I want to use this presentation to reflect a little bit about the differences between the traditional and the modern in a different way than we've done before. To do this, I'm going to borrow from and comment on some ideas from a historian, commentator, philosopher, and essayist named Henry Adams. Here's Henry Adams. He's an interesting person, not an altogether likeable person. A somewhat aloof, arrogant, very close and lovely to his friends, but snobbish in the way someone who was from a very high born Boston family might be. How high born was he? His great-grandfather was the President of the United States, John Adams. His grandfather was President of the United States, John Quincy Adams. His father was a leading American public figure, Charles Francis Adams. Who was the minister to Great Britain during the American Civil War. Where young Henry was serving as a private secretary and had a chance to get involved in some of the diplomacy himself. After the war, Henry becomes a commentator on events in Washington DC. He's hired as a professor at Harvard, spends some years at Harvard trying to teach Medieval history to Harvard students. Despairing of that enterprize where with close friends like John Hay and others, works on a series of essays and histories including histories of the early American Republic. By the 1890s, Adams is increasingly turning to philosophical musings about what he's seen happen during his life and think about that span between 1838 and 1900, how many changes he would have seen. Adams was very interested in the Medieval world and he used the dynamo, the generator of electric power as a symbol of the modern. And contrasted that with the great symbol of the traditional world of Western Europe, the Virgin Mary. An essay, he published in his autobiography, the education of Henry Adams. This particular essay written in 1900 is called The Dynamo and the Virgin. What Adams tries to do is compare the forces of the traditional world with the forces of the modern world. What do I mean by forces? The forces that can act upon that can move men and women. A great symbol of the forces of the traditional world is this. This is the cathedral in the French City of Chartres right near Paris. This cathedral was built in the 1200s, it's an enormous, marvelous structure. The true enormity of this at the time that it was built is hard for us to imagine. When this was built nothing in the surrounding city, nothing in the surrounding countryside was even remotely comparable to this. For miles away, this is the only towering structure one could observe. The effort involved in that society to build a structure of this kind, staggers the imagination. Beyond the structure itself with all the work that went into it with, as I say, nothing like it anywhere nearby. You go inside and you're stunned by these incredible works of art. The stained glass, some of this involves craft work that no longer exists today So contemplating that cathedral, that singular monument. Adams asks himself, what was the source of the force that drew these thousands of people together, to labor over the better part of a century to create this gigantic thing? That force he sees as the Virgin Mary, of course the Virgin Mary is a symbol of attraction. Attraction of what? What does she represent? She represents an ideal of common faith, of a unity of belief. Of something that can bring everyone together and they will build this structure that will be a symbol of how everyone comes together for the worship of this common belief. That faith, that ideal had this enormous power in that traditional world. So you can trust that kind of power, that kind of force. The ability to move men and women. With say this, this is another kind of monument to modern forces. Adam spent a lot of time here, this is the Chicago Exhibition of 1893. The City of Chicago, proud of what it was achieving, put on an exposition of the great industrial achievements of the world. Almost everything you see in this picture, you can get a sense of scale from the ships in the foreground is part of this exposition. All these different great halls. People could spend days touring all the different facilities that were assembled here in Chicago for their admiration and amazement. Just to give you some closeup examples, here's just one of those buildings. This is as you can see, the Electricity Building. Built to show off all the incredible new achievements in generating electric power. So here's another one of those buildings, the Palace of Mechanic Arts. If you look at the foreground, you can get a sense of the enormity of this building. You see these help people, and then across the stream from them is the building itself. And remember, this is just one of many buildings in this exhibition. Here's another one of these buildings, a department of machinery. You see some exhibition spaces here for Britain, Germany, France, and so on. One thing just to notice, Is the sense of scale here. See this scale right here? That's the length of a football field. In one of these halls, Adams was drawn in 1893, and then again at another exposition in Paris, in 1900 to the dynamos. Here is one of those dynamos in Chicago, in 1893. It's generating vast amounts of power. Unlike a big steam engine that would be huffing and puffing, it's roaring along silently. Adams writes as to how he stood in front of this thing, with the sense of scale he had. See that man there, right in the foreground? So Adams describes, he's been given a tour by a scientist. To the scientist, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine house carefully kept out of sight. But to Adams, the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the 40 foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive in its old fashioned deliberate annual or daily revolution than this huge wheel. Revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed and barely murmuring. Scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's breadth further for respect of power, while it would not wake the baby lying close against the frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it. Inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive. But Adams also noticed the way the artist responded to some of these machines. The challenge they found in trying to find any artistic expression emanating from them. Or as Adams put it, all the steam in the world could not like the virgin build Chartres. The point of this was then not to say that one was better than the other, but just how different they were. The sources of the force were different in a way the source of the force that built Chartres, the virgin was pulling towards unity. The source of the force that created the dynamo was in a sense entirely anonymous, diffuse had no recognizable human source at all. In other words, it was almost like a contrast between unity in the one side. And the force that was vastly powerful yet antarctic on the other. Adams eventually decided that he was going to form a political party in which there would be one member. He would be the only member of the conservative Christian anarchists. But more seriously, Adams speculated on where these trends were going. He was constantly interested in trying to create little diagrams and equations about the way the forces were multiplying and where this might go. He develops these ideas I think, in some of his letters. He writes in one letter, for example, that the scientists themselves are the great industrialists. They understand how to recognize the forces, but they, themselves don't really understand where this is going. Or even in the sense fully how to manage the forces that they are creating. As he puts it in one letter, Lord Kelvin with his radium and atheism, and his frank confession that neither he or antagonists know what they mean. 40 years ago, our friends always explained things and had the Cosmo's down to point. Cites people like Darwin or the geologist Charles Lyell. Now they say that they don't believe there is any explanation, or that you can choose between half a dozen, all correct. Poor old 19th century, it is already as far off as Descartes and Newton, he writes in 1903. But then later in January in 1905, Adams offers this vision of the future. He writes, I'm trying to work out the formula of anarchism. The law of expansion from unity, simplicity, morality, which of course he's equating with the world of the virgin as the source of force to multiplicity, contradiction, police. He goes on to say the assumption of unity, which was the mark of human thought in the middle ages has yielded very slowly to the proofs of complexity. The stupor of science before radium, this new element that's been discovered that emits radiation is proof of it. Yet it is quite sure, according to my score of ratios and curves that at the accelerated rate of progression shown since 1600. It will not need another century or half century to tip thought upside down. Law in that case, would disappear as theory or a priori principle and give place to force. Morality would become police. Explosives would reach cosmic violence. Disintegration would overcome integration. And I'm sure there was a hint of nostalgia in what Adams is writing. And the unity he's finding in the symbol of the virgin in Western civilization could find similar echoes in the arguments of people in the world of Islam, in the world of Hinduism, in the world of Buddhism and so on. It is observation is not so much an argument for tradition and against progress. He, like a historian is simply standing back and observing change, and he's wondering where change could go. It's a set of really important questions to ask as we continue examining the great exhilaration which I'll do some more next time. See you then.
