"Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press"
About this Quote
Lange points to a defining but often overlooked transformation of modernity: minds becoming networked. Postal systems, telegraph cables, the telephone, and the popular press shrink distance not only for goods and people but for ideas, judgments, and hopes. With speed and reach, they stitch together dispersed publics into a shared field of attention. Events no longer belong solely to the places where they occur; they are instantly reframed in distant cities, debated in newspapers, and echoed in parliaments. The result is intellectual interdependence, a condition in which knowledge, opinion, and imagination flow across borders and begin to shape one another.
The phrase just as characteristic implies that this intangible web is as emblematic of the modern age as factories, railways, and world markets. Lange, a leading advocate of internationalism and a Nobel Peace laureate after World War I, believed that politics could no longer be conducted as if nations were sealed containers. Public opinion itself had become an international force. The same media that could rally a country to war could also knit together peace movements, labor and women’s organizations, scientific communities, and inter-parliamentary networks. Through these channels, people learned to see themselves as part of a wider human conversation, and that recognition demanded new forms of cooperation and law.
He also hints at ambivalence. Interdependence does not guarantee harmony; it can synchronize hatreds and amplify propaganda as readily as empathy and knowledge. Yet even its dangers confirm the underlying fact: decisions in one place reverberate widely because minds are linked. For Lange, this was the strongest argument for building institutions capable of mediating those reverberations.
Read today, the insight feels prescient. The technologies have changed, but the dynamic remains. Communication media do not merely transmit messages; they create a shared mental environment in which the fate of communities becomes mutually entangled, and responsibility must expand to match that entanglement.
The phrase just as characteristic implies that this intangible web is as emblematic of the modern age as factories, railways, and world markets. Lange, a leading advocate of internationalism and a Nobel Peace laureate after World War I, believed that politics could no longer be conducted as if nations were sealed containers. Public opinion itself had become an international force. The same media that could rally a country to war could also knit together peace movements, labor and women’s organizations, scientific communities, and inter-parliamentary networks. Through these channels, people learned to see themselves as part of a wider human conversation, and that recognition demanded new forms of cooperation and law.
He also hints at ambivalence. Interdependence does not guarantee harmony; it can synchronize hatreds and amplify propaganda as readily as empathy and knowledge. Yet even its dangers confirm the underlying fact: decisions in one place reverberate widely because minds are linked. For Lange, this was the strongest argument for building institutions capable of mediating those reverberations.
Read today, the insight feels prescient. The technologies have changed, but the dynamic remains. Communication media do not merely transmit messages; they create a shared mental environment in which the fate of communities becomes mutually entangled, and responsibility must expand to match that entanglement.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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