I keep hearing “emergent situation” or similar phrases used in place of “emergency”. This is incorrect; “emergent” means something like “coming into existence” or “coming into view” and does not, by itself, imply urgency or crisis. Although before taking to my blog in anger I had only heard this usage rather than seen it in print, a quick visit to the search engines reveals the poisonous weed taking root in (where else?) the offices of state bureaucrats and educationists. In the New Jersey Administrative Code, Chapter 53B (Jursidictional Assignments for Railroad Overhead Bridges), we find the phrase explicitly defined thus:

"Emergent situation" means a sudden, urgent, or unexpected occurrence or occasion that interferes with the free and safe movement of traffic over a railroad overhead bridge, which requires immediate action.

This same production informs us also of the possibility of “emergent bridge repairs”, whatever that means. Are the repairs emerging in some way? Is the bridge?

If you traveled back to 1950, and told people that in 75 years we would be struggling to shut down coal plants and still used petrol in most cars, they would not have believed you. The future was atomic-powered, after all.

If you traveled back to 1975 and told people that in 50 years Concorde would be long retired with no replacement and that commercial supersonic transport no longer existed, they would not have believed you.

If you traveled back to 2000, and told undergrad Eiki that in 25 years nanotech would seem like a fad despite all of academia shoving the prefix "nano" into their grant proposals and that the nanoscale assembler would still not exist 25 years later, I would not have believed you. I might have been relieved but I would have been skeptical.

If you traveled back to 2015 and told optimistic 37-year old Eiki that in ten years fully automated self-driving would still be mostly a tech demo unseen outside of the Bay area and a handful of other places, that very few people would ever have been driven by a car operating on its own, and that basically no one that drives for a living would yet be disemployed by self-driving vehicles, I would not have believed you.

Be careful when you declare the adoption of some technology to be inevitable or just-around-the-corner.

Happiness is the feeling that power increases—that resistance is being overcome.

—Nietzsche

This famous definition sticks in the throat a bit because of Nietzsche's dark reputation and how it makes that “power” sound, but try a small substitution with modern therapeutic language: “Happiness is the feeling that you are being empowered” and notice how differently it hits. Or how about this very slight modification: “Happiness is the feeling that you are moving in the right direction”?

Looked at this way, Nietzsche turns into an old softy, offering us a surprisingly gentle and generous definition, in which happiness is no destination, no distant mountain peak where all is well forevermore, but something accessible, even easily so. No matter what gloomy valley you find yourself in, one step up into light—and even into power, if you will—is enough.

In the 1940s, George Orwell, fighting a long campaign to keep the English of his contemporaries clean and honest, directed some of his fire against the word “jackboot”, denoting a type of cavalry equipment that was already mostly useful only as a symbol of totalitarianism. In his “As I Please” column (#62), he complained of being unable to determine what a jackboot was, exactly, and quipped that it must be “a kind of boot that you put on when you want to behave tyrannically”. Orwell's definition has stuck with me because it is obviously even more apt now that “jackboot” (and indeed, all the language used to condemn 20th century fascism) is even more stale and meaningless than ever, while showing absolutely no signs of being retired in favor of something fresher.

So it was a surprise to come across jackboots, as part of the ordinary equipment of some not-necessarily-authoritarian person traveling by horse, in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities recently. It struck my 2018 ear and made me take notice, reminding me to think about the politicization of words and causing a brief moment of something like relief, because it brought me to a time before ideological warfare became quite so constant a feature of life.

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.

—C. S. Lewis, from his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation *

I like this idea that old books can be an antidote to the unexamined pieties of contemporary thought, and have been putting Lewis' suggestion into practice; at the moment my daily reading is split almost equally between a just-released and currently-best-selling work of pop psychology and Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (although I suspect Lewis would not have counted this as “old”, preferring to read the actual Romans themselves, Gibbon is revered enough and indeed, old enough to have entered the canon himself, even if through the side door).