318
PARTISAN REVIEW
his feats, of which these examples represent just a fraction, is that
they are the designs of one man who scrutinized the landscape with
the transformative eye of the artist and turned the entire countryside
into one large experimental site. Despite the sheer magnitude of his
achievement , however, it is possible that what Moses actually built
constituted only the roughest indication of what he was able to envi–
sion . As he rather wistfully remarked: "It is not to be wondered at
that those who build highways and crossings should have a feeling of
the transience of human affairs and a desire to pass on directions to
future travelers."
We rush like a cornet into infinite space
- Fisher Ames on the Louisiana Purchase
In 1917 the young American Randolph Bourne, observing the
alacrity with which his educated contemporaries had embraced
American involvement in the war, wrote that his was a generation of
instrumentalists, enthusiasts trained in "the pragmatic dispensation,"
possessed of remarkable technical aptitude yet devoid of any sense
whatsoever of the worth or very purpose of such facility. Considera–
tion of values had been subordinated entirely to technique, to the
cultivation and exercise of skill
per se.
"They are vague as to what
kind of society they want," Bourne noted , "or what kind of society
America needs, but they are equipped with all the administrative at–
titudes and talents necessary to attain it." Bourne's analysis of the
technocratic mind remains as incisive as ever, and events since have
reinforced this depiction of huge energies treated as ends-in–
themselves, developed and deployed virtually
in vacuo .
The twentieth
century, "the American Century," may well be viewed in the future
as that period which forever affirmed the American capacity to surge
forward without reflection.
If
so, the century will stand framed by
two events that mirror the darker aspects of such blind urgency: the
foundering of the American-financed Titanic in 1912 and the explo–
sion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
Each of these catastrophic events can be construed as epochal
instances of aspiration gone awry, marked by startling similarities.
Both the Titanic and the Challenger constituted the most advanced
and highly-touted technological achievements of the day; each was
seen as a breathtaking transcendence of man's terrestrial limitations.
The loss of each ship precipitated the kind of deep shock that only
