Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  When President Johnson made his Great Society speech in Michigan in the spring of 1964, he referred to the impoverished environment as one of his reasons for acting. Partly, he had in mind the destruction of the cities, and the ‘Great Blight of Dullness’ that Jane Jacobs had railed against. But he was also provoked by the writings of another woman who did much to stir the world’s conscience with a passionate exposé of the pesticide industry and the damage commercial greed was doing to the countryside – plants, animals, and humans. The exposé was called Silent Spring, and its author was Rachel Carson.65

  Rachel Carson was not unknown to the American public in 1962, when her book appeared. A biologist by training, she had worked for many years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which had been created in 1940. As early as 1951 she published The Sea Around Us, which had been serialised in the New Yorker, a Book-of-the-Month Club alternative choice and top of the New York Times best-seller list for months. But that book was not so much a polemic as a straightforward account of the oceans, showing how one form of life was dependent on others, to produce a balance in nature that was all-important to both its continued existence and its beauty.66

  Silent Spring was very different. As Linda Lear, her biographer, reminds us, it was an angry book, though the anger was kept in check. As the 1950s passed, Carson, as a scientist, had gradually amassed evidence – from journals and from colleagues – about the damage pesticides were doing to the environment. The 1950s were years of economic expansion, when many of the scientific advances of wartime were put to peaceful use. It was also a period when the Cold War was growing in intensity, and would culminate at the very time Silent Spring appeared. There was a tragic personal dimension behind the book. At about the time The Sea around Us appeared, Carson had been operated on for breast cancer. While she was researching and writing Silent Spring, she was suffering from a duodenal ulcer and rheumatoid arthritis (she was fifty-three in 1960), and her cancer had reappeared, requiring another operation and radiotherapy. Large chunks of the book were written in bed.67

  By the late 1950s, it was clear to those who wished to hear the evidence that with the passage of time, many pollutants that formed part of daily life had toxic side effects. The most worrying, because it directly affects humans, was tobacco. Tobacco had been smoked in the West for three hundred years, but the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer was not fully aired until 1950, when two reports, one in the British Medical Journal and the other in the Journal of the American Medical Association, both showed that ‘smoking is a factor, and an important factor, in the production of carcinoma of the lung.’68 This result was surprising: the British doctors doing the experiment thought that other environmental factors – automobile exhaust and/or the tarring of roads – were responsible for the rise in lung cancer cases that had been seen in the twentieth century. But no sooner had the British and American results appeared than they were confirmed in the same year in Germany and Holland.

  From the evidence that Carson was collecting, it was becoming clear to her that some pesticides were far more toxic than tobacco. The most notorious was DDT, introduced to great effect in 1945 but now, after more than a decade, implicated not just in the deaths of birds, insects, and plants but also in cancerous deaths in humans. An especially vivid example explored by Carson was Clear Lake in California.69 Here DDD, a variant of DDT, had been introduced in 1949 to rid the lake of a certain species of gnat that plagued fishermen and holidaymakers. It was administered carefully, as was thought: the concentration was 1 part in 70 million. Five years later, however, the gnat was back, and the concentration increased to 1 in 50 million. Birds began to die. The association wasn’t understood at first, however, and in 1957 more DDD was used on the lake. When more birds and then fish began to die, an investigation was begun – which showed that certain species of grebe had concentrations of 1,600 parts in a million, and the fish as much as 2,500 in a million. Only then was it realised that some animals accumulate concentrations of chemicals, to lethal limits.70 But it wasn’t just the unanticipated build-up of chemicals that so alarmed Carson; each case was different, and often human agency was involved. In the case of aminotriazole, a herbicide, it had been officially sanctioned for use on cranberry bogs, but only after the berries had been harvested. This particular sequence mattered because laboratory studies had shown that aminotriazole caused cancer of the thyroid in rats. When it emerged that some growers sprayed the cranberries before they were harvested, the herbicide could not be blamed direcdy.71 This is why, when Silent Spring appeared in 1962, again serialised in the New Yorker, the book created such a furore. For Carson not only explored the science of pesticides, showing that they were far more toxic than most people realised, but that industry guidelines, sometimes woefully inadequate in the first place, were often flouted indiscriminately. She revealed when and where specific individuals had died, and named companies whose pesticides were responsible, in some cases accusing them of greed, of putting profit before adequate care for wildlife and humans.72 Like The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring shot to the top of the best-seller lists, helped by the thalidomide scandal, which erupted at that time, when it was shown that certain chemicals taken (for sedation or sleeplessness) by mothers in the early stages of pregnancy could result in deformed offspring.73 Carson had the satisfaction of seeing President Kennedy call a special meeting of his scientific advisory committee to discuss the implications of her book before she died, in April 1964.74 But her true legacy came five years later. In 1969, the U.S. Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which required an environmental impact statement for each governmental decision. In the same year the use of DDT as a pesticide was effectively banned, and in 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was established in the United States, and the Clean Air Amendment Act was passed. In 1972 the United States passed the Water Pollution Control Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the Noise Control Act, with the Endangered Species Act approved in 1973.

  By then, thirty-nine nations had met in Rome in 1969 to discuss pollution. Their report, The Limits to Growth, concluded that ‘the hour was late,’ that at some stage in the next one hundred years the limit to growth would be reached, that the earth’s finite resources would be exhausted and there would be a ‘catastrophic’ decline in population and industrial capacity.75 Attempts to meet this looming problem should begin immediately. In the same year Barbara Ward and René Dubos presented a report to the United Nations World Conference on the Human Environment which, as its title, Only One Earth, showed, had much the same message.76 Nineteen-seventy saw the founding of the ‘Bauernkongress’ in Germany, and in 1973 ecology candidates first stood for election in France and Britain. These events coincided with the Yom Kippur War in 1973, as a result of which the OPEC cartel of oil-producing nations raised oil prices sharply, an oil crisis that forced gasoline rationing in several countries, the first time such measures had been necessary since World War II. It was this, as much as anything, that highlighted not just the finite nature of the earth’s resources, but that such limits to growth had political consequences.

  Charles Reich, an academic who taught at both Yale and Berkeley, claimed that the environmental revolution was more than just that; it was a true turning point in history, a pivot when human nature changed. In The Greening of America (1970), he argued that there existed, in America at any rate, three types of consciousness: ‘Consciousness I is the traditional outlook of the American farmer, small businessman and worker who is trying to get ahead. Consciousness II represents the values of an organisational society. Consciousness III is the new generation…. One was formed in the nineteenth century, the second in the first half of this century, the third is just emerging.’77

  Beyond this division, Reich’s idea was a very clever piece of synthesis: he related many works of popular culture to his arguments, explaining why particular songs or films or books had the power and popularity they did. He paid relatively little attention to Consciousness
I but had great fun debunking Consciousness II, where his argument essentially followed on from Herbert Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man, and W. H. Whyte’s Organisation Man. Since the mid-1950s, Reich said, that world had deteriorated; in addition to vast organisations, we now had the ‘corporate state,’ with widespread, anonymous, and in many cases seemingly arbitrary power. He argued that the works of Raymond Chandler, such as The Big Sleep or Farewell My Lovely, owed their appeal to their picture of a world in which no one could be trusted, where one could only survive by living on one’s wits. James Jones’s From Here to Eternity pitted a young man against a vast, anonymous organisation (in this case the army), as did Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. The appeal of Casablanca, he said, lay in the fact that ‘Humphrey Bogart plays a man who could still change fate by taking action. Perhaps Casablanca was the last moment when most Americans believed that.’78

  Reich showed how a large number of popular works took aim at one or other aspect of Consciousness II society, and tried to move on. In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 : A Space Odyssey, a space traveller is in what appears to be a hotel or motel room, expensive and plastic but lacking entirely anything he can do anything with, ‘no work, nothing that asks a reaction.’79 ‘Almost every portrayal of a man at work [in American films] shows him doing something that is clearly outside of modern industrial society [i.e., the corporate state]. He may be a cowboy, a pioneer settler, a private detective, a gangster, an adventure figure like James Bond, or a star reporter. But no films attempt to confer satisfaction and significance upon the ordinary man’s labour. By contrast, the novels of George Eliot, Hardy, Dickens, Howells, Garland and Melville deal with ordinary working lives, given larger meaning through art. Our artists, our advertisers and our leaders have not taught us how to work in our world.’80 The beginning of Consciousness III he took to be J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) but to gather force with the music and words of Bob Dylan, Cream, the Rolling Stones, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Dylan’s ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m only Bleeding),’ Reich said, was a far more powerful, and considerably earlier, social critique of police brutality than any number of sociological treatises. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ said more about alienation more succinctly than any psychologist’s offering. The same argument, he said, applied to such works as ‘Draft Morning’ by the Byrds, Tommy by the Who, or ‘I Feel Free’ by Cream. He thought that the drug culture, the mystical sounds of Procul Harum, and even bell-bottom trousers came together in a new idea of community (the bell-bottoms, he said, somewhat fancifully, left the ankles free, an invitation to dance). The works of authors like Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1979) about a revolt in a mental hospital, embodied the new consciousness, Reich said, and even Tom Wolfe, who in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) was critical of many aspects of the new consciousness, at least conceded that subcultures like stock-car racing and surfing showed people choosing their own alternative lifestyles, rather than simply accepting what was given them, as their parents had.

  This all came together, Reich said, in the ‘green’ movement. Opposition to the Vietnam War was an added factor, but even there the underlying force behind the war was corporate America and technology; napalm destroyed the environment and the enemy almost equally. And so, along with a fear for the environment, a realisation that resources were finite, and a rejection of the corporate state, went an avoidance where possible of the technology that represented Consciousness II. People, Reich said, were beginning to choose to bake their own bread, or to buy only bread that was baked in environmentally friendly ways, using organically grown materials. He was in fact describing what came to be called the counterculture, which is explored in more detail in the next chapter. He wasn’t naïve; he did not think Consciousness II, corporate America, would just roll over and surrender, but he did believe there would be a growth of environment-conscious communes, green political parties, and a return to ‘vocations,’ as opposed to careers, with people devoting their lives to preserving areas of the world from the depredations of Consciousness II corporations.

  A related argument came from the economist Fritz Schumacher in two books, Small Is Beautiful (1973) and A Guide for the Perplexed published in 1977, the year he died.81 Born in Bonn in 1911, into a family of diplomats and academics, Schumacher was given a very cosmopolitan education by his parents, who sent him to the LSE in London and to Oxford. A close friend of Adam von Trott, executed for his part in the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, Schumacher was working in London in the late 1930s and spent the war in Britain, overcoming his enemy alien status. After the war, he became very friendly with Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh, economic advisers to Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1960s, and was appointed to a senior position on the National Coal Board (NCB). Very much his own man, Schumacher early on saw that the resources of the earth were finite, and that something needed to be done. For many years, however, he was not taken seriously because, in being his own man, he took positions that others regarded as outlandish or even as evidence of instability. He was a convinced believer in unidentified flying objects, flirted with Buddhism, and though he had rejected religion as a younger man, was received into the Catholic Church in 1971, at the age of sixty.82

  Schumacher had spent his life travelling the world, especially to the poorer parts, such as Peru, Burma, and India. Gradually, as his religious feelings grew, as the environmental crisis around him deepened, and as he realised that the vast corporations of the West could not hope to offer solutions that would counter the poverty of so many third-world countries, he developed an alternative view. 1971 was for him a turning point. He had recently become president of the Soil Association in Britain (he was an avid gardener), he had been received into the church, and he had resigned from the NCB. He set about writing the book he had always wanted to write, provisionally called ‘The Homecomers,’ because his argument was that the world was reaching a crisis point. The central reality, as he saw it, was that the affluence of the West was ‘an abnormality which “the signs of the times” showed was coming to an end.’ The inflation that had started to plague Western societies was one such sign. The party was over, said Schumacher, but ‘Whose party was it anyhow? That of a small minority of countries and, inside those countries, that of a minority of people.’83 This minority kept itself in power, as was to be expected, but the corporations did little to help the chronic poverty seen in the rest of the world. These countries could not go from their underdeveloped state to a sophisticated state overnight. What was needed, he said, was a number of small steps, which were manageable by the people on the ground – and here he introduced his concept of intermediate technology. There had been an Intermediate Technology Development Group in Britain since the mid-1960s, trying to develop technologies that were more efficient than traditional ones, in India, say, or South America, but far less complex than their counterparts in the developed West. (A classic example of this would be the clockwork radio, which works by being wound up rather than with batteries, which may not be obtainable in remote areas, or may weather badly.) By ‘The Homecomers’ he meant that people would in the future return to their homes from factories, go back to simpler technologies simply because they were more human and humane. The publishers didn’t like the tide and Anthony Blond came up with Small Is Beautiful, at the same time keeping Schumacher’s subtitle: ‘Economics – as if People Mattered.’ The book was published to a scattering of reviews, but it soon took off as word of mouth spread, and it became a cult from Germany to Japan.84 Schumacher had hit a nerve; his main focus was the third world, but it was clear that many people loathed the big corporations as much as he did and longed for a different way of life. Until his death in 1977, Schumacher was a world figure, feted by state governors in America, entertained at the White House by President Carter, welcomed in India as a ‘practical Gandhi.’ His underlying argument was that there is room on earth for everyone, provided that worl
d affairs are managed properly. That management, however, was not an economic question but a moral one, which is why for him economics and religion went together, and why they were the most important disciplines.85 Schumacher’s arguments illustrated Reich’s Consciousness III at its most practical level.

  Anxieties about the human influence on our planet accelerated throughout the 1970s, aided by a scare in Italy in 1976 when a massive cloud of dioxin gas escaped from a pesticide plant near Seveso, killing domestic and farm animals in the surrounding region. In 1978 the United States banned CFCs as spray propellants in order to reduce damage to the ozone layer, which normally filtered out ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This damage, it was believed, was causing global warming through the ‘greenhouse effect.’ In 1980 the World Climate Research Program was launched, a study specifically intended to explore human influence on climate and to predict what changes could be expected.

  No one has been to the Moon for more than a quarter of a century. We have lost the universal sense of optimism in science that the Apollo program represented.