Millennium
Page 37
While at the start of the twentieth century various ideas of a future – what might happen – existed among the literati, historians, philosophers, politicians and their many readers, the understanding of how to predict the future – what would actually happen – was still a long way off. The idea that society would progress to a certain point and cease to change when it had reached a state of happiness was a common trope. Indeed, most visions of the future were happy. But then the First World War broke out. It shocked many believers in progress out of their complacency. How could so many enlightened nations and empires wreak such terrible destruction on one another? After the First World War it was disconcerting to read the grand narratives of older historians who praised every revolution that had been instrumental in bringing about the present world order – only for the supposedly superior modern age to prove itself more destructive to human life than all the superstitious, hierarchy-riddled monstrous regimes of the previous five hundred years. At the same time people were coming to terms with the fact that socialist revolutions did not necessarily result in the socialist paradises that Edward Bellamy and William Morris had been looking forward to, not to mention Karl Marx’s vision of a communist society. A series of dystopian visions followed, most famously Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933), and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Arguably most prescient of all – especially because it was written before the First World War – was E. M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’(1909). This imagines Earth in such a polluted state that life on the surface is unsustainable; people are forced to live in cells beneath the ground, their lives controlled by an Internet-like machine, which allows them to communicate with one another through video links and delivers all their needs. Gradually they become so dependent on the machine that they lose touch with the natural world and all sense of meaning in life. When the machine breaks down, they have no resources or skills on which to fall back, and they perish.
The imagining of futures good and bad received a rocket boost in 1957 as the first satellite, Sputnik 1, went into orbit around the Earth, triggering the Space Race. The landing of two of Apollo II’s crew on the Moon in July 1969 only encouraged space-related science fiction to look far beyond the reachable horizon. By the time of that famously small but giant step, however, a much more important consideration of the future was under way. In 1956 the geologist M. King Hubbert had predicted that the production of oil would follow a mathematical curve, reflecting a gradual increase in production at first, followed by a steep increase for a period, rising to a peak, and then a sudden decrease as oil reserves are used up, tailing off as the last resources are exploited over a longer period of time. The whole graph resembles the shape of a bell. Using the formula for the curve, Hubbert predicted the exhaustion of the world’s then-known oil reserves in 1970. Fortunately for us, more reserves were subsequently found. But the point was easily transferable to other resources, such as natural gas, coal and copper. The patterns of usage could be predicted, and the reserves available could be estimated, so that precautions could be taken against the exhaustion of supplies – in theory, at least. It has to be said that in the late twentieth century governments showed no determination to limit the exploitation of the world’s mineral resources; they seemed to believe that any shortages would result in higher prices that would, in turn, encourage the development of alternatives. Nevertheless, awareness that the world’s resources were limited made many ordinary people worry about the future. The publication of Earthrise – the first photograph of Earth taken from space, snapped by an astronaut aboard Apollo 8 in orbit around the Moon on 24 December 1968 – stunned many people. Looking at that image of the Earth it became abundantly clear that no matter what religion you believed in, or how brilliant mankind’s technological capabilities, the resources of that small planet were all we had. Earlier that year, Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb had predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s due to a series of Malthusian checks on the exponential population growth over the previous decades. More accurately, the report of the Club of Rome, a group of about eighty economists and other intellectuals, entitled The Limits of Growth (1972), demonstrated how calculations of remaining resources based on current usage were inappropriate when the use of those resources was still increasing every year. The Earth’s resources were thus being consumed much more rapidly than people realised. By this time UNESCO had started regularly to calculate long-term population figures. In 1968 its statisticians estimated that the population of the world would reach a peak and stabilise at 12.2 billion in 2075; in 1990, they anticipated that the stable population would be 11.6 billion and that it would not be achieved until 2200. At the same time, the authors recognised that there was considerable room for error: they admitted that the world’s population could be as high as 28 billion in 2150, if high fertility was maintained, or as low as 4.3 billion, if low survival rates were to apply.
At the end of the twentieth century predicting the future was part of usual practice in many professions. Besides UNESCO’s mapping of population, urbanisation, ageing, poverty and education, economic forecasters were trying to predict economic trends for the next few months or years, with mixed results. Meteorologists tried to predict the weather, with varying accuracy. Organisations monitoring public opinion and market researchers tried to predict everything from the outcome of forthcoming elections to the likelihood of success for certain products on the supermarket shelves. Demographers calculated the increase and ageing of the population in specific cities and planned for the accommodation, education and transport needs of the future. Local authorities looked ahead for the location of new housing estates and sites for long-term rubbish disposal and mineral extraction. National authorities developed strategies for future infrastructure and defence. And at international level, scientists increasingly monitored the Earth’s frozen regions for signs of global warming. By 1988 this had become a serious issue, with forecasts of rising water levels as the polar ice caps melted and the destruction of many of the world’s coastal towns, not to mention the extinction of a large number of species. The century that had begun with dreams of socialist utopias and felicitous predictions of human progress ended with millions of people looking anxiously into the darkness of the unknown.
Conclusion
Deciding what to include in this chapter has not been easy. I have selected the above six changes to represent aspects of daily life as well as some more disturbing underlying themes. There will be those who protest that I should have included whole sections on space flight and mobile phones; others will be vexed that I have not focused on the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression; still others will be most disappointed not to find even a mention of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, I am sure there will be men who claim that Marilyn Monroe’s curves had a bigger effect than all the civilisation curves mentioned above. But as I stated in the introduction to the chapter, there was a need to balance the changes in the way we live with the changing context of our lives – and the impact of space travel on most of us does not begin to compare with the impact of war or the petrol engine. Incredible though the Moon landing was, if it hadn’t happened, life would not be so very different today whereas, if the two world wars had not been fought or the petrol engine not become popular, life would barely be recognisable today.
As I see it, there were three huge changes to the context of life in the West in the twentieth century: globalisation, the threat of mass destruction, and the unsustainability of our standards of living. In dealing with globalisation under transport, mass destruction under war, and unsustainability in the last two sections, I hope I have drawn sufficient attention to these issues. Can we say which amounts to the biggest change of the century? Only if we draw the line at the year 2000 and exclude all events after that as irrelevant to the discussion. The world was not destroyed in a nuclear holocaust by 2000; electrical systems had not bur
st into flames as a result of a solar storm, nor had global warming or population growth led to pandemonium and mass deaths. Therefore I cannot help but conclude that the most important difference between the world in 1900 and in 2000 was transport and its consequences.
In reality, however, we cannot draw the line at the end of 2000 – not if we wish this study to have relevance today. As I stated in the chapter on the nineteenth century, history is not about the past but about people, and the most important reason for studying society in different times is to understand ourselves – how we react in a range of different situations, why we behave the way we do, and what may happen to us in the future. Those other two contexts still matter. We cannot disregard the threat of nuclear war because it did not break out in October 1962 or afterwards: we still live with the risks. Nor can we set aside population growth just because it had not resulted by 2000 in the famines predicted in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, we are more aware than ever before that our way of life is unsustainable. I am conscious therefore that my selection of transport as the major change of the twentieth century is a hollow one. It might be accurate as far as a study of the past goes, but the importance of twentieth-century changes in historical terms is still open to revision. As we have seen, if a cataclysmic solar storm were to strike the Earth tomorrow and destroy the world’s economy and transport infrastructure, we would have a very different view of our growing dependence on electricity in the last century. And that is something we need to bear in mind when we turn to the conclusion of this book and try to establish what all of these changes mean for us in the twenty-first century, and in the centuries to come.
The principal agent of change
With one exception, the foremost candidates for the twentieth century are obvious. The Wright brothers, through their persistent attempts to power their gliders, did not just show the world that flying was possible, they advanced aviation so rapidly that they led the world in discovering how to fly safely. Albert Einstein’s work on relativity marks him out as not only one of the most recognisable icons of the century but a key figure in those sciences that made warfare so dangerous and radioactive metals so valuable. He played a role in persuading President Roosevelt to authorise the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atomic bomb. A third candidate we need to consider is Joseph Stalin. He persecuted and terrorised millions of his own people, established the vast empire that was the Soviet Union, industrialised his nation, equipped his empire with nuclear warheads and played major roles in both the defeat of Hitler and the start of the Cold War.
The least obvious candidate, and therefore one who deserves a word of explanation, is Fritz Haber. A German Jewish scientist, his invention with his brother-in-law Carl Bosch of the Haber-Bosch process, to make ammonia fertiliser, enriched the whole world. Estimates of the number of people who are alive today on account of his invention are in the hundreds of millions, and even in the billions. What a great benevolence to mankind, you might say, what a saviour of lives! But the same man was also responsible for the invention of chemical warfare. He not only invented chlorine gas but personally supervised its use against English and French troops at Ypres in 1915. His creation of nitric acid for explosives and his ammonia fertilisers were said by Max Planck to have prolonged the First World War by a full year. His life story is thus one of the most conflicted you could ever possibly come across. He hoped by his contributions to the war effort to prove himself a German patriot despite being a Jew; but his wife, who was also a scientist, was so distressed by his work on chemical warfare (not to mention his disregard of her career) that she shot herself on the day he was promoted to the rank of captain. Worse was to follow. After the First World War, Haber led the team that invented the cyanide-based insecticide Zyklon B. It was this chemical that was used to murder vast numbers of Jews in the Nazi death camps during the Second World War. It seems fitting that as we draw to the end of this chapter, we face a final war-related irony: that the man who saved more lives than anyone else was also responsible for millions of deaths. Just as Lavoisier seems to epitomise the eighteenth century, so Haber seems to epitomise the twentieth, with all its contradictions and tragedies. Ultimately, however, we have to recognise that he himself was not responsible for the application of his inventions for all their destructive purposes. He was simply a scientist who tried to please his political masters. The real agency was that of the politicians who opened the gates of genocide and war.
As a result, the principal agent of change in the twentieth century has to be Adolf Hitler. He was responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War. His aggressive national supremacism and its violent consequences significantly damaged nationalism as a political force, even though it had prevailed in Europe for centuries. He imagined and brought about the Jewish Holocaust, and directly caused massive loss of life on the fields of battle, as well as colossal destruction across Europe, Africa, Russia, the Middle East and the Far East. His threat to create an atomic bomb led Einstein to push the American government towards the Manhattan Project. And as there must be a silver lining to every cloud, the war he started resulted in a huge number of technological and medical advances that had a positive benefit in the second half of the century, from the exploration of space to the use of penicillin. There is no doubt that the world would be a very different place today if he had never lived.
CONCLUSION
Which century saw the most change?
There is, I feel, an age at which the individual man would wish to stop: you are about to inquire about the age at which you would have liked your whole species to stand still.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse upon Inequality (1754)
The last ten centuries have been paraded before you like a row of particularly ugly beauty queens, each one smiling for the audience despite her missing teeth, plague sores, famine, wartime grief and uncomfortable revolutions. As with so many beauty pageants, it is possible to make a case for any of the candidates to be the winner. It is tempting to rank them in chronological order, starting with the eleventh century, for without the changes of the eleventh, those of the twelfth would have been impossible, and without the twelfth century, the thirteenth would have been very different, and so on. However, it is necessary to resist this temptation for the simple reason that the achievements of one century, even if they were fundamental to those of later centuries, do not necessarily represent a greater degree of change. For the same reason we must resist the illusion of modernity – the sense that our most recent achievements, being the most sophisticated and most dazzling to our eyes, embody the most change. This book is not about achievement per se. Mankind’s existence is not a race to the stars; it is not even a race to the truth. It is rather a balancing act – a constant shuffling along a tightrope in the hope of reaching a better place while constantly risking disaster. And regularly looking backwards while doing it.
For what it’s worth, my own impression is that the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries were the ones that saw the most change for my predecessors in the house in which I now live. However, my feelings on the subject are irrelevant here. It is important for me to set aside my own thoughts and possible prejudices in order to develop criteria on which to base a final, objective decision. Those criteria will provide not only the context to the subsequent consideration of the question but also the framework for explaining why the question matters.
Deciding these criteria, however, has its own problems. In the course of writing this book, I met an investment banker at a reception in London who assured me that the most important development of the last thousand years was the telegraphic transfer of money. The reason, he explained, was because without it ‘I could not take advantage of business opportunities quickly enough, and thus I would not be able to do what I do.’ Even when I suggested that Columbus, Luther, Galileo, Marx or Hitler might have had a more significant impact on the world, he did not budge. It reminded me of something I had heard from an Iraqi ship’s carpenter in a cockroa
ch-infested back-street bar in Singapore in August 1990. This man told me that the officers of his ship had purposely run the vessel aground because Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait and they would have had to join the army on their return. The carpenter himself was more than happy to be marooned in the Far East and paid in US dollars: he had already spent several years fighting for Saddam against Iran and had vowed never to do so again. If he weren’t in Singapore, I asked him, where in the world would he most like to be? ‘London,’ he said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Why?’ ‘Because you can buy medicines there twenty-four hours a day.’ The investment banker and the ship’s carpenter obviously had very different priorities from each other, but they both illustrate how we naturally judge what is important in life according to our own experiences.
Stability and change
Given the widespread assumption that society is prone to ever greater changes at an ever faster rate, it is fascinating to reflect that in many respects the reverse is true: things have a tendency to become more and more permanent. To illustrate this, imagine that you find yourself at a spring in the primeval forest and that you can see ahead of you a high place where you might find shelter. If no one has ever passed from where you are now to that high point before, any route through the forest is possible. The pioneer will probably take the easiest path, negotiating the waterlogged ground and the fallen trees. If in due course another way turns out to be faster, the previous route will be abandoned. Soon a preferred path will become established. After centuries of use, it might become a road. If so, eventually someone will take possession of the land on either side, allowing it to be cleared and farmed or used for building. Then all the alternative paths will become impassable: everyone will follow the one route prescribed. Further change will be very difficult.