Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Stewart’s fundamental point, not accepted by everyone, is that mathematics and physics are as powerful as genetics in giving form to life. ‘Life is founded on mathematical patterns of the physical world. Genetics exploits and organises those patterns, but physics makes them possible and constrains what they can be.’54 For Stewart, genetics is not the deepest secret, the deepest order of life. Instead, mathematics is, and he ends his book by predicting a new discipline for the twenty-first century, ‘morphomatics,’ which will attempt to marry math, physics, and biology and which, he clearly hopes, will reveal the deep patterns in the world around us and, eventually, help us to understand how life began.

  * String theorists, incidentally, were one of the groups who established early on their own Internet archives, through which physics papers are immediately made available worldwide.

  Conclusion

  THE POSITIVE HOUR

  I do not hope to know again

  The infirm glory of the positive hour

  T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday, 1930

  Who can doubt Eliot’s sentiment, that the twentieth century was the positive hour, or that its glory, however glorious, was also infirm? He continues in magnificent dissatisfaction, and resolve:

  Because I know that time is always time

  And place is always and only place

  And what is actual is actual only for one time

  And only for one place

  I rejoice that things are as they are…

  Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

  Upon which to rejoice…

  Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

  But merely vans to beat the air

  The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

  Smaller and dryer than the will

  Teach us to care and not to care

  Teach us to sit still.1

  Eliot was writing in the middle of the golden age of physics but also in the golden age of Heidegger, before the fall of both. ‘Teach us to sit still’ was his way of saying, as Heidegger put it, ‘submit.’ Submit to the world as it is and rejoice, celebrate, without forever looking to explain it all. Relish the mystery, which allows us to be as we wish to be. But Eliot, as the rest of the poem and its elegiac tone make clear, was not entirely happy with this as a complete solution. Like too many others, he found the cause that science advanced convincing, too convincing to go back wholly to the status quo ante. No more than the next man could he unknow what was now known. But, as a poet, he could mark what was happening. And crucially, 1930, when Ash Wednesday appeared, was perhaps the earliest date at which all the three great intellectual forces of the twentieth century became apparent. These three forces were: science; free-market economics; and the mass media.

  This is not to say, of course, that science, or free-market economics, or the mass media, were entirely twentieth-century phenomena: they were not. But there were important aspects of the twentieth century which meant that each of these forces took on a new potency, which only emerged for all to see in the 1920s.

  What was just emerging in science at the time of Ash Wednesday, particularly as a result of Edwin Hubble’s discoveries, gathered force as the century went on more than Eliot – or anyone – could have guessed. Whatever impact individual discoveries had, the most important development intellectually, which added immeasurably to the authority of science, and changed man’s conception of himself, was the extent to which science began to come together, the way in which the various disciplines could be seen as telling the same story from different angles. First physics and chemistry came together; then physics and astronomy/cosmology; then physics and geology; more recently physics and mathematics, though they have always been close. In the same way economics and sociology came together. Even more strongly biology, in the form of genetics, came together with linguistics, anthropology, and archaeology. Biology and physics have not yet come together in the sense that we understand how inert substances can combine to create life. But they have come together, as Ian Stewart’s work showed in the last chapter, in the way physics and mathematics help explain biological structures; even more so in the expanded concept of evolution, producing a single narrative from the Big Bang onward, throughout the billions of years of the history of the universe, giving us the creation of galaxies, the solar system, the earth, the oceans and continents, all the way through to life itself and the distribution about our planet of plants and animals. This is surely the most powerful empirically based idea there has ever been.

  The final layer of this narrative has been provided only recently by Jared Diamond. Diamond, a professor of physiology at California Medical School but also an anthropologist who has worked in New Guinea, won the Rhône-Poulenc Science Book Prize in 1998 for Guns, Germs and Steel.2 In this book, he set out to explain nothing less than the whole pattern of evolution over the last 13,000 years – i.e., since the last ice age – and his answer was as bold as it was original. He was in particular concerned to explore why it was that evolution brought us to the point where the Europeans invaded and conquered the Americas in 1492 and afterward, and not the other way round. Why had the Incas, say, not crossed the Atlantic from west to east and subdued the Moroccans or the Portuguese? He found that the explanation lay in the general layout of the earth, in particular the way the continents are arranged over the surface of the globe. Simply put, the continents of the Americas and Africa have their main axis running north/south, whereas in Eurasia it is east/west.3 The significance of this is that the diffusion of domesticated plants and animals is much easier from east to west, or west to east, because similar latitudes imply similar geographical and climatic conditions, such as mean temperatures, rainfall, or hours of daylight. Diffusion from north to south, or south to north, on the other hand, is correspondingly harder and therefore inhibited the spread of domesticated plants and animals. Thus the spread of cattle, sheep, and goats was much more rapid, and thorough, in Eurasia than it was in either Africa or the Americas.4 In this way, says Diamond, the dispersal of farming meant the buildup of greater population densities in Eurasia as opposed to the other continents, and this in turn had two effects. First, competition between different societies fuelled the evolution of new cultural practices, in particular the development of weapons, which were so important in the conquest of the Americas. The second consequence was the evolution of diseases contracted from (largely domesticated) animals. These diseases could only survive among relatively large populations of humans, and when they were introduced to peoples who had developed no immune systems, they devastated them. Thus the global pattern was set, says Diamond. In particular, Africa, which had ‘six million years’ start’ in evolutionary terms compared with other parts of the world, failed to develop because it was isolated by vast oceans on three sides and desert on the north, and had few species of animals or plants that could be domesticated along its north/south axis.5

  Diamond’s account – an expanded version of la longue durée — although it has been criticised as being speculative (which it undoubtedly is), does if accepted bring a measure of closure to one area of human thought, showing why different races around the world have reached different stages of development, or had done so by, say, 1500 AD. In doing this, Diamond, as he specifically intended, defused some of the racist sentiment that sought to explain the alleged superiority of Europeans over other groupings around the globe. He therefore used science to counter certain socially disruptive ideas still current in some quarters at the end of the century.

  The fundamental importance of science, if it needs further underlining, shows in the very different fates of Germany and France in the twentieth century. Germany, the world leader in many areas of thought until 1933, had its brains ripped out by Hitler in his inquisition, and has not yet recovered. (Remember Allan Bloom’s wide-ranging references to German culture in The Closing of the American Mind?) World War II was not only about territory and Lebensraum; in a very real sense it was also about ideas
. In France the situation was different. Many continental thinkers, especially French and from the German-speaking lands, were devoted to the marriage of Freud and Marx, one of the main intellectual preoccupations of the century, and maybe the biggest dead end, or folly, which had the effect, in France most of all, of blinding thinkers to the advances in the ‘harder’ sciences. This has created a cultural divide in intellectual terms between francophone and anglophone thought.

  The strength of the second great force in the twentieth century – free-market economics – was highlighted by the great ‘experiment’ that was launched in Russia in 1917, and lasted until the late 1980s. The presence of the rival systems, and the subsequent collapse of communism, drew attention to the advantages of free-market economics in a way that Eliot, writing Ash Wednesday at the time of the Great Crash, could perhaps not have envisaged. This triumph of the free-market system was so complete that, to celebrate it, Francis Fukuyama published in 1992 The End of History and the Last Man.6 Based on a lecture given at the invitation of Allan Bloom, at the University of Chicago, Fukuyama took as his starting point the fact that the preceding years had seen the triumph of liberal democracies all over the world and that this marked the ‘endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government.’7 He was talking not only about Russia but the great number of countries that have embraced the free market and democracy, to some extent: Argentina, Botswana, Brazil, Chile, the Eastern European countries, Namibia, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Uruguay, and so on. More than that, though, Fukuyama sought to show that there is, as he put it, a Universal History, a single, coherent evolutionary process that takes into account ‘the experience of all peoples in all times.’8 His argument was that natural science is the mechanism by which this coherent story is achieved, that science is by consensus both cumulative and directional ‘even if its ultimate impact on human happiness is ambiguous.’9 He added, ‘Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism.’ Fukuyama thought this accounted for many of the nonmaterial developments in twentieth-century life, most notably the psychological developments. He implied that modern natural science brought democratic progress – because the institutions of science are essentially democratic, and require widespread education for their successful operation, and this in turn brought about a concern on the part of many people, as Hegel had predicted, for a ‘desire for recognition’ – a desire to be appreciated in their own right. In such an environment, the individualistic developments we have seen in the twentieth century became almost unavoidable – from the psychological revolution to the civil rights movement and even postmodernism. In the same way, we have been living through a period equivalent or analogous to the Reformation. In the Reformation, religion and politics became divorced; in the twentieth century political liberation has been replaced by personal liberation. In this process Fukuyama discussed Christianity, following Hegel, as the ‘absolute religion,’ not out of any narrow-minded ethnocentrism, he said, but because Christianity regards all men as equal in the sight of God, ‘on the basis of their faculty for moral choice or belief’ and because Christianity regards man as free, morally free to choose between right and wrong.10 In this sense then, Christianity is a more ‘evolved’ religion than the other great faiths.

  Just as there is an intimate link between science, capitalism, and liberal democracies, so too there is a link to the third force of the twentieth century, the mass media. Essentially democratic to start with, the mass media have in fact grown more so as the century has proceeded. The globalisation of the markets has been and is a parallel process. This is not to deny that these processes have brought with them their own set of problems, some of which will be addressed presently. But for now my point is simply to assert that science, freemarket economics, and the mass media stem from the same impulse, and that this impulse has been dominant throughout the past century.

  Jared Diamond’s thesis, and Francis Fukuyama’s, come together uncannily in David Landes’s Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998).11 At one level, this book is a restatement of the ‘traditional’ historical narrative, describing the triumph of the West. At a deeper level it seeks to explain why it was that, for example, China, with its massive fleet in the Middle Ages, never embarked on a period of conquest as the Western nations did, or why Islamic technological innovation in the same period was interrupted, never to resume. Landes’s answer was partly geographical (the distribution of parasites across the globe, limiting mortality), religion (Islam turned its back on the printing press, fearful of the sacrilege it might bring with it), population density and immigration patterns (families of immigrants flooded into north America, single men into Latin America, to intermarry with the indigenous population), and economic/political and ideological systems that promote self-esteem (and therefore hard work) rather than, say, the Spanish system in South America, where Catholicism was much less curious about the new world, less adaptable and innovative.12 Like Fukuyama, Landes linked capitalism and science, but in his case he argued that they are both systems of cumulative knowledge. For Landes these are all-important lessons; as he points out at the end of his book, convergence isn’t happening. The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Countries – civilisations – ignore these lessons at their peril.

  But science brings problems too, and these need to be addressed. In The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996), the science writer John Horgan explored two matters.13 He considered whether all the major questions in science had already been answered – that all biology, for example, is now merely a footnote to Darwin, or that all physics pales in the shallow of the Big Bang – and he looked at whether this marks a decisive phase in human history. He interviewed a surprisingly large number of scientists who thought that we are coming to the end of the scientific age, that there are limits to what we can know and, in general, that such a state of affairs might not be such a bad thing. By his own admission, Horgan was building on an idea of Gunther Stent, a biologist at the University of California in Berkeley, who in 1969 had published The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress. This book contended ‘that science, as well as technology, the arts and all progressive, cumulative enterprises were coming to an end.’14 The starting point for Stent was physics, which he felt was becoming more difficult to comprehend, more and more hypothetical and impractical.

  One of the scientists Horgan interviewed who thought there is a limit to knowledge was Noam Chomsky, who divided scientific questions into problems, ‘which are at least potentially answerable, and mysteries, which are not.’15 According to Chomsky there has been ‘spectacular progress’ in some areas of science, but no progress at all in others – such as consciousness and free will. There, he said, ‘We don’t even have bad ideas.’16 In fact, Chomsky went further, arguing in his own book, Language and Problems of Knowledge (1988), that ‘it is quite possible – overwhelmingly probable, one might guess – that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.’17

  Horgan considered that there were perhaps two outstanding fundamental problems in science – immortality, and consciousness. He thought that immortality was quite likely to be achieved in the next century and that, to an extent, as J. D. Bernal had predicted in 1992, man would eventually be able to direct his own evolution.

  The challenge implicit in Horgan’s thesis was taken up by John Maddox, the recently retired editor of Nature, in his 1998 book, What Remains to Be Discovered.18 This was in fact an excellent review of what we know – and do not know – in physics, biology, and mathematics, and at the same time a useful corrective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics – he referred to black holes as ‘putative’ only, to the search for theories of everything as ‘the embodiment of a belief, even
a hope,’ and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is ‘becalmed’ right now is because ‘the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood,’ and that the idea the universe began with a Big Bang ‘will be found false.’19 At the same time, Maddox thought science far from over. His thesis was that the world has been overwhelmed by science in the twentieth century for the first time. He thought that the twenty-first century is just as likely to throw up a ‘new physics’ as a Theory of Everything. In astronomy, for example, there is the need to confirm the existence of the hypothetical structure known as the ‘great attractor,’ toward which, since February 1996, it has been known that 600 visible galaxies are moving. In cosmology, there is the search for the ‘missing mass,’ perhaps as much as 80 percent of the known universe, which alone can explain the expansion rate after the Big Bang. Maddox also underlines that there is no direct evidence for inflation in the early universe, or that rapid expansion, a Big Bang, took place before. As he puts it, the Big Bang is ‘not so much a theory as a model.’ Even more pithily, he dismisses Lee Smolin’s ideas of parallel universes, with no unique beginning, as ‘no more persuasive than the account in Genesis of how the universe began.’20 In fact, Maddox says plainly, we do not know how the universe began; Hubble’s law urgently needs to be modified; and, ‘from all appearances, space-time in our neighborhood is not noticeably curved [as it should be according to relativity], but flat.’21