Review Article: Beyond The Edge Of The Known World

Our lives are lived on the edge of the known world. For only that world is known, which has already emerged into the past.

—G. L. S. Shackle¹

I am 70. No one 70 should be allowed to write about the difference that technology has made or will make. Because it isn’t likely to have made any deep difference to people as old as I am. I learned to learn in the years shortly after 1940, and I learned to be a rational human being at and around the time I reached the conventional “age of reason” in 1947.

I am using Word to manufacture this sentence—this is happening on a MAC OS X—and this makes things different, but not deeply different, from how they were when I typed my doctoral dissertation on a manual typewriter. One difference is that, since I could never figure out exactly how much space to leave for footnotes at the bottom of the page, I had to hire a typist to produce the final copy. There were dozens of women—I think they were all women—in Morningside Heights who made their living typing dissertations. They are gone. That is a difference.

Everything changes something, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. “Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose,” which I thought Taine had said, but which Wikipedia credits to Jean-Baptiste Alphone Karr. “Among my friends and acquaintances [Freeman Dyson writes], everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it.”² Freeman Dyson, age 87.

What’s more important in the lives of professors, the appearance of the word processor or the disappearance of domestic servants? I bet you don’t have them and don’t miss them. Read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The Ramsay family is not presented as especially privileged. The pater familias is, like me and many of the readers of this essay, a professor of philosophy. But there are domestic servants: cook, maids, nannies, and more. Their presence is taken for granted as we, but not quite me, take their absence for granted. (I’m not sure why I can’t have a personal assistant.) Marx was, of course, wrong to think our desires and expectations are mere icing on the cake of fundamental economic process, but surely labor market³ conditions—who is available for hire for what jobs at what price—have not only eliminated the maids, but your own maid-relative desires and expectation. John Colville, a very upper level British civil servant could write on the eve of World War II, “It is easy to sit in the warmth, beautifully dressed, after an enormous meal, and talk academically about the inevitability of change and the charm of doing one’s own housework; but it may be less easy to accommodate oneself to the grimness of reality.”⁴ The “grimness of reality,” anticipated by Colville, is not the war itself, but the world in which one does one’s own housework, the world of “austerity Britain.”⁵ Privilege has not, of course, disappeared: I once overheard a gaggle of society ladies complaining about how difficult it is to find a proper laundress. What has changed in the last century or so is that most people these days would find the ladies’ complaint ludicrous or offensive. Attitudes change. Attitudes are also sensitive to address in social space and to social trajectory. I am less likely to find the ladies’ comment objectionable if I envision, at some point in my own upward swing, having household staff myself. It is said that 80% of a person’s income is explained by only two factors: citizenship and parental income class: “The remaining 20% or less [writes World Bank economist Branko Milanovich] is therefore due to other factors over which individuals have no control (gender, age, race, luck) and to the factors over which they do have control (effort or hard work).”⁶

In other words, it’s important to have an iPad, but not that important. A later comment of Milanovich captures one of my worries as I write about the metaphysical significance, or life-transformative powers, of new technology:

If one lives in a shack, in insalubrious conditions, with a volatile income that is barely above subsistence, and is unable to send his kids to school or to offer his family decent health care, it makes no sense to classify him as part of some imaginary “global middle class” because he can dial a cell phone.⁷

Pundits, sitting in some cozy spot, will speak about the “digital revolution” and the “global village.” Again, one needn’t think that what they are saying is false, nor is it entirely irrelevant. It just needs to be viewed, and understood, against the background of the real world, nicely evoked by a character in Bernard Werber’s novel, Les fourmis: “Avant, lorsque j’était toute jeunette, on se disait qu’après le passage du millénaire il se produirait des choses extraordinaires, et tu vois, rien n’a évolué. Il y a toujours des vieux dans la solitude, toujours des chômeurs, toujours des voitures qui font de la fumée.”⁸ There is the marvelous new world and the lonely old person in her room watching TV or nothing, and waiting for the visitor who never comes. And that is not the worst of it for the permanently unlucky:………..