Word: one
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From the very beginning, cultural evolution was a social enterprise, mediated by what you could loosely call a social brain. One person invents, say, a flint hand ax; the idea creeps across the landscape, gets improved here and there, and finally, in a distant land, stimulates a whole new idea: axes with handles conveniently attached...
...feedback, was maturing. With each advance in subsistence technology, survival grew more secure, hastening population growth; and as population grew, the advances came more quickly. By the Mesolithic Age, around 10,000 B.C., with the neuronal population up to around 4 million, the rate of advance had moved from one major innovation per 20,000 years to a sizzling one per 200--including such gifts to posterity as combs and beer...
...sweet it was--the genteel culture of this century's first decade. There were noises off, of course: the clatter of Ashcans in New York City's ateliers, for example. But--saints be praised!--New York's police commissioner had closed Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession after one performance because it was "revolting, indecent and nauseating when it was not boring." As late as 1912, a magazine editor (quoted in Ann Douglas' Terrible Honesty) could write that "no-one paints life as it is--thank Heaven--for we could not bear it," and receive few arguments from his readers...
...economic historian Joel Mokyr, stressing this sort of international synergy, has attributed Europe's Industrial Revolution to "chains of inspiration" by which one idea sparked another. But, as we've seen, chains of inspiration had been vital to the whole history of technical advance, even the glacial process by which the stone flake inspired the inventor of the stone knife. What was new was how fast the chains were being forged, even across great distances...
...happened so fast. One minute Madama Butterfly was on the Gramophone, Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills was on the reading table, the pretty Gibson Girl you had seen in a magazine was on your mind. You wondered if you wanted to see Maude Adams in her return engagement as Peter Pan. Or perhaps brave the odors and chatter of the nickelodeon to catch that spunky new girl--her name, unpublicized at the time, was Mary Pickford--people were talking about in Ramona...