I am leafing through a book called "Terre des Hommes", an autobiography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He was a French aviator, writer and aristocrat. (The English title is "Wind, Sand and Stars").
My first impression is that this book has two distinct gears. On the one hand, tales of life and companionship among pioneering aviators, their struggles against the weather aboard capricious planes, and the looming void of oceans and empty territories, take one back to the early 1900s, and are placed decidedly in the past.
On the other hand, some of the more philosophical passages might as well have been written today. For example:
Pour saisir le monde aujourd'hui, nous usons d'un langage qui fut établi pour le monde d'hier. Et la vie du passé nous semble mieux répondre à notre nature, pour la seule raison qu'elle répond mieux à notre langage.
Chaque progrès nous a chassés un peu plus loin hors d'habitudes que nous avions à peine acquises, et nous sommes véritablement des émigrants qui n'ont pas fondé encore leur patrie.
I would translate this as follows.
"To make sense of today's world, we use a language which was established for the world as it was yesterday. And our past way of life appears to us better suited to our nature, simply because it is more closely espoused by our language.
Every advance has chased us a bit further out from the habits that we had just barely acquired, and we are truly emigrants who have not yet founded their country."
If Saint-Exupéry found progress hard to keep up with a hundred years ago, I wonder what he would make of today's pace of technological advance. It is certainly true that society changes under technological influence, and that it takes time for language to catch up, because we are still exploring the outlines of new concepts and constructs, and appropriate words can only be minted once the concepts crystallize in our collective psyche. The new words then seem like clumsy intruders at first, barging in uninvited and not fitting into our current worldview. Then, over time, we understand their place in the tapestry, and the concepts themselves are further reshaped by this understanding.
This brings me to another passage, a few pages later:
Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. Au terme de son évolution, la machine se dissimule.
This translates to:
"It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove. At the end of its evolution, the machine is transparent."
The text actually refers to the shape of airplane wings, but also to artefacts more generally. I think this is indeed true of mature technology. Once the main usefulness of an artefact becomes increasingly clear, the design of subsequent generations of the artefact will aim to achieve its purpose ever more seamlessly, and progressively tend toward the simplest and most intuitive forms possible.
I'm enjoying the read so far!
