“He never wants anything but what’s right and fair; only when you come to settle what’s right and fair, it’s everything that he wants and nothing that you want.”
—Thomas Hughes, British judge, born October 20, 1822
Boy and man, I have always loved systems. I was a software developer for most of my career. I devised, built, and ran lots of them. (Made a lot of money as a direct result of systems I built, too; but that’s a story for another day.) I think my very favorite kind of history is the history of systems, what Fernand Braudel called l’histoire de la la longue durée, the history of things that last a long time. He distinguished it from the history of events, which is what we normally think about when we think about history. Braudel favored the study of long-lasting phenomena like climate, trade, routes, land-use, communications, and technology instead of the more traditional gossipy, biography-oriented history of great men and events.
Just finished the second volume of Vaclav Smil’s magisterial history of 20th century technical innovation, Transforming the Twentieth Century. The first volume traced the development of the key inventions, mostly between 1867–1914, that formed the modern world. The second takes the story through the twentieth century, with detailed studies of key technologies like electrical generation and transmission, the automobile, container shipping, the oil and gas industries, and electronics and computing. Smil ends with reflections on the gains and losses humanity has achieved: comfort, health, and leisure for billions of people on the one hand; dire, existential threats from global climate change, the potential fragility of systems, and grotesque (and growing) economic inequality on the other.
Continue reading “God Is Still Dead”