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In carry modern times, learned men of the Western world considered themselves members of a Republic of Letters, the worldwide community of men who read one another's books and exchanged opinions. Long after Gutenberg's printing press had begun the process of multiplying books and encouraging the growth of literature in the languages of the marketplace, the community remained a limited one. Thomas Jefferson, for example, considered himself a citizen of that worldwide community because of what he shared with literary and scientific colleagues in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands and elsewhere. When Jefferson offered the young nation his personal library (which was to be the foundation of the Library of Congress), it contained so many foreign-language books (including numerous "atheistical" works of Voltaire and other French revolutionaries) that some members of Congress opposed its purchase. The Republic of Letters was a select community of those who shared knowledge.
Our Republic of Technology is not only more democratic but also more in the American mode. Anyone can be a citizen. Largely a creation of American civilization in the last century, this republic offers a foretaste of American life in our next century. It is open to all, because it is a community of shared experience.
Behind this new kind of sharing was the Industrial Revolution, which developed in 18th century England and spread over Europe and the New World. Power-driven technology and mass production meant large-scale imports and exports — goods carried everywhere in steam-driven freighters, in railroad freight cars, on transcontinental railway systems.
The ways of daily life, the carriages in which people rode, the foods they ate, the pots and pans in their kitchens, the clothes they wore, the nails that held together their houses, the glass for their windows — all these and thousands of other daily trivia became more alike than they had ever been before.
The weapons and tools — the rifles and pistols, the screws and wrenches, the shovels and picks — had a new uniformity, thanks to the so-called American System of Manufacturing (the system of interchangeable parts, sometimes called the Uniformity System). The telegraph and the power press and the mass-circulating newspaper brought the same information and the same images to people thousands of miles apart. Human experience for millions became more instantaneously similar than had ever been imagined possible.
This Republic of Technology has brought a new flavor to our lives, a new relation to our fellow Americans, a new relation to the whole world. Two forces of the new era have proved especially potent.
THE NEW OBSOLESCENCE. For most of human history, the norm had been continuity. Change was news. Daily-lives were governed by tradition. The most valued works were the oldest.
The great works of architecture were monuments that survived from the past. Furnishings became increasingly valuable by becoming antique. Great literature never became out of date. "Literature," Ezra Pound observed, "is news that stays news." The new enriched the old and was enriched by the old. Shakespeare enriched Chaucer; Shaw enriched Shakespeare. It was a world of the enduring and the durable.
The laws of our Republic of Technology are quite different.