Seven Sublimes

After the American Century

Seven Sublimes – The The MIT Press, 2022 

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• “With brilliant clarity, Nye delineates the nuances of the sublime, from the natural to the technological, from the infinite to the infinitesimal. Building on Kant and Burke, this book is a revelation of how we see and experience the world.”

  Miles Orvell, 

  Temple University, author of Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction. Oxford University Press, 2021

The sublime is a widely shared emotion that all human beings, regardless of their race, gender, or nationality, are capable of experiencing, for we all are endowed with the same bodily senses. When W. E. B. Du Bois visited the Grand Canyon, the railroads forced him to travel in a segregated railway car because he was Black, but this did not prevent him from appreciating its grandeur. Du Bois declared unequivocally, “I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.” His meditation on the enormous chasm concluded with these words: “It is not—it cannot be a mere, inert, unfeeling, brute fact—its grandeur is too serene—its beauty too divine! It is not red, and blue, and green, but, ah! the shadows and the shades of all the world, glad colorings touched with a hesitant spiritual delicacy.” Du Bois understood that the capacity to experience the sublime is universal.

This book focuses less on formal philosophy than on personal experiences, such as visiting a national park, skyscraper, disaster site, battleground, or virtual reality. To experience the sublime, it is not necessary to travel to famous locations. During travel restrictions due to the pandemic in 2020–2021, many people discovered solace and inspiration in local microadventures. They camped in nearby parks; they climbed trees; they disrupted routines; they stared at the night sky; they took walks in unfamiliar places. Recent studies confirm what philosophers have long said: confronted with the sublime, people commonly feel a sense of humility. These experiences of awe reduce self-interest and increase social cohesion. 

The sublime is a powerful individual moment, but it also has cultural effects, helping to hold groups together. This is a useful starting point for an historical assessment of the sublime, considered not as a static category but as an evolving realm of experiences with at least seven distinct forms. Sublime phenomena may be experienced either directly through the senses or indirectly through instruments, such as telescopes, microscopes, sensors, and computers. By focusing on this distinction, I found that there appear to be four forms of the tangible sublime (natural, technological, disastrous, and martial) and three forms of the intangible sublime (scientific, digital, and environmental). This book devotes a chapter to each of these. 

While developing these chapters, I realized that the different sublimes did not merely focus on different classes of objects. Each implies a distinct perception of space and time, and therefore they can be on odds with one another. A waterfall or canyon exemplifies the natural sublime to some, and yet other people value more highly a large hydroelectric dam that obliterates these landscapes and exemplifies the technological sublime. Likewise, virtual reality makes possible new perceptions but engages only a few of the senses, in contrast to the all-encompassing sensory engagement with a local ecology that is the hallmark of the environmental sublime. The martial sublime and the technological sublime are based on the mastery of many of the same technologies, but they work toward quite different ends and express incompatible values. In short, the seven sublimes share certain characteristics, but they are not a coherent system. They are related but not congruent.

Gazing from the top of a mountain at a vista is not the same thing as looking at a metropolis from the observation deck of a skyscraper. Watching a military bombardment is not like visiting Niagara Falls. Looking at images constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data is not the same as experiencing a powerful earthquake or visiting a battlefield. In different ways, each of these experiences may be sublime, but the expanded terminology developed in Seven Sublimes is needed to distinguish between them.   This work is  framed by philosophy but focused on historical examples.

Hardcover  $35.00     ISBN: 9780262046923

232 pp.  19 figures   May 2022

Technology: The Machine in the Garden, 50th Anniversary

 After the American Century

Remarks made at MIT celebrating the fiftieth anniversary 

of the publication of

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden

 

I first heard about The Machine in the Garden when a freshman at Amherst College in 1964. I saw it reviewed in the local newspaper, and I went out and bought a copy in hard cover, as a Christmas present for my father. He was interested in the history of technology, but I was not, or so I thought. I did not consider reading it myself, until I had a course with Leo Marx the following year. 

Amherst prides itself on a low student-faculty ratio and small classes. But Professor Marx’s survey of American literature was so popular that he taught in the largest lecture room on campus. About 150 students took the course every year, which meant that about half of all the Amherst student body chose to take it. He lectured on the Puritans, natural depravity, attempts to define "what is an American" from Crévecoeur onwards, the pastoral dream of America, the madness of Ahab in Moby Dick, Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience, and Whitman's barbaric yawp heard over the rooftops of the world. For those of us taking the course, this literature often seemed to be a meta-commentary on our times. The generals in the Pentagon were our Ahabs, the leaders of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements our Thoreaus, and Bob Dylan was our version of Whitman’s barbaric yawp. Our best hope, it seemed, was to survive the coming apocalypse as the Ishmaels of our generation. This was not the thrust of Professor Marx's course, I hasten to add, which was a most inspiring and coherent set of lectures on nineteenth century literature.  I then bought a second copy of The Machine in the Garden, by then in paperback. Reading it, I could hear Leo’s wonderfully engaging voice, which at times has an almost hypnotic quality when he reads from and explicates literature. The survey course made such an impression that his seminars were oversubscribed, and I was one of the lucky 20 who managed to get into one of them.

When each Amherst class graduated, the custom was to select a faculty member as an honorary member of the class. Shortly before graduation the faculty member selected gave a final lecture to the entire class in the College chapel. My class of 1968 selected Leo Marx, and he lectured on technology in American society, with considerable reference to Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Human Development, which had appeared the previous year. I cannot claim to recall his argument in detail, but it linked the themes of  The Machine in the Garden with sociology and philosophy, notably Martin Heidigger’s understanding that the essence of technology lies in the mind not the machine. The tensions analyzed in The Machine and the Garden were not new, but had emerged in antiquity, as with Mumford’s example was the building of the pyramids. Classical references were also in Leo’s book, notably his discussion of the emergence of the pastoral genre in ancient Greece and Rome and its re-emergence in early modern Britain.

Let me draw a few conclusions based on these Amherst years. Before its publication, Leo’s book developed to some degree through his teaching. Many close readings of particular authors were presented and no doubt refined in front of his students before the volume itself appeared. Through the process of teaching, it seems, Leo found compelling ways to make his argument. The ideas themselves had first been nurtured at Harvard in the 1940s, where he studied with F O Matthiessen and Perry Miller, and where he was Henry Nash Smith’s TA. But he reworked his dissertation for over a decade. He was not forced to rush into print in order to gain tenure, as is the unhappy practice today. This is a great book partly because it was closely linked to teaching and because its author was able to give it time. 

My copy of The Machine in the Garden went with me to the University of Minnesota, where Leo had once taught, and where Alan Trachtenberg [who spoke just before I did] was one of his students. His former colleagues recalled him fondly, particularly Barney Bowron, who taught me much about late nineteenth century American literature. The Machine in the Garden was highly regarded at the Center for American Studies, and I found it useful not only in courses but also in framing my PhD thesis. Only in graduate school did I fully understand that this book was quite interdisciplinary. At Amherst the combination of history, literature, fine art, and the social sciences had seemed quite natural, but at Minnesota the faculty at these departments did not always share a commitment to interdisciplinarity. Notably, the New Criticism was still strong in the English Department, and I found that I had to defend the “myth and symbol” approach and to find arguments for the practice of American Studies itself.  To my surprise, I discovered many arguments along these lines in The Machine in the Garden, in paragraphs that had not seemed so important when I was an undergraduate. I more fully understood its importance in shaping the development of the field of American Studies. It offered a model for how to combine sweeping analysis with close readings of texts, including literature, political speeches, government reports, and much more. It was genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on classics, history, psychology, philosophy, popular culture, and  fine art, even as it kept the main focus on literature.

By the middle 1970s when I was out of graduate school, academic fashions were changing rapidly. The field of American Studies was going through a transformation that emphasized social history more than literature and that focused on racial injustice, class tensions, and gender inequality.  These matters were not excluded from the American Studies I had known at Amherst, and it has always seemed to me that they were very much part of the tradition of American Studies that Leo represented. Nevertheless, each academic generation seems to establish itself by attacking those who went before. The so-called “myth and symbol school,” which in fact never formally existed or identified itself by that name, came under attack. This is not the place to rehearse the debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Suffice it to say that while it is true that the book might have included such writers as Willa Cather or Ralph Ellison, their addition would not have undermined or compromised the argument, but rather showed its strengths. There is an enormous difference between leaving someting out because it does not fit a line of argument and leaving something out because not all of American literature can be discussed in a single book. In any case, The Machine in the Garden has outlasted its critics, most of whom  are little remembered today except by specialists. It remains in pint, and people continue to cite it today. It is so well-known that other books refer to it in their very titles. In 1994 appeared, The Garden in the Machine (Princeton), in 2004 The Machine in Neptune’s Garden (Watson Science), and in 2001 The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place.  The journalist Joel Garreau has written an essay, "The Machine, the Garden, and Paradise" (1991). There is also a gothic/darkwave musical duo who call themselves “The Machine in the Garden”. No doubt there are more examples.

Throughout my academic life both Leo and his book have preceded me. When I went to Spain on a Fulbright, I found that Leo had been there lecturing the year before, and The Machine in the Garden  was a celebrated work. When I went for a year to The Netherlands, I found that he was friends with several people there, and that he had apparently lectured at all their universities. He had also spent a Fulbright himself in Britain, and he was well-known in Germany. Furthermore, Leo spent enough of his childhood in France to speak that language. It is difficult to find a European professor of American literature who has not read The Machine in the Garden. I could give many more examples, but one final one. A month ago I sat down at a random table in an airport restaurant waiting for my flight. At the next table a Finnish woman was talking about a lecture she was going to give in Stockholm about ecology and literature. It turned out that one of the first books cited in her paper was The Machine in the Garden.

When I bought that first edition for my father fifty years ago, I could never have imagined how much it would come to mean for me, for American Studies, and for the history of technology. As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is also being rediscovered by a new generation of scholars in other fields. It remains useful in my research and teaching. A colleague at the University of Texas told me that the new graduate students are quite interested in it. One of my classmates from Amherst, Gordon Radley who has a high position at Lucas Films, tells me that The Machine in the Garden has been influential in the formation of some of their motion pictures. If a comprehensive study were done of this book's influence, many more such stories would come to light.

After half a century of prominence, The Machine in the Garden has become an important part of  American culture. It is one of those rare books that is, at the same time, a primary source and a secondary source.  We read it both as one of the highest achievements of American Studies in its first two decades, and as a compelling meditation on the place of technology in American society. 

Constant availability + new communication technologies = Stress

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                         

More than half of all Americans report that they are stressed. The American Psychological Association has conducted a survey showing that half of Americans feel that their level of stress has increased in the last five years. There are many reasons for this, but here I want to examine one of them: the constant interruption of work and thought by new communication technologies.

Once upon a time, the mark of success was having a secretary who screened an executive's phone calls and routinely said that he or she was in a meeting or otherwise unavailable. The most successful people were hard to reach. They had buffers of all kinds around them. Today many of the secretaries and almost all the buffers are gone. The ideal is constant availability: to have a phone handy and to check email at all hours, so that documents can be downloaded and read anywhere. This situation is not unique to white-collar workers. The plumber gets phone calls all day, and the contractor sends pdf files to his clients. Constant availability + new communication technologies = Stress

I have had unknown journalists call me before 7 AM, asking questions about events that occurred when I was asleep. I have students who send me things on Friday night and expect them to be read on Monday morning. I have been on conference programs as a commentator and received the articles I am to discuss in the airport on my way to the meeting. Everyone has similar experiences.

Why did most people in 1960 assume that to be productive a person needed shields from constant intrusions, while today the reverse assumption reigns: that productivity is supposedly based on constant networking while surfing ever higher waves of information (and trivia)? One is expected to follow a host of people on Twitter, Facebook, email, and text-messaging, and yet somehow have time for reading, reflection, writing and serious conversation. Interruptions have become constant, like static on an old radio that is continually on.

Such interruptions are far more frequent for young people. The Pew Trust found in a survey that almost all people under 24 use text messaging, and that they average more than 100 messages sent or received every day. They deal with more than 3200 a month. In addition, they make or receive 15-20 phone calls every day. Add to these roughly 120 messages all the email sent and received and top it off with Twitter and Facebook, as well as browsing the Web for information. If these many messages are distributed evenly over a 16 hour waking day that makes an interruption every five minutes. In addition,  there are TV programs and radio, as well as listening to music, usually through earphones.

People under 24 do not think of this endless stream of messages as interruptions, but rather as normal life. Yet I have a 17-year-old nephew who says he suffers from stress, and it seems to be a worsening problem among younger people. Time itself has become the scarcest resource, and enormous numbers of people feel stressed all the time. High levels of stress cause headaches, insomnia, high blood pressure, and fatigue, to make a short list. Stress also exacerbates many illnesses and in older people increases the risk of heart attacks.

Multitasking is often praised as proof of adaptability and productivity, but studies show the reverse. People who constantly shift between working on several different things take more time to complete their work. My observation is that the greater the number of tasks, the greater the chance that some of them will be forgotten entirely or will be poorly done. As an author in Forbes put it, whether old or young, "Your brain just can’t take in and process two simultaneous, separate streams of information and encode them fully into short-term memory. When information doesn’t make it into short-term memory, it can’t be transferred into long-term memory for recall later."

Would Hemingway have been a better writer if he had received a constant stream of messages from Twitter? Would Charles Dickens have written as many good books if equipped with email? Would Einstein have thought up the theory of relativity if he had an I-phone to distract him  with half a million apps? It seems likely that our mental and psychological makeup is not geared to a constant bombardment of messages, questions, advertisements, and comments. If consciousness is a stream, then all these interruptions are muddying the waters.

The solution? Turn off the phone and the email for some periods each day, so you can concentrate on doing one task well. Do tasks one by one, rather than simultaneously. Limit use of Facebook to a single period of no more than one hour (not during work) each day. These things have worked for me, though it would be even better if I had a full-time secretary/buffer between me and the tides of trivia and nonsense in the world. But that is a luxury of the past unless someone can develop an app to simulate that role.

National Security Agency costs more than faculty of the Ivy League plus US Cultural Exchanges

After the American Century                                                                                                                     

Should the United States invest in education, cultural exchange, and international understanding, or should it take money away from such things and instead invest in spying, code-breaking, eavesdropping, and the creation of international distrust? Since 2001, the answer to that question has been to plow billions into The National Security Agency (NSA) while cutting funding for cultural programs. Since May the NSA has been much in the news, as the extent and reach of its programs has become known. Most Americans, if asked before then, probably could not have said what the initials N S A stood for, even though they were paying billions of tax dollars to support it.

The scale of the NSA's main facility at Ft. Meade, Maryland is best grasped by some comparisons. It is larger than the United Nations building and US Congress combined. It is the largest employer and the largest user of electricity in the State of Maryland. There are spaces for more than 18,000 cars in its parking lot, and the site has its own entrance from the nearby interstate highway. Do not try to use the entrance, however, as it is for NSA employees only, and you will be stopped if trying to enter the area.

There are many NSA facilities besides the buildings at Ft. Meade, both in the United States and abroad. Estimates of the number of employees vary, but apparently there are about 30,000. Being a secret organization, it is hard to get a reliable figure. The Washington Post recently wrote that there were 35,000 code breakers working for the NSA and affiliated groups at the CIA and other agencies. Whatever the number, it is clearly more than the combined faculties of the Ivy League plus MIT and CalTech. Harvard has 2100 faculty, for example. Dartmouth and Brown have fewer, Cornell has more. But the faculty for these ten elite universities are less numerous than the employees of the NSA.  Is the social, educational, and cultural value of the NSA greater than ten of the world's finest universities? The Harvard faculty has won 44 Nobel Prizes, trained generations of outstanding leaders, and graduated an international body of alumni from almost every country in the world. Such universities are a major force for progress, peace, and prosperity. They not only create knowledge; they create a global community. 

BEcause the NSA is secretive it cannot create a global community. It creates suspicion and distrust. It stimulates paranoia. It assembles enormous databases.  It listens in on the presidents of foreign countries, and has recently angered Brazil, Germany, and Mexico, to name just a few. Its staff creates encryption and de-encryption codes. They publish some articles, but their best work must be hidden from scholars, and they cannot be said to be part of or to participate in the global community of knowledge. They are paid as well as Ivy League faculty, but they do not have the same credentials. Would anyone seriously propose that the NSA's contribution to life is equal to that of one Harvard or one Yale, much less 10 such universities?

I am not arguing against the NSA, as such. But how large should it be? At what point would money be better spent elsewhere? Its value does not increase as a direct function of its size. When do diminishing returns set in? An NSA twice as large is not necessarily twice as valuable. There is an enormous new building about to open in Maryland. There is a new data center in Utah as well, and there are more facilities on the drawing board. 

The budget increases for the NSA have come at the expense of other programs, notably cultural exchanges, such as the Fulbright program, which creates strong international connections and builds understanding and trust. As the NSA has grown, such programs have shrunk or disappeared. The Mike Mansfield Fellowship program improved cultural understanding between Japan and the United States, until it was cut from $1.8 million to 0! Likewise, the Institute for International Public Policy Fellowship Program (IIPP) once offered study abroad to minority undergraduates, but it has lost all of its funding. The State Department also plans to eliminate all funding for the George J. Mitchell Scholarship. It provides postgraduate study in Ireland and Northern Ireland for 12 individuals a year. That is a small investment, but over time such programs create valuable networks of human relationships.

The largest and oldest such program, The Fulbright, has had to struggle for funding since the end of the Cold War. Yet in many nations the American contribution is matched or topped by the partner countries. Germany and Denmark, for example, put more money into their Fulbright exchanges with the US than the State Department does. American cutbacks in this case make no economic sense, for these foreign countries are funding US faculty and students to go abroad. There are more than 300,000 Fulbright Alumni from more than 150 countries, and everywhere they are a force for mutual understanding that promotes economic growth and cultural exchange. About 8,000 Fulbright awards are granted every year, with roughly 30% of the money coming from other nations or private contributions.More than 40 Fulbright alumni have won Nobel Prizes. No one from the immensely better-funded NSA has done so or ever is likely to do so, because its organization and goals are antithetical to the values that these prizes recognize.

The US government contributes about $275 million per year to Fulbright. By comparison, the 2014 budget for NSA and the like is 175 times that size. It "Provides $48.2 billion in discretionary base funding for the National Intelligence Program." This is more than the operating budgets for the ten leading universities already mentioned and all the exchange programs combined.

Instruments of "soft power" such as the Fulbright Program are being neglected or even abandoned in favor of secrecy, spying, and code-breaking. Yet the West won the Cold War in good part because its cultural life, its educational institutions, and its consumer goods were more appealing than the Soviet alternatives.  Expanding the NSA at the expense of good universities and cultural exchange is not good policy. It is time to see the NSA as just one part of a coordinated approach to better security and improved international relations. Spying cannot bring peace or prosperity. Creating vast secret agencies with no public oversight does not enhance democracy. The danger in such enterprises is that the means become the ends, that surveillance itself (and its expansion) becomes the goal.

Tenth anniversary of the 2003 North American Blackout.

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                        

The tenth anniversary of the 2003 Blackout passed a few days ago. Fortunately, such a large blackout has not occurred again inside the US, but this is no reason to feel sanguine about electricity supply. The blackout in 2003 was a cascading failure that started in Ohio, tripped by an overhead line touching a tree limb. It was a hot day, which meant that demand for air conditioning was also high, and that caused the high tension lines to heat up. When this happens, they sag down. Power companies know this, and well-run companies make sure that the area below the lines is kept clear. But trees and bushes keep growing, and when not kept in check they soon rise closer to the lines. 

In short, the time of the accident was hardly a surprise. August is late in the growing season, when trees have had months to intrude upward. A hot day in August is hottest in the middle afternoon, and this is when the lines sagged down and touched the trees. The cascading effects knocked out power for 50 million people in Ontario, Canada and the eastern United States. The old adage, "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse. . ." still applies.

Since 2003 the monitoring of the power system has improved, and power plant operators have a few seconds more to notice when a problem occurs. But remember that electricity moves at 186,000,000 miles per second. A breakdown in Ohio can cascade a long way in one second.

If you want to know more about this problem, including how blackouts relate to terrorism, the smart grid, and the future of energy use,  a New York Times article appeared in November the same year that this was posted, and I have also written a short book on the problem, When the Lights Went Out.

The Poor Use of Energy in the Middle East

After the American Century                                                                                                                  

The consumption of energy is a topic usually taken up when discussing China or the United States. Yet the Middle East is not only a major oil-producing region, but an important consumer of oil and natural gas. Unlike the United States or China, however, higher use has not been accompanied by improved energy efficiency.

Doha Qatar, night view

The following table shows the growth in CO2 emissions for OECD Europe, the United States, China, and the Middle East, from 1980 until 2000.  Recent statistics are more fragmentary, but they strongly suggest that the relative positions in this table (ranked according to how close they have come to sustainable growth)  have changed little since 2000. OECD Europe is still the only large region or nation that has come close to achieving sustainable growth, although the United States has begun to do better since 2008.

   Growth in CO2 emissions, selected nations and regions, 1980-2000

 

-->

Selected Region / nation	Population growth (annual)	GDP % growth (annual)	Energy Intensity Change (annual)	Carbon Intensity Change (annual)	growth CO2  Emissions (Annual)	20 year growth in CO2 emissions 1980 = 100
OECD Europe	0.53	1.73	- 1.00	- 1.06	0.18	103.7
United States	0.96	2.15	- 1.64	- 0.21	1.23	127.7
World	1.60	1.28	- 1.12	- 0.45	1.30	129.5
China	1.37	8.54	- 5.22	- 0.26	4.00	219.1
Middle East	2.98	0.04	2.45	- 1.14	4.34	233

The far right-hand column indicates the overall growth in CO2 for each region. It becomes immediately clear, The Middle East, aside from all its political problems, also has serious problems with energy misuse, in good part because oil and gas are abundant in the region. Their price is kept low, and with an annual population growth rate of almost 3%, there are millions more people using energy in the Middle East. More recent statistics show that between 1980 and 2010 Middle East use of oil and natural gas has quadrupled.

Moreover, in stark contrast to all the other regions listed, the Middle East is the only place were energy is being used more carelessly and less efficiently. Look at the third column, "energy intensity" which measures such things as whether cars get fewer or more miles per gallon, whether appliances use more or less electricity to accomplish a task, and so on. In the world as a whole, energy intensity is improving. In China, dramatic improvements in energy intensity do a great deal to offset the enormous increase in GDP. As a result of this factor and lower population growth,  CO2 emissions did not increase as fast in China as they did in the Middle East.

The Middle East has long been increasing CO2 pollution levels faster than Europe, the United States, or China, even though the region's economies as a group scarcely expanding. The population grows, but the economy scarcely holds even. Rising energy use is not part of a dynamic growth economy, as in China or East Asia. 

If one drills down to the national level, the Middle East  dissolves into contrasting oil-rich economies and oil-poor economies, and into sharply divided social classes. But that is not my subject. I merely want to emphasize the failure of the Middle East as a whole to develop efficient energy use. Despite a view highly-publicized solar projects and windmills, almost all energy consumption remains oil and natural gas. For thirty years the Middle East has gone down the path of unsustainable stasis, when most other economies have sought sustainable growth. 

See also: Technology: Energy Rationing or Quotas?  America vs. Europe, 2100