From the beginning of human history until the day, relatively speaking, before yesterday, every civilization has given scope to, and thus been the product of, human genius in every one of its manifestations including the representative, the literary, the musical, the architectural, the mechanical and technical arts and the sciences.
Naturally, each of them had its special characteristics and talents with which it became associated and for which it became known: in the case of China, her bureaucratic and military sophistication; in that of Japan, her refined aestheticism and grace of living. Ancient Greece, and later the Germanies, became a synecdoche for philosophic genius; the Italian peninsula from the medieval era forward for its musical and statuary one; and England for her genius for representative self-government. All excelled at engineering: the Greeks who built the Parthenon, the Romans who built the viaducts, the Chinese who built the Great Wall. And the same civilizations that produced the great cathedrals all over Europe also produced the great paintings and sculpture that filled them.
The enthusiasm for technology has virtually crowded out every other form of human creativity
In recent decades – perhaps, indeed, since about the time when men and women, elderly now but still living today, were born – almost the only form of genius that has sparked the popular imagination of almost every national culture is the technological variety, in particular the digital one. It is primarily toward technology that human genius is being directed today, and toward which the resources of postmodern society are directed. At any rate, technological genius is by far the kind that is most widely appreciated by mass publics everywhere, digital technology having become the popular equivalent of, and replacement for, the arts in every field.
I first became aware of this when, inquiring why my new computer lacked a receiving port in the side of it to accept a disc, it was explained to me that engineers at Apple considered a vulgar slot to be unaesthetic and thus to detract from the overall appearance of a vrai objet d’art.
In an age when music as a serious art form has simply ceased to exist, literature is, variously, a form of political propaganda, a source of mass entertainment, television in print, an exercise in philosophical nihilism, or a self-conscious attempt by the graduate of a creative-writing course at creating a work of art; painting and sculpture efforts at representing what the pictorial and representational arts by their nature can never possibly represent (“concepts” in place of recognizable forms); and architecture limited to creating what the mechanical limbs of a machine, in the absence of the hand of an artist or craftsman, can achieve. I suppose that a case of some sort can be made for the digital devices that deliver instant access to these things being considered works of art in their own right, but I doubt I’d find it a convincing one.
Not just in the West, but in all civilizations and cultures today, the enthusiasm for science and technology has virtually crowded out every other form of human creativity and skill in favor of the science and technology that make possible, promote and provide power, wealth, health, convenience and ease, general utility, and, beyond these, novelty and adventure, leaving little or no space for art and aesthetics – in short, for what in the seemingly distant past were known as “beauty” and “truth.”
And while transhumanism remains too much a futuristic project to engage mass interest and enthusiasm, it is doubtless only a matter of time before the prospect of uploading human brains into computers and boosting them into space where they will spend eternity conquering and exploring impossibly distant galaxies acquires mass appeal. Just what these strange creatures with a human brain and a digital body would accomplish, not even an imaginative transhumanist can say. Certainly it will not be the establishment of new civilizations dedicated to the cultivation of the fine arts and the literary and musical ones, the erection of extraterrestrial New Athenses, New Florences, New Venices, New Parises and New Londons, or even New-New Yorks and New Chicagos containing within them Alexandrian libraries, concert halls and opera houses and art galleries to perpetuate the accomplishments of the Old-Old World.
Nor, finally, will it be the replication of the great cathedral towns of medieval Europe to convert and nurture the alien creatures native to the New Worlds they take for their own. In place of these things, they will instead construct data centers the size of the Australian continent and space ports firing rockets as tall as the Empire State Building to ferry passengers sufficient to fill Queen Mary 2 to galaxies yet more distant – and just for the sake of it. You can’t stop progress, after all.
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