The Lying Stones of Marrakech (35 page)

In order to estimate its [the nineteenth century's] full importance and grandeur—more especially as regards man's increased power over nature, and the application of that power to the needs of his life today, with unlimited possibilities in the future—we must compare it, not with any preceding century, or even with the last millennium, but with the whole historical period—perhaps even with the whole period that has elapsed since the stone age.

The chapters of this first part then detail the major inventions, spurred by advancing science, that brought such great potential improvement to nineteenth-century life: control of fire (with wide-ranging implications from steam engines to generating plants), labor-saving machinery, transportation, communication, and lighting (culminating in the incandescent bulb). Wallace's examples often combine charm with insight (as we recall, from yet a century further on, the different lives of not-so-distant forebears). For example, Wallace writes of his own childhood:

The younger generation, which has grown up in the era of railways and of ocean-going steamships, hardly realize the vast change which we elders have seen…. Even in my own boyhood the wagon for the poor, the stage coach for the middle class, and the post-chaise for the wealthy, were the universal means of communication, there being only two short railways then in existence…. Hundreds of
four-horse mail and stage coaches, the guards carrying horns or bugles which were played while passing through every town or village, gave a stir and liveliness and picturesqueness to rural life which is now almost forgotten.

I confess to a personal reason for intrigue with Wallace's best example for regarding the nineteenth century as exceeding all previous history in magnitude of technological improvement: the trip from London to York, he states, took less time during the Roman occupation than in 1800, just before the advent of railroads—for the Romans built and maintained better roads, and horses moved no faster in 1800 than in A.D. 300. (I am amused by the analogous observation that rail travel on my frequent route between New York and Boston has slowed during the last century. A nineteenth-century steam engine could make the journey faster than Amtrak's quickest train, which now runs by electricity from New York to New Haven, but must then lose substantial time in switching engines for the diesel run on a nonelectrified route from New Haven to Boston. Yes, they tell us, vast improvement and full electrification lie just around the temporal corner. But how long, oh Lord, how long!)

In reading Wallace's examples, I also appreciated the numerous reminders of the central principle that all truly creative invention must be tentative and flexible, for many workable and elegant ideas will be quickly superseded—as in this temporary triumph for news over the newly invented telephone:

Few persons are aware that a somewhat similar use of the telephone is actually in operation at Buda Pesth [
sic
for Budapest, a city then recently amalgamated from two adjoining towns with Wallace's separate names] in the form of a telephonic newspaper. At certain fixed hours throughout the day a good reader is employed to send definite classes of news along the wires which are laid to subscribers' houses and offices, so that each person is able to hear the particular items he desires, without the delay of its being printed and circulated in successive editions of a newspaper. It is stated that the news is supplied to subscribers in this way at little more than the cost of a daily newspaper, and that it is a complete success.

But Wallace's second and longer section then details the failures of the nineteenth century, all based on the premise that moral stagnation has perverted the application of unprecedented scientific progress:

We of the 19th century were morally and socially unfit to possess and use the enormous powers for good or evil which the rapid advance of scientific discovery had given us. Our boasted civilization was in many respects a mere surface veneer; and our methods of government were not in accordance with either Christianity or civilization. This view is enforced by the consideration that all the European wars of the century have been due to dynastic squabbles or to obtain national aggrandizement, and were never waged in order to free the slave or protect the oppressed without any ulterior selfish ends.

Wallace then turns to domestic affairs, with the damning charge that our capitalist system has taken the wealth accrued from technological progress, and distributed the bounty to a few owners of the means of production, while actually increasing both the absolute and relative poverty of ordinary working people. In short, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer:

One of the most prominent features of our century has been the enormous and continuous growth of wealth, without any corresponding increase in the well-being of the whole people; while there is ample evidence to show that the number of the very poor— of those existing with a minimum of the bare necessities of life— has enormously increased, and many indications that they constitute
a larger proportion of the whole population than in the first half of the century, or in any earlier period of our history.

At his best, Wallace writes with passion and indignation, as in this passage on preventable industrial poisoning of workers:

Let every death that is clearly traceable to a dangerous trade be made manslaughter, for which the owners … are to be punished by imprisonment…. and ways will soon be found to carry away or utilize the noxious gases, and provide the automatic machinery to carry and pack the deadly white lead and bleaching powder; as would certainly be done if the owners' families, or persons of their own rank of life, were the only available workers. Even more horrible than the white-lead poisoning is that by phosphorus, in the match-factories. Phosphorus is not necessary to make matches, but it is a trifle cheaper and a little easier to light (and so more dangerous), and is therefore still largely used; and its effect on the workers is terrible, rotting away the jaws with the agonizing pain of cancer followed by death. Will it be believed in future ages that this horrible and unnecessary manufacture, the evils of which were thoroughly known, was yet allowed to be carried on to the very end of this century, which claims so many great and beneficent discoveries, and prides itself on the height of civilization it has attained?

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.