Are We An “Age Beyond Wonder”?©

In 1977 a lightning bolt struck part of the electrical grid of the northeastern United States and New York City experienced a blackout. The fact that many New Yorkers took to looting, pillaging and burning out neighborhood merchants and complained that “mere nature” was allowed to disrupt technology was the occasion for an essay by one of America’s most brilliant pundits–George F. Will.  He considered that the  “extinguishing [of] street lights [was] enough to crack the thin crust of civilization in whole neighborhoods” as American barbarism. From the perspective of four decades, that perspective seems to have only deepened.

But the bulk of Will’s essay that week was devoted to the second issue–the irritation that “mere nature” inconveniently disrupted technology. Below are several excerpts which argue that this is evidence that a mature American society had lost its sense of awe and wonder. What do you think?  Has the computer age and the “age of Hubble” increased the sense of awe and wonder of Americans, or are they just more examples of Will’s argument?

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What most distinguishes modern people is that they have so slight a sense of awe about the world around them. ... [M]odern people should consider that, in a sense, they take more things on faith than did a thirteenth-century peasant tilling the fields in the shadow of Chartres.

When the peasant wanted light, he built a fire from wood he gathered. Modern people flip switches, trusting that someone, somewhere, has done something that will let there be light. How many switch-flippers can say what really happens, in the flux of electrons, when a generator generates?

The most advance form of travel for the peasant was a sailing ship or a wagon: the mechanisms were visible and understandable. This year forty-one million passengers will pass through Chicago’s O’Hare airport, obedient to disembodied voices, electronically amplified, telling them to get into cylindrical membranes of aluminum that will be hurled by strange engines through the upper atmosphere. The passengers will not understand, and will be content not to understand, how any of it really works. And we think the fourteenth century was an age of faith.

Perhaps ours is the strangest age.  It is an age without a sense of the strangeness of things.   ...

The human race has grown up and lost its capacity for wonder. This is not because people understand their everyday world better than people did in earlier ages. Today people understand less and less of the social and scientific systems on which they depend more and more. Alas, growing up usually means growing immune to astonishment.(1)

Let’s think together again, soon.

Notes:

1.  George F. Will, The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts, New York: Harper & Row, 1978, 109-11, emphasis added.