Past the "crisis of self" found in literature, its useful to read philosophical or historical books. Analysis and commentary on the past can also help us create the proper context in which to understand particularity of literature.
Fitting "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", (its not literature) into our larger picture of those generations that are yet still living, but nonetheless represent that which will end right before our eyes: these are the so called Silent Generation and Baby Boom, but they really are people who read, consumed, and favored world views that may now be considered subject to an unprecendented revision.
The revision being the digital age and how mankind will proceed into the future as different from how it proceeded in the past.
James Burke, another Journalists, took on the History of Science from the point of view of a Baby Boomer growing up Post-War (and Post-Imperial...Burke is British) and consuming that vision of progress.
The last chapter examines the future of what is now the internet. Burke had conceived, incorrectly of a system somehow more sophisticated than Bush's Memex, but not quite as exacting as it actually emerged twenty or so years later in the World Wide Web search engine Google.
Yet that is somewhat irrelevant to the overall point, which is removing the perfect Will, presented in 20/20 hindsight, as a spirit of progress that can be owned.
Or, to put it another, Burke's work examines the lucky accidents and rising and accelerating pace of these accidents as they pile up and create more innovations, leading to breakthrough in human understanding.
What is not generally pointed out in the many other commentaries about "The Day The Universe Changed" is that this pace evidently increases perhaps along with increasing population. Burke would argue that its not the old Romantic notion of Genius, but of people who are not so narrowly seeking an end result, but instead who struggle, and in that struggle get results, frequently not what they desired.
The whole romantic notion of genius was presented with a dark side in Frankenstein, a romantic novel that depicts evil genius in spite of itself. I am not evil, I am just misunderstood.
The scope of "...Universe Changed." is the limits of one definition of the Modern, from early Middle Ages to Now. The modern is sometimes defined as that form of thought that does not ascribe to dogma. This is perhaps to contrast the progress of the West to the former progress but current stasis of all the rest of the World.
Or, the largest scope of the Modern can also be termed that sensibility that dispensed with the old Authoritarianism or official State policy on what the subjects of the State should know (that you are safe in our borders, and the rest of the world is full of savages!).
Science is the end point of rigor in thought. "...Universe Changed" makes this implicitly clear, and also clarifies that no one people can own science, that is it partly an accident and frequently successful due to prejudice and stupidity. Not the put down "stupidity" but the accidents of not even thinking about what one is doing but then having at least some modicum of care to see the error.
We all know the scientists seek to prove hypothesis, but one salient point made by "...Universe Changed" is that discovery is sometimes due to the hypothesis being wrong and the scientist being tough enough to accept this and move on.
The sensibility that this creates is of course, experiment to determine what it is you don't really know but what you assume to know frequently just because thats how you want it to be.
And what you are clinging to perpetuates...or fills in the blank slot of needing to know, can then be debunked as accepted truth, and the real truth can then be revealed.
Religion and prophecy used to be all about this, but as it is proto science (Religion is: cosmology is the domain of both subjects) it has been clarified through the process of being exchanged among civilizations, thereby being taken out of the context of the people who came to understand, and who sought to make it absolute that they understood what nobody else did. But of course, these understanding found fertile ground in later civilizations, wherein, the concept behind the practice, perhaps Astronomical, or Mathmatical or Medicinal, did not belong exclusively to the tribe or civilization that owned it.
Burke argues for the transformation of the World through the scholarly process of cross-indexing revealing a gap in a subject. The frequency of this phenom of essential innovation increases or has accelerated over time, compressed in a sense, in a way similar to the dates of each chapter of the book, "The Day the Universe Changed". In other words, the pace of this phenomenon of Science's accumulation of knowledge has been increasing, accelerating, compressing, to the point where we might best understand it as purely the result of increasing population.
So, Burke is not lauding the progess of the West as superior to all the civilizations that came before. Burke is rather humorous in portraying himself (he is a TV personality presenting his book in a Television series) as a prejudiced former British Empire prig, but you can see his self deprication (hidden as much as possible in order to add punch to the joke).
His over all point is the exact opposite, but also, implicitly, this tradition is the result of a series of accidents that befell Western Civilization as it sought to compete.
Burke over all work is exactly the Anti-Authoritarianism that Ayn Rand is so completely oblivious to in projecting a Nietzchean superman elite. If one has read Burke, you can see the basis for the anti-Randians.
This scale of increasing speed of movement, population growth, power over nature (Burke is not concerned with Environmentalism in this book) paints a marvelous picture of human beings, as a community, increasingly progressing away from primitive brutality toward what is still owned by Wells, the Eloi.
Burke does not make imaginative leaps in assumption, or assumes the role of a profit. He is an excellent Journalist but otherwise comes across as Professor. But he is not a professor, Burke's book takes the anaylitic school and removes the human will as a narcisstic construction yet capable of innovation, and instead analyses the machinery of progress and then inserts people, just names, as almost follies in the process.
What we see then is the continued presentation, emerging early on in German philosophy, of a mind not tied to its Nation or People, but tied instead to reason. Nietzche picked up on this, and posited the Free Thinkers who would emerge in greater numbers. Given the few great prophets of a largely uninhabited planet, its reasonable to assume that now, prophets are a dime a dozen!
The Narcissism plagues this culture of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boom. I really see my Generation as grappling with an overabundance of Narcissism as it results from the celebration of Individualism, egoism, and the noun: Genius.
These results of a civilization that caters nearly to the most obscure whimsies (drinking gold?) is nothing new. The power that came with Imperialism, resulted in Authority of the State, which brought in larger and larger amounts of luxury goods. Luxury in this case resulting in the self satisfied look on the face.
Religion had always strove to erase that self satisfied look, but Science, which increases trade and technologies of the self (satisfaction or false recognition), dethroned Religion on the basis of being a tool of the State that prevents innovation. This was probably recognized, in some proto form, in Classical Greece and their 'scientists'. But its taken a great effort over hundred of generations to allow Science to displace Religion and its use by the Authoritarian to exploit selves. This argument and attitude, either the Authoritarian Science (progress!) or Authoritarian Religion (morals!) is a still vigorous conflict and perhaps account for most of the News today.
The result of Authority over subjects is narcissism. Narcissism I am using to present a false belief that nonetheless satisfies a person or self, and relieves them from the burden of what Literature has also worked to present as more authentic, which is the crisis of the self that is the greatest moment of actual individuation, and discovery of what was not know.
Its aggravating however, to be constantly in a state of what one believes to be proven wrong.
Education is the result of this ordinary, human state of striving toward truth while breaking against having to re-evaluate YET AGAIN who "I" am, and what I believe. Institutionalizing this process happened long ago.
The point Burke effects...perhaps by intent but I am thinking merely just as an intended consequent of his (his team) constructing these presentations wherein, most of what we are is compressed into a book (and television series).
The effect is the putting aside of some of the vanities that weaken ourselves and deflect our continuing mastery.
I would say the best way to present to the West to the world, wherein, our obnoxious Internationalism is justified, is in the content of this book. It does not have the old White Imperialistic rhetoric of world domination by way of tools, or some special evident National character.
It instead says "We White people got lucky, and here is how." And...that all people would be best served if they read "Day the Universe Changed" instead of their own National-Theocratic, or really just Authoritarian based ethnic boosterism...as it is meant to counter their neighbors own "empowerment" through "we are the originals" officially sanctioned storyline.
The West was guilty of this narrative: even as it was underpinned by Science. The "Social Darwinism" of the turn of the century, when the White People of the British Empire were overtaken by the White People of the German Empire.
Burke, I am sure along with many, many others, saw this continued cycle of a people's Narcissism, but now growing larger, as it had further prompts of Narcissism coming from the "more than" National championing...from Print to Motion Pictures to Television.
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