Modern life, which we tend to think of as an accelerating series of gains in knowledge, wealth, and power over nature, is predicated on a loss: the loss of contact with the past. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us. Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. After all, they might have said, imagine someone transported from 1816 to 1916: what would that person have thought of railroads, telegraphs, machine guns, and steamships? For people in the early twentieth century were as acutely aware of their modernity as we are of ours, and with just as good reason. But one thing would be very familiar to such a time traveller: the pride, and the anxiety, we feel about being so modern.
If you could transport someone from the year 1916 to the present, we ask a little proudly, wouldn’t that person be stupefied by the changes? And, of course, he would be, at least for a few days, until he figured out how everything worked. Just look at all the commonplace features of our world that didn’t exist a century ago-jet travel, television, space flight, the Internet. We like to think of ourselves as living in an age of unprecedented disruption. During the Enlightenment, every fixed point of knowledge began to wobble.
0 kommentar(er)
