Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  A few hundred yards from the philosophy department at Harvard is the psychology building, William James Hall, named in honour of the great pragmatist. From there, in 1972, at the same time that Rawls and Nozick were in residence, B. F. Skinner produced his remarkable book about liberty, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Skinner wrote as a psychologist, not as a philosopher, and indeed he made it pretty clear that he thought a lot of traditional philosophical ideas were wrong.136 Yet his book was deeply philosophical in the sense that he was concerned not with equality and its relation with freedom, but with the fundamental idea of freedom in the first place. As a scientist and a biologist, Skinner saw human nature as the product of evolution (and therefore to a large extent genetically grounded) and as an adaptation to the environment. For Skinner, there was only one way to change (and by implication to improve) man, and that was to change the environment. His second point was to argue that, at base, true freedom did not, and does not, exist. Man’s nature is the result of his history – evolution – in collaboration with his environment. Therefore, man is by definition subject to a certain amount of control. For Skinner, freedom is merely the state in which man does not feel the control that is exerted over him.137 Yet freedom does not primarily apply to feelings, he says, but to behavior. In other words, freedom is the lack of aversive stimuli in the environment, and what we call the feeling of freedom is in reality only the result of this absence. These aversive stimuli will be different for different people, with different histories, but in the concluding chapters of his book he attempted to sketch out a design for a culture where the aversive stimuli are kept to a minimum.138 Skinner wanted to see mankind develop a technology of behavior which recognises that man’s nature, man’s collective nature as a vast number of individuals, is developed as a result of contingencies – rewards and punishments – acting on our genetic makeup. For Skinner, there is no autonomous man, or rather we should recognise the limits to our autonomy, if we wish to be truly free, in the sense of being at ease with our true nature.

  Control and punishment, Skinner says, are necessary aspects of the environment where people live together in society, but they should not be understood as bad things, only as ways to achieve the maximum freedom for the maximum number of people – freedom understood as a lack of aversive stimuli. (This was written near the height of the period of student rebellion.) By creating a better environment, we shall get better men. He therefore criticises notions such as ‘a spiritual crisis’ (among students), the drug problem, and the gambling problem. These problems come not from within human nature, like a homunculus, but rather from the mismanagement of the control of society: ‘Autonomous man is a device used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way. He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does not dehumanize man, it dehomunculises him.139

  Skinner’s ideas have not proved anywhere near as influential as Rawls’s or Nozick’s or Hayek’s. In part that is because he did little to show how freedom might be improved. But the main reason was that, in the 1960s, in the American context of civil rights, freedom and justice were assumed by most people to be the same thing.

  The ‘long 1960s,’ ending around 1973, was not at all the frivolous decade it is so often painted. A good claim can be made for saying that it was the most important postwar period, the most pivotal, when man’s basic condition – the nature of his very freedom – came under threat and under scrutiny, for the reason that his psychology, his self-awareness, was changing. The shift from a class-based sociology to an individual psychology, the rise of new groups to identify with (race, gender, students) changed not only self-awareness but politics, as Hannah Arendt had predicted. Much of what happens in the rest of this book, much of the thought in the last quarter of the century, can only be understood in that light.

  * This, it will be observed, has been an important distinction between philosophers throughout the century: those who start from an ideal original position, and those who accept the world as it is.

  31

  LA LONGUE DURÉE

  Between September and November 1965, the United States National Science Foundation vessel Eltanin was cruising on the edges of the Pacific-Antarctic Ocean, collecting routine data about the seabed. This ship was essentially a laboratory belonging to the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, part of New York’s Columbia University. Oceanography had received a boost in World War II because of the need to understand U-boats and their environment, and since then with the arrival of deepwater nuclear submarines. The Lamont Institute was one of the most active outfits in this area.1

  On that 1965 voyage, Eltanin zigzagged back and forth over a deep-sea geological formation known as the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge, located at 51 degrees latitude south. Special equipment measured the magnetic qualities of the rocks on the seabed. It had been known for a time that the magnetism of rocks for some reason reversed itself regularly, every million years or so, and that this pattern told geologists a great deal about the history of the earth’s surface. The scientist in charge of legs 19, 20, and 21 of the Eltanin’s journey that time was Walter Pitman III, a Columbia-trained graduate student. While on board ship, he was too busy to do more than double-check that the instruments were working properly, but as soon as he got back to Lamont, he laid out his charts to see what they showed. What he had in front of him was a series of black-and-white stripes. These recorded the magnetic anomalies over a stretch of ocean floor. Each time the magnetic anomaly changed direction, the recording device changed from black to white to black, and so on. What was immediately obvious, that November day, was that one particular printout, which recorded the progress of Eltanin from 500 kilometres east of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge to 500 kilometres west, was completely symmetrical around the ridge.2 That symmetry could be explained in only one way: the rocks either side of the ridge had been formed at exactly the same time as each other and ‘occupied the position they did because they had originated at the ridge and then spread out to occupy the seabed. In other words, the seabed was formed by rocks emerging from the depths of the earth, then spread out across the seafloor – and pushing the continents apart. This was a confirmation at last of continental drift, achieved by seafloor spreading.’3

  It will be recalled that continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1915 as a way to explain the distribution of the landmasses of the world and the pattern of life forms. He took the theory for granted, based on the evidence he had collected, but many geologists, especially in the United States, were not convinced. They were ‘fixists,’ who believed that the continents were rigid and immobile. In fact, geology was divided for years, at least until the war. But with the advent of nuclear submarines the U.S. Navy in particular needed far more information about the Pacific Ocean, the area of water that lay between it and its main enemy, Russia. The basic result to come out of this study was that the magnetic anomalies under the Pacific were shaped like enormous ‘planks’ in roughly parallel lines, running predominantly north-south, each one 15–25 kilometres wide and hundreds of kilometres long. This produced a tantalising piece of arithmetic: divide 25 kilometres by 1 million (the number of years after which, on average, the earth’s polarity changes), and you get 2.5 centimetres. Did that mean the Pacific was expanding at that rate each year?4

  There was other evidence to support the mobilists. In 1953 the French seismologist Jean Pierre Rothé produced a map at a meeting of the Royal Society in London that recorded earthquake epicentres for the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.5 This was remarkably consistent, showing many earthquakes associated with the midocean ridges. Moreover, the further the volcanoes were from the ridges, the older they were, and the less active. Yet another spinoff from the war was the analysis of the seismic shocks sent shuddering across the globe by atomic bomb explosions. These produced the surprising calculation that the ocean floor was barely four miles thick, whereas the continents were twenty miles thick. Jus
t a year before the Eltanin’s voyage, Sir Edward Crisp Bullard, a British geophysicist, had reconstructed the Atlantic Ocean margins, using the latest underwater soundings, which enabled 1,000-metre depth contours to be used, rather than sea-level contours. At that depth, the fit between the continents was even more complete.6 Despite these various pieces of evidence, it wasn’t until Eltanin’s symmetrical picture came ashore that the ‘fixists’ were finally defeated.

  Capitalising on this, in 1968 William Jason Morgan, from Princeton, put forward an even more extreme ‘mobilist’ view. His idea was that the continents were formed from a series of global, or ‘tectonic,’ plates, slowly inching their way across the surface of the earth. He proposed that the movement of these plates – each one about 100 kilometres thick – together accounts for the bulk of seismic activity on earth. His controversial idea soon received support when a number of ‘deep trenches’ were discovered, labelled subduction zones, up to 700 kilometres deep, in the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It was here that the sea floor was absorbed back into the underlying mantle (one of these trenches ran from Japan to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, a distance of 1,800 kilometres).7

  Continental drift and the wanderings of tectonic plates (many geophysicists prefer the term blocks) were initially of geological interest only. But geology is a form of history. One of the achievements of twentieth-century science has been to make accessible more and more remote areas of the past. Although these discoveries have arrived piecemeal, they have proved consistent – romantically consistent – in helping to provide the basis for one story, one narrative, culminating in mankind. This is perhaps the crowning achievement of twentieth-century thought.

  In the same year as the Eltanin’s crucial voyage, twenty-seven scientists from six nations met at a conference at Stanford University in California to consider how America had been populated. These were members of the International Quaternary Association – geologists, palaeontologists, geographers, and ethnographers interested in the most recent of the four basic geological periods – and the papers presented to the conference all concerned a single theme: the Bering land bridge. Although Christopher Columbus famously ‘discovered’ America in 1492, and whether or not you accept that he was beaten to it by the Vikings in the Middle Ages – as many scholars believe – equally clearly there were ‘native’ populations throughout the New World who had arrived there thousands of years before. Around 1959, as we have seen, palaeontologists were beginning to accept the view that Homo sapiens had evolved first hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Rift Valley of East Africa. Work on tectonic plates had shown that this valley was the edge of just such a plate, perhaps accounting, for some unknown reason, for why mankind should have emerged there. Since that time, unless man evolved separately in different parts of the world, he must have spread out across the earth in an order that, in theory at least, can be followed. The farthest large pieces of land from East Africa are Australia, Antarctica, and the Americas. To get to the Americas, early man would either have had to navigate huge distances across the oceans, in enough boats to create the numbers needed for propagation at the destination (which they could not have known about in advance), or crossed the narrow (56-mile) gap between Siberia and Alaska. It was this possibility that the Stanford conference was called to consider.

  The idea was not new, but the conference was presented with archaeological and geological evidence that for the first time fleshed out a hitherto vague picture. It appeared that man crossed the land bridge in three waves, the first two being between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago, and the third between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago.8 The basic long-term context of the migrations was determined by the ice ages, which locked enormous amounts of water in the glaciers at the poles, reducing sea levels by up to a hundred metres, more than 300 feet (the Bering Straits are 24 fathoms deep, or nearly 150 feet). The idea of three migrations came initially from an analysis of artefacts and burial techniques, later from an analysis of art, language, and genes. Calculations by C. Vance Haynes in Denver, made the year after the conference, suggested that a tribe of only thirty mammoth hunters (say) could increase in 500 years to as many as 12,500 people in perhaps 425 tribes. The Clovis hunters, who comprised the third wave, distributed their characteristic spearheads (first found at Clovis, New Mexico, near the Texan border) all over the continent. According to Haynes they would have needed to migrate only four miles to the south each year to reach Mexico in 500 years. Thus the geological and ethnographical evidence for early man in America fits together very well. It also fits neatly into the ‘one story’ narrative.

  The recovery of the American past was matched by developments in Africa. Here, the seminal work was Basil Davidson’s book Old Africa Rediscovered, first published in 1959, which proved so popular that by the early 1960s it had gone into several editions.9 The book followed an explosion of scholarship in African studies, with Davidson pulling the picture together. His achievement was to show that the ‘dark continent’ was not so dark after all; that it had its own considerable history, which a number of well-known Western historians had denied, and that several more or less sophisticated civilisations had existed in Africa from 2000 BC onward.

  Davidson surveyed all of Africa, from Egypt and Libya in the north to Ghana, Mali, and Benin in the west, the coast of Zanj (or Zinj) in the east, and the south-central area around what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He covered the appearance of ‘Negro’ peoples, about 3,000–5,000 BC, according to an analysis of some 800 skulls discovered at a site from predynastic Egypt, and the evidence of early migrations – for example, from the Nile area to West Africa (‘The Forty Day Road’). He described the Kush culture, emerging from the decadence of imperial Egypt, the enormous slag heaps of Meroe (‘the Birmingham of Africa’), about a hundred miles from modern Khartoum. Besides the palaces and temples, only a fraction of which has been excavated, the slag heaps are evidence of Meroe’s enormous iron-smelting capability, on which its great wealth was based.10 Having described the great coastal civilisations of Benin, Kilwa, Brava, Zanzibar, and Mombasa, Davidson’s most remarkable chapters concern the great inland civilisations of Songhay, Jebel Uri, Engaruka, Zimbabwe, and Mapungubwe, mainly because such places, remote from foreign influence, most closely represent the African achievement, uncomplicated by international trade and the ideas such trade brings with it. Engaruka, on the borders of Kenya and Tanganyika, as it then was (now Tanzania), had been first discovered by a district officer in 1935 but excavated later by Louis Leakey. He found the main city to consist of nearly seven thousand houses, supporting a population, he thought, of at least thirty to forty thousand. The houses were well built, with terraces and engravings that he thought were ‘clan marks.’11 Three hundred miles from the coast, Engaruka was well defended on a steep escarpment of the Rift Valley and, Leakey felt, dated to the seventeenth century. There were stone structures he took to be irrigation channels and evidence of solitary burials. Later excavation showed that the city was surrounded by eight thousand acres that were once under grain, producing a surplus that was traded via roads to the north and south – villages of up to a hundred houses were grouped along these roads. Iron-using techniques spread south through this area of Africa from about 500 AD.

  Great Zimbabwe is a vast group of stone ruins a few miles off the main road which links what is now Harare (Salisbury when Davidson published his book) and Johannesburg in South Africa, featuring an ‘acropolis’ and an elliptical ‘temple.’ All the buildings are made of local granite, flat, bricklike stones chopped from ‘leaves’ of exfoliated rock. The form of the defensive work, terraced battlements, shares some features with the building at Jebel Uri several hundred miles away, raising the possibility of commerce and the exchange of ideas over large distances. Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe both lie near the centre of a vast mining area – gold, copper, iron, and tin – which stretches as far north as Zambia and the Belgian Congo (now Zaïre) and as far south as Pretoria and Johannesburg in the Transvaal.
Some scholars believe that Zimbabwe is as old as 2000 BC, with the main period of inhabitation between 600 and 1600 AD.12

  Mapungubwe is less well known than Zimbabwe and even more mysterious. It is found on a small table mountain about 200 miles to the south, just across the Limpopo River. It was regarded as ‘a place of fear’ by the locals, but when it was finally visited (via a narrow ‘chimney,’ found to have holes cut in it opposite one another, so that a ladder could be built into the walls), the top of the flat mountain proved to contain thousands of tons of soil imported from the surrounding countryside, clearly evidence of a crop-growing civilisation. But what most attracted the attention of the people who found the site were the gold artefacts they discovered – and the skeletons.13 One skeleton (twenty-three were unearthed) was covered in gold bangles. Analysis of the skeletons showed an absence of Negroid features; they were, rather, ‘pre-Negro.’ The burial practices were Bantu, but the skeletons were partly Hottentot and partly similar to those found on the coast. They buried their own dead and their cattle, evidence of religion.