One of the most famous cuts in cinema history, from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” perfectly captures a concept known as the technological sublime. First, we see an angry ape bludgeoning one of his fellows to death with a scavenged bone; he’s only just discovered that bones can be used this way, and he hurls his weapon into the air in celebration. We follow the bone upward as it tumbles against the unpolluted blue sky. Then, suddenly, we cut to outer space, millions of years in the ape’s future. The bone has been replaced by an elegant satellite, floating past the curve of the Earth. Over the next few minutes, as a ship docks with a space station, we see just how far humanity has come.
If you’ve encountered any science fiction, you’ve experienced the technological sublime—the feeling of awe, braided with dread, that can emerge in response to the engulfing possibilities of technology’s progress. Maybe you’ve gaped at the sprawling cyber-cityscapes of “Blade Runner,” or at the impossibly tall, leaflike alien ships in “Arrival.” In the cascading green code of “The Matrix,” you might have sensed a promise of revelation—or perhaps Ava, the uncannily beautiful android played by Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina,” has induced some idea of what it might mean to be more than human. In all of these cases, technology feels big, strange, relentless, but also mind-expanding and appealing—a bracing wave that will sweep you up.
These are fantasies about an as-yet-unrealized future. But the technological sublime exists in our world, too. Decades ago, when I was in elementary school, we watched the space shuttle take off from Cape Canaveral, agog at the power of its rockets even on our classroom’s small TV. Today, crowds gather to witness towering SpaceX boosters return to Earth, where they’re caught by giant mechanical arms. Rocketry comes across as futuristic, but actually the modern version of it is a hundred years old—and so, when we thrill to it, we thrill not to a fantasy but to a fact of life. When I walk to The New Yorker’s offices, in One World Trade Center, I often crane my head to trace the building’s facets as they flow upward to its spire. Such architecture evokes a city of the future, but it exists in the here and now, and the innovations that make it possible—steel skeletons and curtain walls, H.V.A.C. systems and elevators—stretch back to the nineteenth century. We live, and have lived for a long time, in a high-tech age.
“The sublime” is an old concept. It denotes, at minimum, an especially transporting kind of aesthetic experience, perhaps the highest kind. The writer of “On the Sublime,” a two-thousand-year-old Greek text, associated it with an immortal literary greatness—the sort conjured by a phrase like “Let there be light.” In the eighteenth century, the concept took a turn, when philosophers connected it to the natural world. In a seminal treatise, “A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” Edmund Burke distinguished between two kinds of aesthetic experience: a pleasing, unintimidating sort of beauty (think of a flower, or a poem), and a scarier kind of beauty, which we might face when we stand before a roaring waterfall or an endless expanse of desert. The waterfall and the desert dwarf us; they’re indifferent to us; they could kill us. Yet we find them sublime, as long as we can appreciate their power from a safe remove. The experience of sublimity, Burke wrote, is “not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror.” The sublime invokes in us “astonishment,” he went on, and also “awe, reverence, and respect.”
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