Thoughts to think about at the end of one semester and the beginning of another
Our civilization is taking on the structure and properties of a machine...This machine will not tolerate less than world-wide rule; it will not allow a single human being to survive outside its control, uninvolved in its functioning. Furthermore, it cannot put up with ill-defined lives within its sphere of operation. Its precision, which is its essence, cannot endure vagueness or social caprice; irregular situations are incompatible with good running order. It cannot put up with anyone whose duties and circumstances are not precisely specified. It tends to eliminate those individuals who from its own point of view do not exactly fit, and to reclassify the rest without regard to the past or even the future of the species...It has already begun to attack the ill-organized populations of the earth...decreeing that the highly organized must invariably take the offensive against the poorly organized...The machine--that is, the Western World--could not help turning, one day, against those ill-defined and sometimes incommensurable men inside it...So we are witnessing an attack on indefinable mass by the will or the necessity for definition. Fiscal laws, economic laws, the regulation of labor, and, above all, the profound changes in general technology...everything is used for counting, assimilating, leveling, bracketing, and arranging that group of indefinables, those natural solitaries who constitute a part of the intellectual population...It was never more than indirectly that society could afford the life of a poet, a thinker, an artist, whose works were unhurried and profound.
--Paul Valery, 1925.