The last several hundred years may be viewed as a cascade of nuclear collisions in which one stratum of human consciousness has been replaced by another. With the advent of the typed word in the 1400’s, the world in all its span was contracted down into pulp and ink . Every reality which once stood at the nexus of a thousand interrelated realities was hacked, torn, and plucked from its place of origin. The tree was denuded of its leaves. The trunk was stripped of its bark. Passed through a sieve, the sea was separated into salt and water. And what occurred in all these innumerable separations? Everything in heaven and earth was isolated. Everything was tacked beneath the all-encompassing domain of the written word. 

Torn to bits and pieces, the tree, the sea, and the world were atomized. Though they were once a part of an organic whole, they were metamorphed into a conglomeration of words. As a hundred printed words made a page, a hundred pages a book, a hundred books seemed as though they could encompass the entire world. For the first time in the printed book, man felt like he could codify the whole of reality. 

With this new intellectual power placed in his hand, man felt as though every dark corner could be enlightened, every savage beast tamed, every corner of creation explored, and every mystery penetrated to the depth of its profundity by the power of his ability to name and categorize. Man was hungry then for knowledge and for domination. He longed to bend the world to his designs, to command the wind and the waves, to turn lead into gold. And, by fate of Providence, at the same time a crop was beginning to grow which served to satiate that hunger for knowledge and domination. That crop was coffee. 

As the quest to codify reality was well underway, the arabica bean served as the perfect stimulant to speed it along. The book became the roadmap for the world. Likewise the coffee bean became the fuel for the car that would drive upon its roads. Within the span of a century, two drugs were poured into the nervous system of Europe. That great aphrodisiac, Knowledge, was the first. And coffee came as a welcome concomitant. It is perhaps no coincidence that coffee was legalized in Europe only a decade before Martin Luther nailed his Theses to the Wittenberg door. 

What happened in the 1500’s may be characterized thus: two great stimulants were introduced into the consciousness of men. On the one hand, the rise of printing served as a stimulant for social communication. Past barriers were demolished and new bridges were raised. On the other, we had a quite literal stimulant in coffee, one which directly acted upon the nervous system. The consequence was a long age of dynamism, in which change followed upon change at a rate unprecedented in human history. More discoveries were made possible in the fifteen hundreds than have been seen before or since.

Here we are now. The world is not today what it was even a hundred years ago. And the difference between the world a hundred years ago and the world five hundred years ago is still the difference between night and day. Still more, I think most of us are certain that the world a hundred years hence will be one we cannot imagine. So what do we make of all this dynamism, all this incessant change. I have at a radical and perhaps discomforting thesis. 

What happened in the the 1500’s was that the nervous system of man was changed, perhaps permanently. With the caffeine that was poured through people’s bellies and hence into their brains, I would argue that Europe and the West became increasingly entranced by that newfound friend of ours, Dopamine. As the influx of caffeine drove away the sleepiness of our bodies, the West found an insatiable drive, an endless quest upwards towards higher splendors of knowledge, towards greater webs of taxinomia, towards a universality of knowledge that could encompass all things.