Before there was progress
DAVID WOOTTON ON MANKIND’S BRIEF HISTORY ON THIS PLANET AND THE METHOD OF EXAMINATION AND DISCOVERY THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
On Oct. 6, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature at McGill will be awarded to the author of a book “determined to have had (or likely to have) a profound literary, social and academic impact in the area of history.” This week, the National Post, in partnership with The Walrus, is publishing excerpts from all six 2016 Cundill Prize finalists.
Modern science was invented between 1572, when Ty cho Brahe saw a nova, or new star, and 1704, when Newton published his Opticks, which demonstrated that white light is made up of light of all the colours of the rainbow, that you can split it into its component colours with a prism and that colour inheres in light, not in objects.
The world we live in is much younger than you might expect. Modern science is even younger. There have been tool- making “humans” on Earth for around two million years. Our species, Homo sapiens, appeared 200,000 years ago, and pottery dates back to around 25,000 years ago. But the most important transformation in human history before the invention of science, the Neolithic Revolution, took place comparatively recently, between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago. It was then that animals were domesticated, agriculture began and stone tools began to be replaced by metal ones. There have been roughly 600 generations since human beings first ceased to be hunter- gatherers. The first sailing vessel dates back to 7,000 years or so ago, and so does the origin of writing. Those who accept Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution can have no patience with a Biblical chronology, which places the creation of the world 6,000 years ago, but what we may term historical humankind (humans who have left written records behind them), as opposed to archaeological humankind ( humans who have left only artifacts behind them), has existed only for about that length of time, some 300 generations. Add the word “great” in front of “grandparent” 300 times: it will fill just over half a page of print. This is the true length of human history; before that there were two million years of prehistory.
Gertrude Stein ( 1874— 1946) said of Oakland, Calif., that there was “no there there” — it was all new, a place without history. She preferred Paris. She was wrong about Oakland: human beings have lived there for 20,000 years or so. But she was also right: the living there was so easy that there was no need to develop agriculture, let alone writing. Domesticated plants, horses, metal tools (including guns) and writing arrived only with the Spanish after 1535. (California is exceptional — elsewhere in the Americas the domestication of maize goes back 10,000 years, as far as any other plant anywhere in the world, and writing goes back 3,000 years.)
So the world we live in is almost brand new — older in some places than others but, in comparison to the two million years of tool-making history, box- fresh. After the Neolithic Revolution the rate of change slowed almost to a crawl. During the next 6,500 years there were remarkable technological advances — the invention of the water- wheel and the windmill, for example — but until 400 years ago technological change was slow, and it was frequently reversed. The Romans were amazed by stories of what Archimedes (287-212 BCE) had been able to do; and 15th-century Italian architects explored the ruined buildings of ancient Rome convinced that they were studying a far more advanced civilization than their own. No one imagined a day when the history of humanity could be conceived as a history of progress, yet barely three centuries later, in the middle of the 18th century, progress had come to seem so inevitable that it was read backwards into the whole of previous history. Something extraordinary had happened in t he meantime. What exactly was it that enabled 17 th- and 18th- century science to make progress in a way that previous systems of knowledge could not? What is it that we now have that the Romans and their Renaissance admirers did not?
When William Shakespeare ( 1564- 1616) wrote Julius Caesar (1599) he made the small error of referring to a clock striking — there were no mechanical clocks in ancient Rome. In Coriolanus ( 1608) there is a reference to the points of the compass — but the Romans did not have the nautical compass. These errors reflect the fact that when Shakespeare and his contemporaries read Roman authors they encountered constant reminders that the Romans were pagans, not Christians, but few reminders of any technological gap between Rome and the Renaissance. The Romans did not have the printing press, but they had plenty of books, and slaves to copy them. They did not have gunpowder, but they had artillery in the form of the ballista. They did not have mechanical clocks, but they had sundials and water clocks. They did not have large sailing vessels that could sail into the wind, but in Shakespeare’s day warfare in the Mediterranean was still conducted by galleys ( rowed boats). And, of course, in many practical ways, t he Romans were much more advanced than the Elizabethans — better roads, central heating, proper baths. Shakespeare, perfectly sensibly, imagined ancient Rome as just like contemporary London but with sunshine and togas. He and his contemporaries had no reason to believe in progress. “For Shakespeare,” s ays Jorge Luis Borges ( 1899-1986), “all characters, whether they are Danish, like Hamlet, Scottish, like Macbeth, Greek, Roman or Italian, all the characters in all the many works are treated as if they were Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Shakespeare felt the variety of men, but not the variety of historical eras. History did not exist for him.” Borges’ notion of history is a modern one; Shakespeare knew plenty of history, but ( unlike his contemporary Francis Bacon, who had grasped what a Scientific Revolution might accomplish) he had no notion of irreversible historical change.
We might think that gunpowder, the printing press and the discovery of America in 1492 should have obliged the Renaissance to acquire a sense of the past as lost and gone forever, but the educated only slowly became aware of the irreversible consequences that flowed from these crucial innovations. It was only with hindsight that they came to symbolize a new era; and it was the Scientific Revolution itself that was chiefly responsible for the Enlightenment’s conviction that progress had become unstoppable. By the middle of the 18th century Shakespeare’s sense of time had been replaced by our own. This book stops there, not because that is when the revolution ends, but because by that time it had become clear that an unstoppable process of transformation had begun. The triumph of Newtonianism marks the end of the beginning.
NO ONE IMAGINED A DAY WHEN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY COULD BE CONCEIVED AS A HISTORY OF PROGRESS.