On Modern Civilization

I've just finished reading David McCullough's The Great Bridge--fantastic.  It's the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and as dry as that may sound to some, I assure you that the book is anything but boring!  This is the second McCullough book I've read and I think I'll be taking another home with me to Spain to read on the plane.  They are fascinating books that bring history and it's characters to life on the page.  The fact that I devoured this one in a matter of days is a testament, I believe to the writing.
  

I could write an entire post about the incredible feat of engineering that was the building of the bridge, approved in 1870, when Brooklyn and New York were separate cities, and finished in 1883 (nearly exactly 100 years before I was born!).  But maybe I'll save that for another time.  Mostly I want to share this fabulous excerpt from Chief Engineer Washington Roebling's letter to one of the Bridge Board Trustees who was preparing a speech to be read on opening day (May 24, 1883) and had asked for some figures to show that the bridge would have cost much more if built in any other age.  In other words, he wanted some hard facts and figures to back up the idea that the bridge was representative of great advancement in science, technology and humankind in general.  This was the response he got from Roebling:

To build his pyramid Cheops packed some pounds of rice into the stomachs of innumerable Egyptians and Israelites.  We today would pack some pounds of coal inside steam boilers to do the same thing, and this might be cited as an instance of the superiority of modern civilization over ancient brute force.  But when referred to the sun, our true standard of reference, the comparison is naught, because to produce these few pounds of coal required a thousand times more solar energy than to produce the few pounds of rice.  We are simply taking advantage of an accidental circumstance.

It took Cheops twenty years to build his pyramid, but if he had had a lot of Trustees, contractors, and newspaper reporters to worry him, he might not have finished it by that time.  The advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization. 

I love it!  And his point certainly rings true today, in an era where solar power and energy consumption are the center of public debate.  It also seems to be a true and quite humble reality.  Even something as staggering as the Curiosity's Mars landing is really only possible thanks to "accidental circumstance". It's actually comforting to think of the great achievements of  humankind in this way.  No one people is greater than another for having achieved this or that, but rather all are equally ingenious for having used their circumstances to their advantage.  There is an over-arching commonality across the ages and between the cultures of the world--the singularly human capacity for creativity and innovation.