and mechanical . . ." He wrote of how the compass, gunpowder, telescope, printing press, and microscope had caused the accumulation of new forces to grow in volume "until they acquired sufficient mass to take the place of the old religious science, substituting their attraction for the attraction of the Civitas Dei . . ." In more contemporary parlance, Adams might say that the vision of Bill Gates has replaced the vision of St. Augustine. But the "accretion of new forces" only partially serves the function of a "spool on which to wind the thread of history." For the dynamic that lies behind the accretion of new forces is the never-ending pursuit of an increase in knowledge. It is the expansion of knowledge, whether by accident or design, that has propelled the development of mechanical power at ever-increasing orders of magnitude. This expansion of knowledge is first and foremost the product of man's curiosity, man's insatiable desire to know and to understand. The source of this desire to know is, in part, a reflection of his quest for the infinite in life. There is something about man that constantly reaches out for wider dimensions of knowing and being, and the story of the Interregnum is the chronicle of how that pursuit has evolved in all its wonder, in all its terror. Find Items On Similar Subjects  Personal Development
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