The Lying Stones of Marrakech
Page 26
Wallace offers few specific suggestions for a new social order, but he does state a general principle:
The capitalists as a class have become enormously richer…. And so it must remain till the workers learn what alone “will save them, and take the matter into their own hands. The capitalists will consent to nothing but a few small ameliorations, which may improve the condition of select classes of workers, but will leave the great mass just where they are.
I doubt that Wallace harbored any muscular or martial fantasies about armed revolt sweeping through the streets of London, with the apostles of a new and better world, himself included, leading a vanguard, rifles held high. Wallace was far too gentle a man even to contemplate such a style of renewal. At most, he looked to electoral reform and unionization as means for workers to take “the matter into their own hands.” His final chapter, entitled “The Remedy for Want,” goes little beyond a naive proposal for free bread on demand, financed by a voluntary (albeit strongly suggested) governmental tax upon people with the highest incomes.
Wallace’s summary of the nineteenth century—a steady inexorability of technological progress derailed by failure of our moral and social sensibilities to keep pace—underscores the second evolutionary theme of this essay, while undermining the entire genre of fin-de-siècle (or millennium) summations: the unpredictability of human futures, and the futility of thinking that past trends will forecast coming patterns. The trajectory of technology might offer some opportunity for prediction—as science moves through networks of implication, and each discovery suggests a suite of following steps. (But even the “pure” history of science features unanticipated findings, and must also contend with nature’s stubborn tendency to frustrate our expectations—factors that will cloud anyone’s crystal ball.) Moreover, any forecast about the future must also weigh the incendiary instability generated by interaction between technological change and the weird ways of human conduct, both individual and social. How, then, can the accidents that shaped our past give any meaningful insight into the next millennium?
I think that the past provides even dimmer prospects for prediction than Wallace’s model of history implies—for another destabilizing factor must be added to Wallace’s claim for discordance between technological and moral change. Wallace missed the generality of an important pattern in nature because he remained so committed to Lyellian (and Darwinian) gradualism as the designated way of life on earth. His book devotes an entire chapter (in the first section on scientific progress) to arguing that the replacement of catastrophism by uniformitarian geology—the notion that major features of the earth’s history and topography “are found to be almost wholly due to the slow action of the most familiar everyday causes” and should not be “almost always explained as being due to convulsions of nature”—“constitutes one of the great philosophical landmarks of the 19th century.”
Wallace knew that the discordance of technological and moral change could produce catastrophic disruption in human history, but he viewed such a result as exceptional among the ways of nature, and not subject to generalization. Now that our modern sensibilities have restored catastrophism as an important option (though not an exclusive pattern) for nature as well, this theme gains ground as a powerful argument against predictability. Not only as an anomaly of human history, but also as a signature of nature, pasts can’t imply futures because a pattern inherent in the structure of nature’s materials and laws—“the great asymmetry” in my terminology—too often disrupts an otherwise predictable unfolding of historical sequences.
Any complex system must be constructed slowly and sequentially, adding steps one (or a few) at a time, and constantly coordinating along the way. But the same complex systems, once established, can be destroyed in a tiny fraction of the necessary building time—often in truly catastrophic moments—thus engendering the great asymmetry between building up and tearing down. A day of fire destroyed a millennium of knowledge in the library of Alexandria, and centuries of building in the city of London. The last blaauwbock of southern Africa, the last moa of New Zealand, perished in a momentary blow or shot from human hands, but took millions of years to evolve.
The discordance between technological and moral advance acts as a destabilizing factor to feed the great asymmetry, and prevents us from extrapolating past trends into future predictions—for we never know when and how the ax of the great asymmetry will fall, sometimes purging the old to create a better world by revolution, but more often (I fear) simply cutting a swath of destruction, and requiring a true rebirth from the ashes of old systems (as life has frequently done—in a wondrously unpredictable way—following episodes of mass extinction).
Thus, I am even less sanguine than Wallace about possibilities for predicting the future—even though I think that he overstated his case in an important way. I don’t fully agree with Wallace’s major premise that technology has progressed while morality stagnated. I rather suspect that general levels of morality have improved markedly as well, at least during the last millennium of Western history—though I don’t see how we could quantify such a claim. In most of the world, we no longer keep slaves, virtually imprison women, mock the insane, burn witches, or slaughter rivals with such gleeful abandon or such unquestioned feelings of righteousness. Rather, our particular modern tragedy—and our resulting inability to predict the future—resides largely in the great asymmetry, and the consequential, if unintended, power of science to enhance the effect. I suspect that twenty Hitlers ruled over small groups of Europeans a thousand years ago. But what could such petty monsters accomplish with bows and arrows, battering rams, and a small cadre of executioners? Today, one evil man can engineer the murder of millions in months.
Finally, a fascinating effect of scale defeats all remaining hope for meaningful predictability. Yes, if one stands way, way back and surveys the history of human technology, I suppose that one might identify a broad form of sensible order offering some insight into future possibilities. The invention of agriculture does imply growth in population and construction of villages; gunpowder does move warfare away from the besieging of walled cities; and computers must exert some effect upon printed media. Unless the great asymmetry wipes the slate clean (or even frees the earth from our presence entirely), some broad patterns of technological advance should be discernible amidst all the unpredictable wriggles of any particular moment.
Yes, but almost all our agonized questions about the future focus upon the wriggles, not the broader patterns of much longer scales. We want to know if our children will be able to live in peace and prosperity, or if the Statue of Liberty will still exist to intrigue (or bore) our grandchildren on their school trips, or to greet yet another wave of immigrants. At most, we ask vague and general questions about futures not really very distant, and not truly very different, from what we already know or suspect.
Just consider the most widely discussed pattern of human history since the invention of writing: the rise, spread, and domination of the European world, thanks largely to the auxiliary technologies of gunpowder and navigation. Traditions of Western explanation, largely self-serving of course, have focused upon two successive causes—strikingly different claims to be sure, but strangely united in viewing European domination as predictable, if not foreordained.
The first, as old as our lamentable self-aggrandizement, simply trumpets the inherent superiority of European people, a claim made even uglier in the last few centuries by grafting the phony doctrine of scientific racism upon old-fashioned xenophobia. The second—arising largely from a desire to reject the falsity and moral evil of racism, while still viewing history as predictably sensible—holds that people are much of a muchness throughout the world, but that certain climates, soils, and environments must inspire technological advance, and European people just happened to live in the right place.
This second argument holds much merit, and almost has to be valid at a scale of explanation that steps way back and looks at broadest patter
ns. Indeed, no other explanation in the determinist mode makes any sense, once we recognize the multitude of recent genetic studies that reveal only trivial differences among human groups, based on an enormous weight of shared attributes and the great variability existing within each of our groups.
But again, I ask most readers of this essay (originally published in a Western land and language, and initially read mostly by people of European descent) to look into their guts and examine the basis of their question: are you really asking about an admittedly broad inevitability based on soils and latitudes, or are you wondering about a wriggle lying within the realm of unpredictability? I suspect that most of us are really asking about wriggles, but looking at the wrong scale and thinking about predictability.
Yes, complex technology probably had to emerge from mid-latitude people living in lands that could support agriculture—not from Eskimos or Laplanders in frozen terrains with limited resources, and not from the hottest tropics, with vegetation too dense to clear, and a burden of disease too great to bear. But which mid-latitude people? Or to be more honest (and for the majority of Anglophones who read this essay in its original form), why among people of my group and not of yours?
In honest and private moments, I suspect that most readers of European descent regard the spread of European domination as a sensible and predictable event, destined to happen again if we could rewind time’s tape, say to the birth of Jesus, and let human history unroll on a second and independent run. But I wouldn’t bet a hoplite’s shield or a Frenchman’s musket on a rerun with European domination. The little wriggles of a million “might have beens” make history, not the predictabilities of a few abstract themes lying far from our concerns in a broad and nebulous background.
Can we really argue that Columbus’s caravels began an inevitable expansion of one kind of people? Surely not when the great Chinese admiral Zheng He (rendered as Cheng Ho in a previously favored system of transliteration), using a mariner’s compass invented by his people, led seven naval expeditions as far as the shores of eastern Africa between 1405 and 1433. Some of Zheng He’s ships were five times as long as a European caravel, and one expedition may have included as many as sixty-two ships carrying nearly 28,000 men.
To be sure, Zheng He sailed for the Yung-lo emperor, the only ruler who ever favored such expansionist activities during the Ming dynasty. His successors suppressed oceanic navigation and instituted a rigidly isolationist policy. (I also understand, though I can claim no expertise in Chinese history, that Zheng He’s voyages must be viewed more as tributary expeditions for glorifying the emperor, than as harbingers of imperialistic expansion on Western models. Incidentally, as further evidence for our fascination with differences, I have never read a document about Zheng He that proceeds past the first paragraph before identifying the great admiral as both a Muslim and a eunuch. I could never quite fathom the relevance, for captains don’t navigate with their balls, while we know that court eunuchs played a major role throughout Chinese imperial history.)
In any case, suppose that Chinese history had unfolded a bit differently? Suppose that the successors of the Yung-lo emperor had furthered, rather than suppressed, his expansionist policies? Suppose that subsequent admirals had joined another great Chinese invention—gunpowder as weaponry—with their unmatched naval and navigational skills to subdue and occupy foreign lands? May we not suppose that Caucasian Europe would then have become a conquered backwater?
We must also consider dramatic (and entirely believable) alternatives within Caucasian history. Has any force in human affairs ever matched the spreading power of Islam after a local origin in the sixth century A.D.? The preeminent traveler Ibn Battuta surveyed the entire Muslim world during three decades of voyaging in the mid-fourteenth century. Would any companion have bet on Christianity over Islam at that moment in history? (And how would one vote today, despite the intervening success of European doctrines?) The Encyclopaedia Britannica comments: “Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) might have been read from Spain to Hungary and from Sicily to Norway; but Ibn al-’Arabi (1165–1240) was read from Spain to Sumatra and from the Swahili coast to Kazan on the Volga River.”
Islam came close to subduing Europe on several occasions that might easily have experienced an opposite outcome. Perhaps that Moors of Iberia never did have designs on all Europe, despite the cardboard tale we once learned in conventional Western history classes—that Islam peaked and began an inevitable decline when Charles Martel defeated the Moors at Poitiers in 732. Britannica remarks that “the Andalusian Muslims never had serious goals across the Pyrenees. In 732, Charles Martel encountered not a Muslim army, but a summer raiding party.”
But genuine threats persisted for nearly a thousand years. If the great Timur (also known as Tamerlane), the Turkic conqueror of Samarkand, had not turned his sights toward China, and died in 1405 before his eastern move, Europe might also have fallen to his form of Islam. And the Ottoman sultans, with their trained and efficient armies, took Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, and laid powerful siege to the walls of Vienna as late as 1683–a final failure that gave .us the croissant as a living legacy, the breakfast roll based on the Turkish symbol of a crescent moon, and first made by Viennese bakers to celebrate their victory. (As a little footnote, remember that I have not even mentioned Attila, Genghis Khan, and several other serious threats to European domination.)
Our history could have been fashioned in a million different credible ways, and we have no adequate sense of where we are heading. But a good moral compass, combined with an intelligent use of scientific achievements, might keep us going—even prospering—for a long time by our standards (however paltry in geological perspective). We do have the resources, but can we muster both the will and judgment to hold first place in a game that can offer only possibilities, never guarantees—a game that spells oblivion for those who win the opportunity but fail to seize the moment, plunging instead into the great asymmetry of history’s usual outcome?
9 I wrote and first published this essay in 1998.
IV
Six Little Pieces
on the
Meaning
and
Location
of Excellence
Substrate
and
Accomplishment
11
Drink Deep,
or Taste Not the
Pierian Spring
MOST FAMOUS QUOTATIONS ARE FABRICATED; AFTER all, who can concoct a high witticism at a moment of maximal stress in battle or just before death? A military commander will surely mutter a mundane “Oh shit, here they come” rather than the inspirational “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” Similarly, we know many great literary lines by a standard misquotation rather than an accurate citation. Bogart never said “Play it again, Sam,” and Jesus did not proclaim that “he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.” Ironically, the most famous of all quotations about the cardinal subject of our mental lives—learning—bungles the line and substitutes “knowledge” for the original. So let us restore the proper word to Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
I have a theory about the persistence of the standard misquotation, “a litde knowledge is a dangerous thing,” a conjecture that I can support through the embarrassment of personal testimony. I think that writers resist a full and accurate citation because they do not know the meaning of the crucial second line. What the dickens is a “Pierian Spring,” and how can you explain the quotation if you don’t know? So you extract the first line alone from false memory, and “learning” disappears.
To begin this short essay about learning in science, I vowed to explicate the Pierian spring so I could dare to quote this couplet that I have never cited for fear that s
omeone would ask. And the answer turned out to be joyfully accessible—a two-minute exercise involving one false lead in an encyclopedia (reading two irrelevant articles about artists named Piero), followed by a good turn to The Oxford English Dictionary. Pieria, this venerable source tells us, is “a district in northern Thessaly, the reputed home of the muses.” Pierian therefore becomes “an epithet of the muses; hence allusively in reference to poetry and learning.”
So I started musing about learning. Doesn’t my litde story illustrate a general case? We fear that something we want to learn will be difficult and that we will never even figure out how to find out. And then, when we actually try, the answer comes easily—with joy in discovery, for no delight can exceed the definitive solution to a litde puzzle. Easy, that is, so long as we can master the tools (not everyone enjoys immediate access to The Oxford English Dictionary; more sadly, most people never learned how to use this great compendium or even know that it exists). Learning can be easy because the human mind works as an intellectual sponge of astonishing porosity and voracious appetite, that is, if proper education and encouragement keep the spaces open.