The following Bicentennial Essay is the tenth and last in a series that has been appearing periodically, surveying how America has changed in its 200 years.
“An athlete of steel and iron with not a superfluous ounce of metal on it!” exclaimed William Dean Howells before the centerpiece of Philadelphia’s International Exhibition celebrating our nation’s 100th birthday. He was inspired to these words by the gigantic 700-ton Corliss steam engine that towered over Machinery Hall. When President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil turned the levers on May 10, 1876, a festive crowd cheered as the engine set in motion a wonderful as sortment of machines— pumping water, combing wool, spinning cotton, tearing hemp, printing newspapers, lithographing wallpaper, sewing cloth, folding envelopes, sawing logs, shaping wood, making shoes — 8,000 machines spread over 13 acres.
Others, especially visitors from abroad, were troubled by this American spectacle. “I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed,” announced the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, “by your bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?”
The monster steam engine was an appropriate symbol of the American future, but not for the reason most of the spectators suspected. The special hopes, opportunities and achievements, the fears and frustrations that marked the nation’s grandeur in its second century — and are destined to mark the century now to come — were to be even newer than visitors to the 1876 exposition could imagine. These came not from bigness but from a new kind of community. New ties would bind Americans together, would bind Americans to the larger world and would bind the world to America. I call this community the Republic of Technology.
This community of our future was not created by any assemblage of statesmen. It had no written charter, and was not to be governed by any council of ambassadors. Yet it would reach into the daily lives of citizens on all continents. In creating and shaping this community the U.S. would play the leading role.
The word Republic I use as Thomas Paine, propagandist of the American Revolution, used it in his Rights of Man, to mean “not any particular form of government” but “the matter or object for which government ought to be instituted . . . res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally translated, the public thing.” This word describes the shared public concerns of people in different nations, the community of those who share these concerns.
In carry modern times, learned men of the Western world considered themselves members of a Republic of Letters, the worldwide community of men who read one another’s books and exchanged opinions. Long after Gutenberg’s printing press had begun the process of multiplying books and encouraging the growth of literature in the languages of the marketplace, the community remained a limited one. Thomas Jefferson, for example, considered himself a citizen of that worldwide community because of what he shared with literary and scientific colleagues in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands and elsewhere. When Jefferson offered the young nation his personal library (which was to be the foundation of the Library of Congress), it contained so many foreign-language books (including numerous “atheistical” works of Voltaire and other French revolutionaries) that some members of Congress opposed its purchase. The Republic of Letters was a select community of those who shared knowledge.
Our Republic of Technology is not only more democratic but also more in the American mode. Anyone can be a citizen. Largely a creation of American civilization in the last century, this republic offers a foretaste of American life in our next century. It is open to all, because it is a community of shared experience.
Behind this new kind of sharing was the Industrial Revolution, which developed in 18th century England and spread over Europe and the New World. Power-driven technology and mass production meant large-scale imports and exports — goods carried everywhere in steam-driven freighters, in railroad freight cars, on transcontinental railway systems.
The ways of daily life, the carriages in which people rode, the foods they ate, the pots and pans in their kitchens, the clothes they wore, the nails that held together their houses, the glass for their windows — all these and thousands of other daily trivia became more alike than they had ever been before.
The weapons and tools — the rifles and pistols, the screws and wrenches, the shovels and picks — had a new uniformity, thanks to the so-called American System of Manufacturing (the system of interchangeable parts, sometimes called the Uniformity System). The telegraph and the power press and the mass-circulating newspaper brought the same information and the same images to people thousands of miles apart. Human experience for millions became more instantaneously similar than had ever been imagined possible.
This Republic of Technology has brought a new flavor to our lives, a new relation to our fellow Americans, a new relation to the whole world. Two forces of the new era have proved especially potent.
THE NEW OBSOLESCENCE. For most of human history, the norm had been continuity. Change was news. Daily-lives were governed by tradition. The most valued works were the oldest.
The great works of architecture were monuments that survived from the past. Furnishings became increasingly valuable by becoming antique. Great literature never became out of date. “Literature,” Ezra Pound observed, “is news that stays news.” The new enriched the old and was enriched by the old. Shakespeare enriched Chaucer; Shaw enriched Shakespeare. It was a world of the enduring and the durable.
The laws of our Republic of Technology are quite different.
The importance of a scientific work, as the German mathematician David Hilbert once observed, can be measured by the number of previous publications it makes superfluous to read. Scientists and technologists dare not wait for their current journals.
They must study “pre-prints” of articles and use the telephone to be sure that their work has not been made obsolete by what somebody else did this morning.
The Republic of Technology is a world of obsolescence. Our characteristic printed matter is not a deathless literary work but today’s newspaper that makes yesterday’s newspaper worthless. Old objects simply become secondhand—to be ripe for the next season’s recycling. In this world the great library is apt to seem not so much a treasurehouse as a cemetery. A Louis Sullivan building is torn down to make way for a parking garage. Progress seems to have become quick, sudden and wholesale.
Most novel of all is our changed attitude toward change. Now nations seem to be distinguished not by their heritage or their stock of monuments (what was once called their civilization), but by their pace of change. Rapidly “developing” nations are those that are most speedily obsolescing their inheritance. While it took centuries or even millenniums to build a civilization, the transformation of an “underdeveloped” nation can be accomplished in mere decades.
THE NEW CONVERGENCE. The supreme law of the Republic of Technology is convergence, the tendency for everything to become more like everything else. Now the distinction is seldom made between nations that are “civilized” and those that are “uncivilized.” Today, when we rely on the distinction between the “developed” and the “underdeveloped” or “developing” countries, we see the experience of all peoples converging. The common standard enables us to measure the rate of convergence statistically—by G.N.P., by per capita annual income and by rates of growth. Everyone, we assume, can participate in the newly shared experience. A person need not be learned, or even literate, to share the fruits of technology. While the enjoyment of printed matter is restricted to those who can read, anybody can get the message from a television screen. The converging forces of everyday experience are both sublingual and translingual. People who never could have been persuaded to read Goethe will eagerly drive a Volkswagen.
The great literature that brings some people together also builds barriers. Literary classics may nourish chauvinism and create ideologies. Wars tend to reenforce national stereotypes and to harden ideologies. When the U.S. entered World War I, its schools ceased teaching German. Beethoven and Wagner were taboo. Still, at that very moment, American military research teams were studying German technology. Today, while Indira Gandhi restricts American newsmen and American publications, she desperately tries to make the Indian technology more like the American. Technology dilutes and dissolves ideology.
In each successive modern war, the competition in technology becomes more fierce—and more effective. The splitting of the atom and the exploring of space bear witness to the stimulus of competition, the convergence of efforts, the involuntary collaboration of wartime enemies. Technology is the natural foe of nationalism.
With crushing inevitability, the advance of technology brings nations together and narrows the differences between the experiences of their people. The destruction of modern warfare tends to reduce the balance of advantage between victor and vanquished. The spectacular industrial progress of Japan and Germany after World War II was actually facilitated by the wholesale destruction of their industrial plant.
Each forward step in modern technology tends to reduce the difference between the older categories of experience. Take, for example, the once elementary distinction between transportation and communication: between moving the person and moving the message. While communication once was an inferior substitute for transportation (you had to read the account because you couldn’t get there), it is now often the preferred alternative.
The television screen (by traditional categories a mode of communication) brings together people who still remain in their separate living rooms. With the increasing congestion of city traffic, with the parking problem and the lengthened holding patterns over airports, our television screen becomes a superior way of getting there. So when it comes to public events, now you are often more there when you are here than when you are there!
Broadcasting is perhaps the most potent everyday witness to the converging powers of technology. The most democratic of all forms of public communication, broadcasting converges people, drawing them into the same experience in ways never before possible. The great levelers, broadcast messages and images, go without discrimination into the homes of rich and poor, white and black, young and old. More than 99% of American households have at least one television set. If you own a set, no admission fee is required to enter TV land and to have a front seat at all its marvels. No questions are asked, no skill is needed.
You need not even sit still or keep quiet. To enjoy what TV brings, the illiterate are just as well qualified as the educated — some would say even better qualified. Our Age of Broadcasting is a fitting climax, then, to the history of a nation whose birth certificate proclaimed that “all men are created equal” and which has aimed to bring everything to everybody
We have reaped myriad benefits as citizens of the new Republic of Technology. Our American standard of living is a familiar name for these daily blessings. Our increased longevity, the decline of epidemics, the widening of literacy, the reduced hours of labor, the widening of political participation, our house hold conveniences, the reduction of the discomforts of winter and of summer, the growth of schools and colleges and universities, the flourishing of libraries and museums, unprecedented opportunities to explore the world — all are byproducts of the New Obsolescence and the New Convergence. They have be come so familiar that they are undervalued. But some strange fruit is apt to grow in the fertile orchards of our technological progress. If we remain aware of the special risks in the com munity of our future, we will run less risk of losing these un precedented benefits that we have come to take for granted.
Here are a few of the forces at work in the Republic of Technology that will shape our American lives in the next century:
TECHNOLOGY INVENTS NEEDS AND EXPORTS PROBLEMS. We will be misled if we think that technology will be directed primarily to satisfying “demands” or “needs” or to solving recognized “problems.” There was no “demand” for the telephone, the automobile, radio or television. It is no accident that our nation — the most advanced in technology — is also the most advanced in advertising. Technology is a way of multiplying the unnecessary. And advertising is a way of persuading us that we didn’t know what we needed. Working together, technology and advertising create progress by developing theneed for the unnecessary. The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world. There wants will be created not by “human nature” or by century-old yearnings, but by technology itself.
TECHNOLOGY CREATES MOMENTUM AND IS IRREVERSIBLE.
Nothing can be uninvented. This tragicomic fact will dominate our lives as citizens of the Republic of Technology. While any device can be made obsolete, no device can be forgotten or erased from the arsenal of technology. While the currents of politics and of culture can be stopped, deflected, or even reversed, technology is irreversible. In recent years, Germany, Greece and some other countries have gone from democracy to dictatorship and back to democracy. But we cannot go back and forth be tween the kerosene lamp and the electric light. Our inability to uninvent will prove ever more troublesome as our technology proliferates and refines more and more unimagined, seemingly irrelevant wants. Driven by “needs” for the unnecessary, we remain impotent to conjure the needs away. Our Aladdin’s lamp of technology makes myriad new genii appear, but cannot make them disappear. The automobile — despite all we have learned of its diabolism — cannot be conjured away. The most we seem able to do is to make futile efforts to appease the automobile —by building parking temples on choice urban real estate and by deferring to the automobile with pedestrian overpasses and tunnels. We drive miles — and when we are there we walk miles — all for the convenience of the airplane. Our national politics is shaped more and more by the imperious demands of television. Our negotiations with the Genie of Television all seem to end in unconditional surrender. We live, and will live, in a world of increasingly involuntary commitments.
TECHNOLOGY ASSIMILATES. The Republic of Technology, ruthlessly egalitarian, will accomplish what the prophets, political philosophers and revolutionaries could not. Already it as similates times and places and peoples and things — a faithful color reproduction of the Mona Lisa, the voice and image of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Winston Churchill, or of Gandhi. You too can have a ringside seat at the World Series, at Wimbledon — or anywhere else. Without a constitutional amendment or a decision of the Supreme Court, technology forces us to equalize our experience. More than ever before, the daily experience of Americans will be created equal — or at least ever more similar.
TECHNOLOGY INSULATES AND ISOLATES. While technology seems to bring us together, it does so only by making new ways of separating us from one another. The One World of Americans in the future will be a world of 200 million private compartments. The progression from the intimately jostling horse-drawn carriage to the railroad car to the encapsulated lone automobile rider and then to the seat-belted airplane passenger who cannot converse with his seatmate because they are both wearing earphones for the recorded music; the progression from the parent reading aloud to the children, to the living theater with living audiences, to the darkened motion-picture house, to the home of private television sets, each twinkling in a different room for a different member of the family — these are the natural progressions of technology. Each of us will have his personal machine, adjusted, focused and preselected for his private taste. CB radio now has begun to provide every citizen with his own broadcasting and receiving station. Each of us will be in danger of being suffocated by our own tastes. Moreover, these devices that enlarge our sight and vision in space seem somehow to imprison us in the present. The electronic technology that reaches out instantaneously over the continents does very little to help us cross the centuries.
TECHNOLOGY UPROOTS. In this Republic of Technology the experience of the present actually uproots us and separates us from our own special time and place. For technology aims to dilute and immunize us against the peculiar chances, perils and opportunities of our natural climate, our raw landscape. The snowmobile makes a steep mountain slope or the tongue of a glacier just another highway. Our America has been blessed by a myriad variety of landscapes. But whether we are on the mountaintop, in the desert, on shipboard, in our automobile or an airplane, we are protected from the climate, the soil, the sand, the snow, the water. Our roots, such as they are, grow in an antiseptic hydroponic solution. Instead of enjoying the weather given us “by Nature and by Nature’s God” (in Jefferson’s phrase), we worry about the humidifier and the air conditioner.
Many of these currents of change carry us further along the grand and peculiarly American course of our history. More than any other modern people we have been free of the curse of ideology, free to combine the nations, free to rise above chauvinism, free to take our clues from the delightful, unexplored, uncongested world around us. We have, for the most part, avoided the brutal hom*ogeneities of the concentration camp and the instant orthodoxies that are revisable at the death of a Mao. During our first two centuries, a raw continent made us flexible and responsive. Our New World remains more raw and more unexplored than we will admit.
The Republic of Technology offers us the opportunity to make our nation’s third century American in some novel ways. We remain the world’s laboratory. We like to try the new as do few other peoples in the world. Our experiment of binding together peoples from everywhere by opportunities rather than by ideologies will continue. The Republic of Technology offers fantastic new opportunities for opportunity.
A world where experience will be created equal tempts us in new ways and offers new dilemmas. These are the New World dilemmas of our next century. Will we be able to continue to enrich our lives with the ancient and durable treasures, to enjoy our in heritance from our nation’s founders, while the winds of obsolescence blow about us and while we enjoy the delights of ever wider sharing? Will we be able to share the exploring spirit, reach for the unknown, enjoy the multiplication of our wants, live in a world whose rhetoric is advertising, whose standard of living has become its morality — yet avoid the delusions of Utopia and live a life within satisfying limits? Can we be exhilarated by the momentum that carries us willy-nilly beyond our imaginings and yet have some sense of control over our own destiny?
