Term Paper on "Henry Adams and Technology"

Term Paper 3 pages (1048 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

technological observations of Henry Adams: how they affected his life and his view of life in the United States and Europe

Henry Adams in his Autobiography printed in 1918, saw technology as traumatic to mankind that, being its Dracula, would eventually destroy it and cause it infinite misery and havoc. Reminiscent of a host of successors, Adams saw technology as a force that would breed alienation, firstly, between new and old Americans, and secondly, between people and their old way of life, particularly when rendering humans into insipid, dried automation-type beings. By serving as mediator between actual life and human contact, people would be separated from the vividness and immediacy of life altogether.

Commenting on his observations of the Great Exposition of 1900 in the chapter of his autobiography entitled "The Dynamo and the Virgin," Adams muses on the recent developments in technology, science, and knowledge, and how these irreversibly impacted not only his own outlook but also those of prior generations. "Man had," in the past seven years, "translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world" 1. The results, Adams, describes, with great clarity, is that found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition with his "historical neck broken by the sudden eruption of forces totally new" 2. It was not only Adams who found himself so. Older Americans found themselves overwhelmed, confabulated, anxious, and lost by a new dialect and weltanschauung that left them adrift and unmoored from their comfortable past and separated from the so-called new Americans. In that way, the old Americans are ostracized from the new and the new has "no common scale of measurement with the old" 3, for the new sees the world now through a different lens and, thus a disconnect has been created.

This subject is expanded on in the chapter "A Law of Acceleration" where Adam sees the American who is born since 1900 "a new creation" and "a new American" who "must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature"4. According to Adam, technologies has made the new American think in ways that are utterly unfamiliar and alien to the old American - in ways that are "unimaginable to an earlier mind" and to deal with problems "altogether beyond the range of earlier society" 5. Technology is no welcoming concept for Adams. For him, it signals a breach between an older and newer generation and between past and future life that will no longer be able to be breached.

Adam's analogy to a broken neck is powerful. A major part of his body, neck-dividing head from the rest of the body has been severed and his body is no longer whole. A major body of American history, or the American nation, has been irreparably disconnected. In his chapter "A Dynamic Theory of History," Adam comments, "gunpowder killed whole races that lagged behind" 6. The problem with technology is that it gives new generations the power to annihilate old, and whoever does not succeed in keeping up with the race… READ MORE

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