The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  Wilberforce’s remark about Huxley’s ape ancestors was thus more than a snarky gibe. Consciously or not, the bishop was effectively asking whether Huxley was prepared to affirm that he and all other people were prisoners of biology. Blinded by contempt, Huxley seems not to have realized that his adversary was posing, however rudely, an important question. (The “great question,” the great conservationist George Perkins Marsh called it a few years later: “whether man is of nature or above her.”) Not grasping the underpinnings of the dispute, Huxley didn’t even try to engage them. Darwin later shuddered at the “awful battles which have raged about ‘species’ at Oxford,” but there was no actual debate. At least not in the sense of a genuine attempt to hash out diverging beliefs.

  Both Huxley and Wilberforce thought they had come off well. Three days after the encounter, the bishop bragged to a friend, “I think I thoroughly beat him.” Certainly his supporters in the audience, “cheering lustily,” thought so. Equally pleased, Huxley later boasted that he “was the most popular man in Oxford for full four and twenty hours afterwards.” In the years to come, Huxley and Wilberforce ran into each other from time to time. The meetings were always cordial. Both viewing themselves as the winner, they could be magnanimous in victory.

  Over the decades Huxley came to be seen as triumphant. In his school in the 1960s, the writer Christopher Hitchens was taught that “Huxley cleaned Wilberforce’s clock, ate his lunch, used him as a mop for the floor, and all that.” In my college a few years later, I learned much the same thing. The Wilberforce-Huxley dustup was presented as a morality play ending in a straightforward victory for rational thought. Only much later did I realize that from today’s perspective the implications of our species’ lack of specialness were different from what my teacher and textbook had presented.

  In Wilberforce’s day, those who hoped for a better future cheered on Huxley, because science and technology seemed to promise a better life. But now that science and technology have allowed the human enterprise to risk its own survival, the partisans of hope have stepped back from some of Huxley’s implications. Wizards and Prophets each have a separate blueprint for the future. But both assume that Wilberforce, not Huxley, was correct—that human beings are special creatures who can escape the fate of other successful species. If the Oxford debate was a morality play, the vices and virtues have slipped offstage and switched masks.

  Slight Amendment of the Foregoing, Whooping-Crane Edition

  Lynn Margulis was a Huxleyite. When she told me that human beings, like Gause’s protozoa, would wipe themselves out, she was affirming her belief in Darwin’s view: biological laws apply to every creature. After talking with her I sometimes told people about these ideas. Few accepted them, and even those who agreed did not fully endorse Margulis’s perspective. They told me that the human race was doomed because people are greedy and stupid, not because, as Margulis thought, overreaches and crashes are the natural way, as much a part of the wonders of life as coral reefs and tropical forests. But I also never met anyone who had a convincing argument that she was wrong.

  A year after her death, I bumped into Daniel B. Botkin, an ecologist who had recently retired from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Botkin has worked in many areas but is perhaps best known for Discordant Harmonies (1990), a classic study debunking the long-held belief that ecosystems will exist in a timeless balance unless people disturb them. He had known Margulis well and respected her. “But she’s wrong on this one,” he said.

  Not all species would multiply themselves out of existence if given the chance, he said. Among the exceptions is the whooping crane, Grus americana. The subject of one of the longest conservation efforts in North America, the whooper, as it is called, is a sister species to the Eurasian crane, Grus grus; geneticists believe the two species split off from a common ancestor 1 to 3 million years ago. Despite their physical similarity, the birds behave differently. Hundreds of thousands of Eurasian cranes exist, despite human hunting. The bird aggressively expands its territory when possible, sometimes infuriating farmers by taking over their fields. Whoopers, by contrast, are shy creatures of the marsh, rarely seen in groups bigger than two; as far as is known, the entire species has never numbered more than 1,500 individuals. “Explosive growth is evidently not part of its evolutionary strategy,” Botkin said.

  There are other examples—not many, but they exist. Another example, from Botkin: the Tiburon mariposa lily (Calochortus tiburonensis). Native to northern California, it lives only on soils made from serpentine, a relatively rare kind of stone that produces soils filled with chromium and nickel, which are toxic to most plants. Serpentine soils occur usually in isolated patches with relatively defined borders—natural petri dishes, one might say. The lily reproduces slowly enough that it never overwhelms its environment. It never hits the edge of the petri dish.

  Was there any known case, I asked Botkin, of a species changing its evolutionary strategy? A creature that went from rapid, Gause-style expansion to quiet adjustment to its environment? Of a protozoan transforming itself, so to speak, into a whooping crane? Or of a plant that somehow makes its own serpentine soil? Isn’t this what Borlaug and Vogt were each advocating in their different way? That people had a special something—call it a soul, as Wilberforce did—which allowed them to do this?

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Botkin said.

  Exemption

  One possible answer to the question is provided by Robinson Crusoe, hero of Daniel Defoe’s famous novel. Shipwrecked alone on an uninhabited island off Venezuela in 1659, Crusoe is an impressive example of fictional human resilience and drive. During his twenty-seven-year exile he learns to catch fish, hunt rabbits, tame goats, prune citrus trees, and create “plantations” of barley and rice from seeds salvaged from the wreck. (Defoe didn’t know that citrus and goats were not native to the Caribbean and thus probably wouldn’t have been on the island.) Rescue comes in the form of a shipful of mutineers, who plan to maroon their captain on the supposedly empty island. Crusoe helps the captain recapture his ship and offers the defeated mutineers a choice: permanent exile on the island or trial in England. All choose the island. Crusoe has harnessed so much of its productive power to human use that even a gaggle of inept seamen can survive there in comfort.

  Robinson Crusoe’s first three chapters recount how its hero ended up on his ill-fated voyage. The youngest son of an English merchant, Crusoe has a restless spirit that leads him to become an independent slave trader. On a voyage to Africa his ship is captured by a “Turkish rover” captained by a Moor from Morocco. “As his proper Prize,” Crusoe becomes the captain’s house slave. After two years of servitude, Crusoe steals his master’s fishing boat and escapes. He bumbles in the boat down the West African coast without food or water and is rescued by a Portuguese slave ship bound for Brazil. There the enterprising Crusoe establishes a small tobacco plantation. But he is short of labor, and decides with some other plantation owners to obtain that labor by taking a ship to Africa and buying some slaves. The ship wrecks on the return voyage. Except for Crusoe, all hands perish, slaves included. He ends up alone on his island.

  What is striking to a modern reader is that Defoe saw nothing remarkable about expecting readers to sympathize with a man in the slave trade. Crusoe has no qualms about slaving even after having been, most unhappily, a slave himself. Here, character echoes author: Defoe extolled slavery as “a most Profitable, Useful, and absolutely necessary Branch of our Commerce.” Backing words with deeds, he owned shares in the Royal African Company, created in 1660 to buy men and women in Africa and transport them in chains to the Americas. When the company was attacked in Parliament, he offered to write the equivalent of editorials in its favor. It paid him the rough equivalent of $50,000 for his public-relations services.

  Defoe was a person of his time. Three centuries ago, when he was writing Robinson Crusoe, societies from one end of the world to another depended on slave labor, as had been
the case since at least the Code of Hammurabi, in ancient Babylon. Customs differed from one place to another, but slavery was sanctioned and practiced everywhere from Mauritania to Manchuria. Unfree workers existed by the million in the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, and Ming China. In classical Athens, two-thirds of the inhabitants were slaves; imperial Rome, the historian James C. Scott has written, “turned much of the Mediterranean basin into a massive slave emporium.” Slaves were less common in early modern Europe, but Portugal, Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands happily exploited huge numbers of them in their American colonies. In the last half of the eighteenth century alone, almost 4 million people were taken from Africa in chains. In colonies throughout the Americas at that time, in places ranging from Brazil to Barbados, from South Carolina to Suriname, slaves were so fundamental to the economy that they outnumbered masters, sometimes by ten to one.

  Then in the nineteenth century, slavery almost stopped entirely. The implausibility of this change is stunning. In 1860, slaves were the single most valuable economic asset in the United States, collectively worth more than $3 billion, an eye-popping sum at a time when the U.S. gross national product was less than $5 billion. (The slaves would be worth as much as $10 trillion in today’s money.) Rather than investing in factories like northern entrepreneurs, southern businessmen had sunk their capital into slaves. Rightly so, financially speaking—slaves had a higher return on investment than any other commodity available to them. Enchained men and women had made the region politically powerful, and gave social status to an entire class of poor whites. Slavery was the foundation of the social order. It was, thundered South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, “instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.” (Calhoun was no fringe character; a former U.S. secretary of war and vice president, he would become secretary of state.) Yet despite the institution’s great economic value, part of the United States set out to destroy it, wrecking much of the national economy and killing half a million citizens along the way.

  Incredibly, the turn against slavery was as universal as slavery itself. Great Britain, leader of the global slave trade, banned its market in human beings in 1807 after a tireless campaign by abolitionists. Two laws enacted in 1833 and 1838 freed all British slaves. Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal soon outlawed their slave trades, too, and after that slavery itself. Like stars winking out at the approach of dawn, cultures across the globe removed themselves from the previously universal exchange of human cargo. Slavery still exists; the International Labor Organization estimates that almost 25 million people are still forced to work as captives. But in no society anywhere is slavery a legally protected institution—part of the social fabric—as it was throughout the world two centuries ago.

  Historians provide many reasons for this extraordinary transition, high among them the fierce opposition of slaves themselves. But another important cause is that abolitionists convinced people around the world that slavery was a moral disaster. An institution fundamental to human society for millennia was made over by ideas and a call to action, loudly repeated.

  In the last few centuries, such profound changes have occurred repeatedly. Another, possibly even bigger example: since the beginning of our species, almost every known society has been based on the subjugation of women by men. Tales of past matriarchal societies abound, but there is little archaeological evidence for their veracity. In the long run, women’s lack of liberty has been as central to the human enterprise as gravitation to the celestial order. The degree of suppression varied from time to time and place to place, but women never had an equal voice. Union and Confederacy clashed over slavery, but they were in accord on the status of women: in neither state could women attend school, have a bank account, or, in many places, own non-personal property. Equally confining in different ways were female lives in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Nowadays women are the majority of U.S. college students, the majority of the U.S. workforce, and the majority of U.S. voters. Again, historians assign multiple causes to this shift, rapid in time, confounding in scope. But a central element was the power of ideas—the voices and actions of suffragists, who through decades of ridicule and harassment pressed their case. In recent years something similar may have occurred with gay rights: first a few lonely advocates, censured and mocked; then victories in the social and legal sphere; finally, perhaps, a slow movement to equality.

  Every whit as profound is the decline in violence. Ten thousand years ago, at the dawn of agriculture, societies mustered labor for the fields and controlled harvest surpluses by organizing themselves into states and empires. These promptly revealed an astonishing appetite for war. Their penchant for violence was unaffected by increasing prosperity or higher technological, cultural, and social accomplishments. When classical Athens was at its zenith in the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., it was ever at war: against Sparta (First and Second Peloponnesian Wars, Corinthian War); against Persia (Greco-Persian Wars, Wars of the Delian League); against Aegina (Aeginetan War); against Macedon (Olynthian War); against Samios (Samian War); against Chios, Rhodes, and Cos (Social War). Greece was nothing special—look at the ghastly histories of China, sub-Saharan Africa, or Mesoamerica. Look at early modern Europe, where war followed upon war so fast that historians bundle them into catch-all titles like the Hundred Years’ War or the even more destructive Thirty Years’ War. The brutality of these conflicts is difficult to grasp; to cite an example from the Israeli political scientist Azar Gat, Germany lost between a fifth and a third of its population in the Thirty Years’ War—“higher than the German casualties in the First and Second World Wars combined.” The statistic is sobering: Germany lost a greater percentage of its people to violence in the seventeenth century than in the twentieth, despite the intervening advances in the technology of slaughter, despite being governed for more than a decade by maniacs who systematically murdered millions of their fellow citizens.

  As many as one out of every ten people met a violent death in the first millennium A.D., the archaeologist Ian Morris has estimated. Ever since, violence has declined—gradually, then suddenly. In the decades after the Second World War, rates of violent death plunged to the lowest levels ever seen. Today, humans are far less likely to be slain by other members of their species than a hundred years ago, or a thousand—an extraordinary transformation that has occurred, almost unheralded, in the lifetime of many of the people reading this book. Given the mayhem documented in every day’s headlines, the horrors in the Middle East and the ghastly strife in northeast Africa, the idea that violence is diminishing may seem absurd. Nonetheless, every independent effort to collect global statistics on violence suggests that we seem to be winning, at least for now, what the political scientist Joshua Goldstein calls “the war on war.”

  Multiple causes for this turnaround have been suggested. But Goldstein, a leading scholar in this field, argues that the most important is the emergence of multinational institutions like the United Nations, which owe their origins to peace activists from the last century. These organizations have by no means stopped all fighting. But over time, Goldstein says, they have snuffed out, almost invisibly, conflicts that in previous eras would have led to horrific brutality.

  Past successes do not guarantee future progress. Violence has ticked upward in the last decade, and may get worse. One can readily imagine some ghastly political or religious insurgency that reinstates slavery; many insurrectionary forces go out of their way to brutalize women. Global poverty has fallen dramatically in recent decades, but could rebound. Lunatics with nuclear weapons may yet strike—a possibility that will never go away. There is no permanent victory condition for being human, as the writer Bruce Sterling has remarked.

  Given this record, though, even Lynn Margulis might pause. No European in 1800 could have imagined that in 2000 Europe would have no legal slavery, women would be able to vote, and same-sex couples would be able to marry. No one could have guessed that a continent that had been tearing itself apa
rt for centuries would be largely free of armed conflict, even amid terrible economic times. No one could have guessed that Europe would have vanquished famine.

  Preventing Homo sapiens from destroying itself à la Gause would require a still greater transformation, to Margulis’s way of thinking, because we would be pushing against Nature itself. Success would be unprecedented, biologically speaking. It would be a reverse Copernican Revolution, showing that humankind is exempt from natural processes that govern all other species. But might we be able to do exactly that? Might Margulis have got this one wrong? Might we indeed be special?

  Consider, again, Robinson Crusoe. He was a slaver—but also, in the end, he had a special spark. Confronted with a threat to his survival, he changed his way of life, root and branch, to meet it. Working alone, he transformed the island, enriching its landscape. And then, to his surprise, he realized that he “might be more happy in this Solitary Condition, than I should have been in a Liberty of Society, and in all the Pleasures of the World.”

  Living alone on a large, biologically rich island, Crusoe was able to take as many of its resources as he wanted—he was, so to speak, barely past the first inflection on Gause’s curve. Margulis’s presumption is that if he and the mutineers had stayed, they would eventually have hit the second inflection point and wiped themselves out. (I am making the unrealistic assumption that they would not have left the island.) Wizards and Prophets both believe that Margulis is wrong—that Crusoe and the others would have gained enough knowledge to save themselves. They would have either used this knowledge to create technology to soar beyond natural constraints (as Wizards hope) or changed their survival strategy from expanding their presence to living in a steady-state accommodation with what the island offered (as Prophets wish).