Technological Observations of Henry Adams: Term Paper

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His neck, a mechanical part of him, has become so overwrought by the pressures and complexity of technology that it has stopped working. Whole segments of the American nation have become powerless by the overwhelming pomposity of the new inventions that, unable to keep up with the new dialect, they have surrendered to the more youthful marchers and have become trodden underfoot. The old American not only becomes defunct; worse still, he becomes extinct.

The pre-electric era was relatively benign to the present and future potential terrors. Those "earlier stages of progress" were "simple and easy [for humans] to absorb" 7 and beneficial in that they helped him do his work without overwhelming him and attaching his esteem.

However then:

as the mind of man enlarged its range, it enlarged the field of complexity, and must continue to do so, even into chaos, until the reservoirs of sensuous or supersensuous energies are exhausted, or cease to affect him, or until he succumbs to their excess. 8

In a grim burst of prophecy, Adam's predictions for technological future are gloomy: He predicts that a bomb will be dropped in a "neighborhood of an official" and that this bomb will double in force every 10 years 9. Later still, he predicts that railways will be involved in war and that "automobiles and fire arms will ravage society" 10. Man will be unable to control the forces that are unleashed and instead of technology uniting society, as was originally the case, will sever it and demarcate it into two groups: the living and those that it will help to die.

The universe was originally seen as a holistic force, but, according to Adams, technology will disunite it and break it into fragmented pieces, causing man to become unsure of his place in the Universe, fragmenting man's esteem, and making him question his very existence and rationale for existence.

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Man once saw the world as unity and worshiped it as God 11. Later, however, man began to doubt the origination of the Universe, whether it even had an ultimate purpose, and now, writes Adams, the universe may as well be seen as "super sensuous chaos" instead of its possessing divine unity. A new mind, capable of understanding this new realm of complicity and multiplicity must be created and initiated for the American race to continue and prosper.

Man has a dichotomy ahead of him. Looking into the future he wonders: will he be able to "leap into the future" 12 or will he succumb to the excess that he has created and drown. The universe is less holistic, more disordered than ever before. It has severed new generations of American from previous Americans rendering the predecessors susceptible to extinction. These technological observations made Adam leery of the future, suspicious of the new and coming generations of Americans, and profoundly distrustful of modern life in the United States and Europe. He also felt like one of these old Americans who neck had become broken by the jolt and whose body was left in disarray, overwhelmed and unable to continue functioning due to the sudden and overwhelming shock.

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