It’s worth recalling that technological change generally happens more slowly than we expect, while social change can happen astonishingly fast. As noted earlier, the most visible aspect of such fast change is usually a major institutional shift— the collapse of the apartheid regime or the sudden demise of Soviet communism, for instance, or more recently the legalization of gay marriage in many Western countries. But those shifts occurred only because substantial worldview change had already taken place under the surface, often— as in the cases of apartheid and gay marriage— due to the efforts and courage of many, many people at all levels of society.
Every revolution, in Kissinger’s view, tossed up its Kerenskys—sane, reasonable, well-meaning idealists with no grasp of the realities of power. For them, good intentions were a substitute for weapons (whereas hard-headed Marxists from Regis Debray to Mao Zedong believed power came out of the barrel of a gun). Inevitably, they ended up being devoured.
Barely fifteen years ago, it was widely believed that societies wired together by the internet and the web would become progressively smarter over time— that a higher collective intelligence could emerge from rapid flows of immense amounts of information and a flattening of knowledge hierarchies as everyone gained direct access to previously inaccessible expertise. Since then, we’ve learned some harsh lessons. Instead of creating a digital environment that draws us together and makes us smarter, the companies at the core of the social media revolution— Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the like— have used the vast amounts of data they harvest about our preferences and behaviors to create an emotional environment that tends to pull us apart and make us dumber.
These two elements, sensuous and emotional, are not merely combined in the experience: they are combined according to a definite structural pattern. This pattern can be described by saying that the sensation takes precedence of the emotion.
HUME ONCE REMARKED that the whole of human civilization depends upon the fact that “one generation does not go off the stage at once and another succeed, as is the case with silkworms and butterflies.” At some turning-points of history, however, at some heights of crisis, a fate similar to that of silkworms and butterflies may befall a generation of men. For the decline of the old, and the birth of the new, is not necessarily an affair of continuity; between the generations, between those who for some reason or other still belong to the old and those who either feel the catastrophe in their very bones or have already grown up with it, the chain is broken and an “empty space,” a kind of historical no man’s land, comes to the surface which can be described only in terms of “no longer and not yet.”
Are we there--in the "no longer & not yet"--now?
Compared to an object of contemplation, meaning, which can be said and spoken about, is slippery; if the philosopher wants to see and grasp it, it “slips away.”
