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People made machines, and machines set them freer than ever before. The American imprint on this century has been due not only to a spiritual or political conception of freedom but to technology; the country that promoted and thrived on the work ethic was the same that sought from the beginning to reduce human labor to a minimum through inventiveness. So central was this impulse to American history that shortly after the American Revolution, parades held in Boston, Philadelphia and New York to celebrate the ratification of the Constitution gave prominent and revered places to the new nation's artisans, mechanics and craftsmen and especially to the makers of mathematical instruments and scientific apparatus. They were cheered in the streets. Even in the 1780s the nation knew that its strength would eventually rely on its capacity to ensure, in the words of the Horn and Hardart cafeteria ads of the 1940s, "less work for mother." Today's citizens are told to "set yourself free with Stouffer's."
In terms of pure convenience, the world has never experienced such liberation. To our age has been given the freedoms of jet planes, bullet trains, wash-and-wear, Minute Rice; dial long distance (dial-a-prayer, dial-a-joke); automatic windows, automatic doors; the artificial lung and heart; the electric knife, the electric pencil sharpener, the electric eye and chair; instant soup, photographs, copies, calculations; self-starters, self-service; the freedom from small pox, polio, the "heartbreak of psoriasis"; the freedom to worry about freedom itself, to fret about the uses of "leisure time." Killing, too, has been made simpler, thanks to automatic rifles, grenade guns, cluster bombs and guided missiles. In some dark way, the technology of killing may have accounted for death's prosperity in this century: the ease and magic of the enterprise.
Behind most of these events lay the assumption, almost a moral imperative, that what was not free ought to be free, that limits were intrinsically evil. Even the act of relying on history might be judged dangerous, since knowledge of the past could exert prior restraint on future actions and decisions; one could not wholly let it be if one believed in history. Science, however, presented a different matter. One of the reasons that science has achieved such stature in the late 20th century is its self-confident autonomy, the freedom of the scientific mind, Prometheus unbound, to go wherever it pleases.