The New Penguin History of the World (191 page)

Some fear that resources are now so wastefully employed that we confront a new version of the Malthusian peril. Energy has never been used so lavishly as it is today; one calculation suggests that more has been used
by humanity during the last century than during the whole of previous history – say, in the last 10,000 years. Yet the best estimates do not suggest that there is an imminent danger of running out of the fossil fuels that have supplied most of this enormous increase. Nor have we by any means reached the end of our capacity to produce food, though there is more land under cultivation than ever before (and its area doubled in the last century), but there would at once be an impossible situation if the whole world sought to consume other goods than food at the level of developed countries today. There is a limit to what a human being can eat, but virtually none to what he or she can consume in terms of a better environment, social services, medicine and the like. We may, too, already have passed the point at which energy consumption is putting unmanageable strains on the environment (for instance, in pollution or damage to the ozone layer), and to further increase those strains would be intolerable. The social and political consequences that might follow from changes that have already occurred have not yet begun to be grasped and we have nothing like the knowledge, technique or consensus over goals such as was available to land men on the moon.

This became much clearer as a new spectre came to haunt the last decades of the century – the possibility of manmade, irreversible climatic change. The year 1990 had hardly ended before it was being pointed out that it had been the hottest year since climatic records began to be kept. Was this, some asked, a sign of ‘global warming’, of the ‘greenhouse effect’ produced by the release into the atmosphere of the immense quantities of carbon dioxide produced by a huge population burning fossil fuels as never before? One estimate is that there is now some 25 per cent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than in pre-industrial times. It may be so (and as the world’s output of the stuff is now said to be 6000 million tons a year, it is not for laymen to dispute the magnitudes). Not that this was the only contributor to the phenomenon of accumulating gases in the atmosphere whose presence prevents the planet from dissipating heat; methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons all add to the problem. And if global warming is not enough to worry about, then acid rain, ozone depletion leading to ‘holes’ in the ozone layer, and deforestation at unprecedented rates, all provided major grounds for new environmental concern. The consequences, if no effective counter-measures are forthcoming, could be enormous, expressing themselves in fears of climatic change (average surface temperature on the earth
might
rise by between one and four degrees Celsius over the next century), agricultural transformation, rising sea-levels (six centimetres a year has been suggested as possible and plausible), and major migrations.

The Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which came into force in 2005, is an attempt to deal with these problems through limiting the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere. Thirty-eight industrial nations have pledged to reduce their emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012. But the world’s largest polluter, the United States, has refused to sign, while the world’s second largest polluter, China, is exempt from most of the regulations because of its status as a developing country. Even if the signatories live up to their commitments, most experts believe that much more is needed to avoid the long-term effects of global warming. By the turn of the twenty-first century it was abundantly clear that if the major states could eventually come to co-operate rather than compete, there would be plenty of common concerns for mankind to co-operate about – if they could agree on what had to be done.

BELIEFS AND ATTITUDES

Historians should not pontificate about what goes on in the minds of the majority, for they know no more than anyone else; it is the untypical, who have left disproportionately prominent evidence, whom they know most about. They should be careful, too, about speculating on the effect of what they think are widely held ideas. Obviously, as recent political responses to environmental concerns show, changes in ideas can soon affect our collective life. But this is true even when only a minority know what the ozone layer is. Ideas held more widely, and of a vaguer, less-defined sort, also have historical impact; a Victorian Englishman invented the expression ‘cake of custom’ to speak of the attitudes, formed by deep-seated and usually unquestioned assumptions, which exercise decisive conservative weight in most societies. To be dogmatic about how such ideas operate is even more hazardous than to say how ideas tie up with specific matters (such as environmental change), yet the effort has to be made.

We can now see, for example, that more than any other single influence a growing abundance of commodities has recently shattered what was for millions – still not long ago – a world of stable expectations. This is still happening, most strikingly in some of the poorest countries. Cheap consumer goods and the images of them increasingly available in advertisements, especially on television, bring major social changes in their train. Such goods confer status; they generate envy and ambition, provide incentives to work for wages with which to buy them, and often encourage movement towards towns and centres where those wages are to be had.
This severs ties with traditional ways and with the disciplines of ordered, stable life. This is one of many currents feeding the hastening onrush of modernity.

Part of the complicated background to and the process of such changes is an obvious paradox: the last century was one of unprecedentedly dreadful tragedy and disaster on any measurable scale, and yet it appeared to end with more people than ever believing that human life and the condition of the world could be improved, perhaps indefinitely, and therefore that they should be. The origins of such optimistic attitudes lie centuries back in Europe; until recently, they were confined to cultures rooted in that continent. Elsewhere they have still to make much progress. Few could formulate such an idea clearly or consciously, even when asked; yet it is one shared more widely than ever before and one that is changing behaviour everywhere.

Almost certainly such a change owes less to exhortatory preaching (though there has been plenty of that) than to the material changes whose psychological impact has everywhere helped to break up the cake of custom. In many places they were the first comprehensible sign that change was in fact possible, that things need not always be as they have been. Once, most societies consisted mainly of peasants living in similar bondage to routine, custom, the seasons, poverty. Now, cultural gulfs within mankind – say, those between the European factory-worker and his equivalent in India or China – are often vast. That between the factory-worker and peasant is wider still. Yet even the peasant begins to sense the possibility of change. To have spread the idea that change is not only possible but also desirable is the most important and disruptive of all the triumphs of the culture – European in origin – which we now call ‘western’.

Technical progress has often promoted such change by undermining inherited ways over very broad areas of behaviour. As already mentioned, an outstanding example has been the appearance over the last two centuries of better forms of contraception, whose apogee was reached in the 1960s with the rapid and wide diffusion of what became (in many languages) known simply as ‘The Pill’. Though women in western societies had long had access to effective techniques and knowledge in these matters, the Pill – essentially a chemical means of suppressing ovulation – implied a greater transference of power to women in sexual behaviour than any earlier device. Although still not taken up by women in the non-western world so widely as by their western sisters, and although not legally available on the same basis in all developed countries, it has, through the mere spread of awareness of its existence, marked an epoch in relations between the sexes. But many other instances of the transforming power of science and technology on society could be cited. It is difficult not to feel, for example,
that two centuries’ changes in communication, and particularly those of the last six or seven decades, imply even more for the history of culture than, say, did the coming of print. Technical progress also operates in a general way through the testimony it provides of the seemingly magical power of science, since there is greater awareness of its importance than ever before. There are more scientists about; more attention is given to science in education; scientific information is more widely diffused through the media and more readily comprehensible.

Yet success, paradoxically, as in space, has provided diminishing returns in awe. When more and more things prove possible, there is less that is very surprising about the latest marvel. There is even (unjustifiable) disappointment and irritation when some problems prove recalcitrant. Yet the grip of the master idea of our age, the notion that purposive change can be imposed upon nature if sufficient resources are made available, has grown stronger in spite of its critics. It is a European idea, and the science now carried on around the globe (all based on the European experimental tradition) continues to throw up ideas and implications disruptive of traditional, theocentric views of life. This has accompanied the high phase of a long process of dethroning the idea of the supernatural.

Science and technology have thus both tended to undermine traditional authority, customary ways and accepted ideology. Even when they appear to offer material and technical support to the established order, their resources become available to its critics. Clear ideas about what scientists do may hardly filter through to the public at large, but even if most of humanity rests undisturbed in traditional pieties and superstition, it is harder to stay in the familiar ruts. This is true not only for the intellectuals who are, of course, disproportionately prominent in histories of thought and culture, but of the inherited assumptions and prejudices with which most of us live. The second effect is more important in recent history than at earlier times because improving communication has pushed new ideas more quickly into mass culture than ever before, though the impact of scientific ideas on élites is easier to trace. In the eighteenth century, Newtonian cosmology had been able to settle down into co-existence with Christian religion and other theocentric modes of thought without much troubling the wide range of social and moral beliefs tied to them. As time passed, however, science has seemed harder and harder to reconcile with any fixed belief at all. It has appeared at times to stress relativism and the pressure of circumstance to the exclusion of any unchallengeable assumption or viewpoint.

A very obvious instance can be seen in one new branch of science – psychology – which evolved in the nineteenth century. After 1900 more
began to be heard of it by the lay public, and especially of two of its expressions. One, which eventually took the name ‘psychoanalysis’, can be considered, as an influence on society at large, to begin with the work of Sigmund Freud, which had begun in the clinical observation of mental disorder, a well-established method. His own development of this became, with comparative rapidity, notorious because of its wide influence outside medicine. As well as stimulating a mass of clinical work that claimed to be scientific (though its status was and is contested by many scientists), it undermined many accepted assumptions, above all, attitudes to sexuality, education, responsibility and punishment. Freud’s work was based on a belief that therapy could be pursued and relevant clinical data assembled by uncovering patients’ unconscious wishes, feelings and thoughts. This was to prove an inspirational gift to artists, teachers, moralists and advertising specialists. Meanwhile, another psychological approach was that pursued by practitioners of ‘behaviourism’ (like ‘Freudian’ and ‘psycho-analytical’, a word often used somewhat loosely). Its roots went back to eighteenth-century ideas, and it appeared to generate a body of experimental data certainly as impressive as (if not more impressive than) the clinical successes claimed by psychoanalysis. The pioneer name associated with behaviourism is still that of the Russian, I. P. Pavlov, the discoverer of the ‘conditioned reflex’. This rested on the manipulation of one of a pair of variables in an experiment, in order to produce a predictable result in behaviour through a ‘conditioned stimulus’ (the classical experiment provided for a bell to be sounded before food was given to a dog; after a time, sounding the bell caused the dog to salivate without the actual appearance of food). Refinements and developments of such procedures followed which provided much information and, it was believed, insight into the sources of human behaviour.

Whatever the benefits these psychological studies may have brought with them, what is striking to the historian is the contribution that Freud and Pavlov made to a larger and not easily definable cultural change. The doctrines of both were bound – like more empirical approaches to the medical treatment of mental disorder by chemical, electrical and other physical interference – to suggest flaws in the traditional respect for moral autonomy and personal responsibility that lay at the heart of European moral culture. In a sharper focus, too, their weight was now added to that of the geologists, biologists and anthropologists in the nineteenth century who contributed to the undermining of religious belief.

At any rate, in western societies the power of the old idea that things mysterious and inexplicable were best managed by magical or religious means now seems to have waned. It may be conceded that where this has
happened it has gone along with a new acceptance, even if halting and elementary, that science was now the way to manage most of life. But to speak of such things demands very careful qualification. When people talk about the waning power of religion, they often mean only the formal authority and influence of the Christian churches; behaviour and belief are quite different matters. No English monarch since Elizabeth I, four and a half centuries ago, has consulted an astrologer about an auspicious day for a coronation. Yet in the 1980s the world was amused (and perhaps a little alarmed) to hear that the wife of the president of the United States liked to seek astrological advice.