Darwin's Watch

by Terry Pratchett

  Equally, though, it's unsatisfying just to list lots of possible contributory causes - the East India Company ... Harrison's excellent chronometer, which helped to make the British Empire so profitable and made aristocratic families send their younger sons fairly safely out into the Empire, from which they came back wiser and richer ... Quakers and other nonconformist sects, which were tolerated by the Anglican Church ... the Lunar Society's progeny, including the Royal Society and the Linnaean Society ... the College of Apprentices ... Parliament and the pretence of democracy, so that a middle class could rise from the merging of junior aristocrats who came back from the Empire to found pickle factories in Manchester ... artisans who were coming into towns looking for satisfying jobs.

  We could make the list ten times longer, though in most cases we wouldn't be sure about genuine causal connections. And even with ten times as many `causes', we would still have to say `all of the above'.

  Are such factors a cause of historical differences, or a consequence? That's not a sensible question if you insist on a yes/no answer - very probably the answer should be `both'. A modem analogue would be to ask whether today's space-oriented engineers and scientists are a cause of the success of space films and nailed-down science-fiction stories - or did the early scientifically oriented SF stories, with their sense of wonder at the sheer vastness and mystery of outer space, fire those engineers, when young, with the desire to turn fiction into fact? It must have been both, of course.

  The early Victorian apprentices in pottery, ironworking, brick firing, and even bricklaying were respected by, and respected, their masters. Together they laid down enduring monuments for future generations. Similarly, early trains and canals connected all the major cities, and connected factories to their suppliers and customers. This transport system paved the way to the wonderful economic network that Edwardian Britain inherited from the Victorians. These systems were not static, to be admired for what they had achieved. They were dynamic, they changed, they were processes as much as achievements. They changed the way succeeding generations thought about where and how they lived. Even today, our cities rely heavily on what the Victorians built, especially when it comes to sewerage and water supplies.

  The resulting changes in thinking fuelled further changes. The combination of cause and consequence is an example of what we have elsewhere called complicity.[1] This phenomenon arises when two conceptually distinct systems interact recursively, each repeatedly changing the other, so that they co-evolve. A typical outcome is that

  [1] See Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Cbaos (Viking, 1994).

  together they work their way into territory that would have been inaccessible to either alone. Complicity is not mere `interaction', where the systems join forces to achieve some joint outcome, but

  are not themselves greatly affected as a result. It is far more drastic, and it changes everything. It can even erase its own origins, so that neither of the original separate systems remains.

  The social innovations that were (arguably but not solely) triggered by Victorian ingenuity and drive are just like that. Because there was selection, and because the best growth often occurs in the best run and best designed parts of growing systems, there was recursion. The next generation was inspired by the previous generation's successes, and their noble mistakes, and built a better world. What we might call the Channel Tunnel Syndrome occurs quite often in capitalist, democratic societies, but not in totalitarian states or even in nations like, say, today's Arab states or twentieth-century India. And particularly not in nineteenth-century Russia or China: both were rich, but they had no respectable middle class.

  The Victorian middle class was respected both by the workers whose lives they exploited - and opened up - and by the aristocrats, whose increasingly international outlook was progressively integrated with trade. Russia and China had political systems without an economically powerful, shareholding middle class, which could start or follow fashions, and support romantic, visionary ventures. Today, the British will still support a Channel Tunnel venture or a Beagle-2 Mars lander, because such things are romantic and possibly heroic, even though they are unlikely to be very profitable. A lengthy historical record shows very clearly that the first attempt at any major tunnel usually collapses financially - though after the tunnel is successfully built - often after a long series of attempts to shore up a failing enterprise. Then the ruins are bought for a song, occasionally nationalised or considerably financed by government or some other major capital source, and the resulting business can stand on the shoulders of the first. Only some rather strained economics has so

  far kept the original companies involved in the Channel Tunnel in business, at least on the British side of the Channel where everything was done by private enterprise.

  Some projects are so romantic, so attractive in concept but so very difficult in execution, that three or four attempts are needed for them to acquire momentum. It is recursive structure of the complicit kind that keeps them afloat.[1] Telford's bridges are famous, as are so many of his other engineering works; his ability to capitalise on his successes was the result, and the cause, of his fame, which was achieved by what would now be called `networking' among aristocrats, government ministers, and pickle manufacturers. He was, as they said, famous for being famous. In America similar enterprises were measured more by the anticipated financial return, the `bottom line'. So John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and their ilk were worth supporting because your investment was guaranteed to multiply, rather than because the enterprise was exciting `for Queen and Country'. Early twentieth-century America had gigantic, monolithic Ford ... while England had a variety of small engineering concerns like Morris Garages (MG).

  The other major reason why societies like Victorian England can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fly is one we've discussed earlier. They lift themselves out of the old constraints, and into a new set of rules. In The Science of Discworld and The Science of Discworld II we explained why the space bolas, a kind of enormous Ferris wheel in orbit, is capable of carrying people into space far cheaper than rockets - in fact, requiring less energy than anyone would calculate using Newton's laws of motion and gravity. We took one

  [1] In their 1980 book Autopoiesis and Cognition, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela confused this kind of recursion with a life force, and called it 'autopoiesis'. Many selfconsciously modem management experts cite this concept, without having the foggiest idea what it is.

  further step, and invoked the space elevator, a very strong cable hung from geostationary orbit, which would be harder to build but would require even less energy. The trick is that people and goods coming down can help to lift other people and goods up. The energetics satisfy all the standard mathematical rules, but the context supplies an unexpected source of energy.

  These gadgets work better than rockets, but not because these use relativity or other clever new physics like quantum. Or because they don't obey Newton's laws, because they do, to the extent that these are still relevant. Instead, the bolas and the elevator have new invention immortalised into them, so that a spaceman who gets into the cabin of a bolas in thin upper atmosphere from a jet aircraft can shortly afterwards get out of the cabin 400 miles up. Going at the right speed, it so happens, to catch the passing cabin of a 400-mile space bolas, which can deposit him, days later, in the right orbit to catch the 15,000-mile bolas, which deposits him in geostationary orbit, 22,000 miles up, after a couple of weeks. Such machines can be powered by using them to drop valuable asteroid material down to Earth, or (in the case of the bolas) by `pumping' them like a garden swing, using motors in the middle powered by sunlight and reeling in or letting out the cabin tethers as the bolas rotates.

  Once we've made the huge initial investment required to build such machinery, rocket technology becomes largely obsolete, just as animal traction was dispossessed by the internal combustion engine. Sure, you can't attach 500 horses to the front of a big canal-barg
e, because there wouldn't be room on the towpath - but a 500horsepower marine engine is another matter entirely. Sure, a rocket would use far too much fuel to be a practical method for hoisting goods and people into orbit en masse - but that's not the only way to get them there. Yes, Newton's laws still have to be obeyed, and you have to `pay' to set everything up, and it still costs just the same energy to get people into orbit. But nobody pays once the machinery is there. If you don't believe this, go up in an elevator in a

  skyscraper, noting how the counterbalance weights go down, and return to solid ground. Then, to ram the message home, walk up the stairs.

  The wordprocessor we're using to type this book is a metaphorical space elevator compared to a manual typewriter (remember those? Maybe not). A modem automobile is a space elevator compared to a Ford model T or an Austin-7, which were themselves bolases, while 1880s steam cars were rockets. Think of the investment that went into the Victorian railway system, the canals - then realise how this immense investment changed the rules, so that later generations could do all kinds of things that were impossible to their forebears.

  Victoriana, then, was not a situation, it was a process. A recursive process, which built itself new rules and new abilities, as previous hard work and innovation led to new capital, new money, and new investment. The new poor, downtrodden though they may have been, were much better off than the rural poor had been. Which is why people poured into the cities where their lives, even though Dickensian, were easier and more interesting than they had been in the countryside. The urban newcomers provided a new workforce to build new industries. They provided a useful consumer base too. Those workmen's cottages, still found in the suburbs of many towns, were not only housing for an exploited labour force; they were also a source of new wealth for that young aristocrat back from the Gold Coast who'd opened a pickle factory in Manchester. He had seen the sauces made in Madagascar or Goa, liked the taste, and thought that he could sell them to workmen to put on their sausages and bacon. Think of him for a moment, perhaps a chinless wonder who employed thirty men to mix the tropical-fruit ingredients and boil them in great cast-iron vats. The vats had been made in Sheffield and carried by narrow-boat along canals, giving coin to perhaps fifty workmen who supplied the original vats and buildings: [1] His pickle company supported a whole small industry for generations: supplying coke for heating, imported and locally grown fruit and spices to be processed into sauces, special water, glass bottles, printed labels ...

  [1] When Jack started at Birmingham University in the 1950s, the factory behind the university made cooking pots for missionaries, just like the ones that were popular in the cartoons in Punch - with the missionaries as ingredients, not cooks, you appreciate. No doubt the same factory had once made the original sauce vats used in Madagascar and Goa.

  There would have been half a dozen middle-aged matrons busy at different tasks in his factory, too, even bossing some of the men. This was new - outside the home, anyway. Women also got jobs with him as cleaners, perhaps as secretaries to some of the senior staff, and women earning their own money was a massive wedge driven into a male-dominated society. In that society, it was rare even for courtesans to have control of their own funds, to that extent Mimi in La Boheme is more realistic than Flora in La Traviata. The laws and customs then were very different from what we accept as 'normal' now: young women and older ones were exploited sexually, large numbers of workmen died from industrial accidents and pollution.[1] Only through their suffering - and their triumphs - could the next generation be built.

  Today's Britons are an integral part of this onward and upward process, and in order to see why the triumphs of our real Victorian history have lessons for us now, we must understand what happened then.

  There was one major difference, among millions of individual tiny differences, between Victorian Britain and Russia (or China). The

  [1] Details can be found in many personal diaries, such as those kept by the foremen of the spinning and weaving mills in Lancashire as exercises in writing for their evening classes. We learn that sexual engagement with women employees was sometimes necessary for these men, in order to retain the respect of their colleagues, to maintain obedience by the workforce, even when they found it horrible themselves. In the armed forces, of course, and in prisons, the social 'rules', the peer pressure to sin grossly, were too powerful to resist, too awful for us to contemplate now.

  British had several sources of social heterogeneity, dissidence, of exposure to the public eye of things being done or understood in different ways. From the Baptist chapel to the Quaker meeting house, from the Catholic cathedral with its sweet music and incomprehensible prayers to the Jewish synagogues with their strangely cloaked and hatted congregants who turned into your lawyer or your accountant during the week, religion was obviously diverse. In Poland and Russia, there were pogroms (particularly during the late nineteenth century); in England, there were only taxes. Even in English prisons, very different religious practices were respected, perhaps as much in the breach as in the practice, but the theory was well known and encouraged - if not enforced - by the law. This freedom of thought, word and deed lasted. After the Second World War, after the defeat of Nazism at immense cost, with London still in ruins and food rationed, Sir Oswald Mosley was an avowed fascist whose Blackshirts came down to the East End of London to promote their racist views. Jack was involved in street fights with them about once a month. Even then, he was pleased that their horrible speeches were permitted by the law. In the USA or Russia, Mosley would either have been in jail or elected president. There was a context of heterogeneity, of difference being more than accepted, being valued with a smile. And this was part of an unbroken tradition, going back to Victorian times.

  The big difference that made Victorian Britain successful, itself fostered recursively by all the success stories within it - and by the disparate nature of these successes, such as Quakers, railways, big beautiful bridges, fewer starving children, control of some diseases - was in the ambience, the context, which promoted difference. It has been fashionable for a particularly naive kind of historian of science to point to the social context of scientific theories, and to pretend that science is therefore entirely socially driven. It is usually claimed, by the same token, that this provenance denies science its authority, so its truths merely follow social convention.

  Victorian evolutionists provide a precise refutation of that view.

  Wallace, for example, was born to poor parents, was apprenticed to a watchmaker for a while (obviously one of our wizards had been instructed to achieve this), then became a successful - though indigent - land agent, then a more successful animal and plant collector. He never made enough money to join the upper middle class, even after his star had risen alongside Darwin's.

  Darwin was a junior aristocrat, his parents were well off, and it would have been entirely proper for him to have become a curate - and, indeed to have written Theology of Species. Other proevolutionists, as various as Owen (mistaken by Darwin for an anti-evolutionist because of his careful analysis of the anatomical implications of the Darwin/Wallace natural-selection idea), Huxley, Spencer, Kingsley, were all from different strata of society. We have seen that the first printing of Origin of Species was inadequate for the market, and all copies were sold by the second morning after publication. Would that have happened in nineteenth-century India? In Russia under the czars, or after the revolution? In the United States ... possibly. And in the German part of Prussia. Dickens's stories, critical as they were of the existing order, were anxiously awaited by all strata of society in England - and by many in the eastern United States.

  It would not have been quite so strange if this heterogeneous society involved different groups that picked up on different ideas, according to their various philosophies and theologies. However, what really happened, both to Dickens and to Darwin and later to Wells, was a very general appreciation of their radical ideas, very widely, across all of those diverse grou
ps. The same alternative views were welcomed by many different strata of society. More so, perhaps, than in any other society since, heterodoxy was almost the rule. Working men's clubs were hotbeds of rational argument, thanks to the establishment of evening classes by the Workers' Educational Association. Education for the common man was promoted by the new technical colleges and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

  To some extent, the same went for all the embryo universities which, in Victorian times, had been seeded by philanthropic discussion groups in the big cities. These establishments, dark red-brick buildings found in the centres of all English industrial cities, were very different organisations from the ancient universities. The other half of the building, or the building opposite on the same street, was often the public library, an organisation not to be found in Russia or China at that time. These organisations provided a way up from manual labour to artisan, and there were a thousand such establishments all over Victoriana.

  The real universities, of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrew's, were promoting orthodoxy via classics and the literary and governmental arts. The sciences were slowly coming in, mainly as theoretical physics and astrophysics, which needed only brains and blackboards, like mathematics. Practical sciences like geology and palaeontology, chemistry, and zoology went on in dark and dirty laboratories with tall glass and dark wood partitions; botany was backed up by aromatic herbaria. Such work had a very low status compared to mathematics and philosophy - it had associations with manual labour and dirt. However, archaeology, because of its continuing association with the classical world and its artefacts, had quite high status.