Technological Observations of Henry Adams:

¶ … 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 vanishes. 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. 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.