Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

But read what the great German poet, writer, scientist, and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said on the subject almost two hundred years ago in 1825, soon after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution1: Everything nowadays is ultra, everything is being transcended continually in thought as well as in action. No one knows himself any longer; no one can grasp the element in which he lives and works or the materials that he handles. Pure simplicity is out of the question; of simplifiers we have enough. Young people are stirred up much too early in life and then carried away in the whirl of the times. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires. . . . Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every possible kind of rapid communication are what the educated world seeks but it only over-educates itself and thereby persists in its mediocrity. It is, moreover, the result of universalization that a mediocre culture [then] becomes [the] common [culture]. . . . Although it’s a curious mixture of comments on the accelerating pace of life and the resulting erosion of culture and values, expressed in a slightly archaic language, it sounds hauntingly familiar.