Man is older yet than his civilization. His actions pre-exist his works, and his languages are older than his words. He was born into the world as part of it, and belonging to nothing else. But man has become a seperate creature, and lives in means past living - in some strange action of time, he has stretched his roots into boundless air, and lives, for a time, beyond earth.
Darwin was very right about the development of living things through generations; the man that was too large found it difficult to feed himself sufficiently, and iether rose to the challenge dealt him or died a lean, aesthetic death. Likewise the man who was too small: he would find more problems surviving when strength and force were called for, and may often have met grim deaths at the hands of larger fates.
But the problem of man is his mind. It is a fearful instrument, one that sees its own problems, and consciously seeks to correct them. A squirrel knows enough to store food away - a man knows to grow it, to store it, and then to prepare it to be more than itself. In doing so, he crosses many gaps that no other creature dares bridge.
Civilization has allowed man to be higher than beasts, but has made him less of a man. With the aid of some civilized machine or domesticated beast, he finds need of lesser strength; his muscles weaken for ownership of an ox, or a push-cart, or an automobile, as surely as his efficiency increases. The same is true not only of the farmer or wares-dealer, but also the mathematician, the facts-checker, and even the artist. A photographer can now do with the push of a few buttons, over the span of a few seconds, things that his counterpart of a century earlier would labor over for hours - lighting, exposure, and stops, and the chemical treatment of a thousand little points to prepare himself for the moments he would spend with the shutter open. This in itself streamlined and mechinised one of the key errands of the painter, who learned manually the tasks created by his many colors, and took to composing from scratch the forms he had chosen to render as image on a flat and empty surface. Today's photographer achieves his goal by pointing and pressing a button, and a very little more; his forebears did this same thing only after achieving complete knowledge of the human face, the shapes of fruit, the way things hang in the air when in motion, and then by mastering thier chosen media to reflect all this in one artistic product. The camera not make its user less of an artist; I do contend that it brings his mind to less use, and therefore, makes him less of a man.
This new century presents this same problem to virtually every expertice that a civilized human being can practice, bringing us farther away from the point at which we became experts at all. This may indeed, be the century's problem; more likely, its downfall. The task at hand may be simplified by using a tool - but the same task will become incromprehensible to another when that tool is taken away. The greatness of the species is reduces, if not completely nullified if we do not use our minds to solve problems, and continue to use them even after the problem is solved.
