pseudopodium

. . .

Michael Lind explains (link via metameat), in clearer prose than I'm ever likely to produce, what's wrong with talk about "the West," and comes to a depressing conclusion:

"The collapse of liberal denominations promises an increasing polarisation between consistent secularists and devout believers."
Empty chatter about "the Christian West" or "the capitalist West" fogs perception, as universalizing abstractions tend to do: when we need to know the weather, we're told that clouds look like bunnies (or at least real clouds do). But what makes this particular parochialism dangerous rather than merely annoying is its easy slide into racism and aggression.

The reader a-thirst for closer analysis of Rise-and-Fall Clash-of-Culture rhetoricians might enjoy Robert Musil's 1921 essay, "Mind and Experience: Notes for Readers Who Have Eluded the Decline of the West":

For there is a favorable prejudice -- I want to use the word spiritual, let us say then in spiritual circles, but I mean in literary circles -- toward offenses against mathematics, logic, and precision. Among crimes against the spirit, these are happily counted among the honorable political ones; the prosecutor actually finds himself in the role of the accused. Let us be generous, then: Spengler is speaking approximately; he works with analogies, and these are always right in some sense or other. If an author is bent on referring to concepts by the wrong names or even confusing them with each other, one can eventually get used to it. But some key symbol, some kind of ultimately unequivocal connection between thought and word, must be sustained. Even this is lacking. The examples I have adduced, without having to look very hard, are only a selection among many; they are not errors of detail, but a way of thinking.

There are lemon-yellow butterflies, and there are lemon-yellow Chinese. In a certain sense, then, one can say that the butterfly is the winged, middle-European, dwarf Chinese. Butterflies and Chinese are both familiar as images of sexual desire. Here the thought is formulated for the first time of the previously unrecognized commonality between the great ages of lepidopteral fauna and Chinese culture. That butterflies have wings and the Chinese do not is only a superficial phenomenon. If ever a zoologist had understood anything about the ultimate and deepest ideas of technology, it would not have been left to me to be the first to disclose the significance of the fact that butterflies did not invent gunpowder precisely because the Chinese had done so already. The suicidal predilection of certain kinds of nocturnal moths for bright light is a relic of this morphological connection to Sinology, a connection hard to explain in terms of everyday reason.

It really makes no difference what it is that is to be proved by such means.

. . .

Failing towards Freedom : Henry Adams, 1

That the effort to make History a Science may fail, is possible, and perhaps probable; but that it should cease, unless for reasons that would cause all science to cease, is not within the range of experience. Historians will not, and even if they would they cannot, abandon the attempt. Science itself would admit its own failure, if it admitted that man, the most important of all its subjects, could not be brought within its range.
- Henry Adams to the American Historical Association, 12 December 1894

History saw few lessons in the past that would be useful in the future; but one, at least, it did see. The attempt of the American of 1900 to educate the American of 2000, must be even blinder than that of the Congressman of 1800, except so far as he had learned his ignorance. During a million or two of years, every generation in turn had toiled with endless agony to attain and apply power, all the while betraying the deepest alarm and horror at the power they created.... the mind would continue to react. All the teacher could hope was to teach it reaction.

... Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions, and instead of Kant's famous four antinomies, the new universe would know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law.

- The Education of Henry Adams, 1905

Social studies are an excellent idea; social sciences less so.

The problem springs (and I mean springs) from the confusion of description and prescription, the impulse to apply "knowledge" lickety-split to "practice," a confusion and impulse so built into human nature that only us kinda screwed-up people even perceive it, much less perceive it as a problem. If we try to study "how unhappiness develops," financial pressure will quickly switch us to the more profitable question of "how to prevent unhappiness": psychology turns into therapy, philosophy turns into self-help, sociology turns into genocide, and economics into utter insanity; pro-republic Machiavelli barely advanced into a science of politics before his research became funded and repurposed by Medici Technologies. Sure, everyone wants to be an authority, and that's harmless enough; the trouble is that people expect authorities to give orders.

Luckily if unprofitably, virtually all attempts at formalizing a "humanity" into a "scientific discipline" crumble -- such a relief after straining to hold it together! -- unless one assumes a static monoculture. Historical narratives demonstrably overlap without strictly determining each other, and therefore what's defined as history depends on the observer's chosen focus. Predictive history is impossible because both the facts and their interpretive framework are in the future. Even within a monoculture, even for a single interpeter and for a safely past-and-gone event, newly discovered facts (as Adams often mentions) can completely overturn an interpretation. As a result, the new and glorious science can only be defended by outrageously know-nothing rhetoric -- which hardly makes it a safer foundation for action.

History can only react. It doesn't tell us what to do; it only tells us "I told you so," and that's precisely its value. We need it not because we need prescience but because we need narratives. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fewer and dumber ways of interpreting the present.

. . .

The Descent of Man

If God created man in His own Western (but not too Western) European image, why don't all men resemble Western Europeans? And if men are entitled to law and property, how can one justify enslaving men or colonizing their territory?

The enlightened eighteenth century killed both these birds and got a nice dinner out of 'em by casting the stone of degeneration.

That sounds a bit odd to American ears, since our local colonialist rhetoric restricted itself to filthy bloodthirsty savages (that is, the populations of Africa and the New World). But Sarah Jordan reminds me that Mother England also had to deal with the Middle East, India, and China, and an Oxbridgian could hardly claim that the English infantry was more civilized than those populations. Instead, he'd claim it was less depraved:

Alexander Dow, The History of Indostan, 1770:
"The frequent bathing inculcated by the Coran, has, by debilitating the body, a great effect on the mind. ... The prohibition of wine is also favourable to despotism. It prevents that free communication of sentiment which awakens mankind from a torpid indifference to their natural rights."
Robert Orme, History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, 1763:
"An abhorrence to the shedding of blood, derived from his religion, and seconded by the great temperance of a life which is passed by most of them in a very sparing use of animal food, and a total abstinence from intoxicating liquors; the influence of the most regular of climates, in which the great heat of the sun and the great fertility of the soil lessen most of the wants to which the human species is subject in austerer regions, and supply the rest without the exertion of much labour; these causes have all together contributed to tender the Indian the most enervated inhabitant of the globe."

The effete East is decadent, and "savages" are just decadents who got so lazy they stopped putting on clothes in the morning. God wants the English, as His original representatives, to restore both groups to their hard-working hard-drinking natural ways rather than let them continue to squander their god-given resources in their god-forsaken countries.

As Jordan points out, although admirably unified, this self-justification had a blatant flaw: What man had done, man could do. If the savage African and the effete Asian had started off as pure as Adam or George IV but then been corrupted by their climates, wouldn't the same corruption sooner or later strike colonists? A hard question to turn away, given the gruesome evidence supplied by the colonists' persons.

If ideology was determined by rational argument rather than economics, then the advent of evolutionary theory would have destroyed racism.

Instead, the ideology stayed firmly in place and the justification flipped around it. In the enlightened nineteenth century, the colonized and enslaved went from "degenerate" to "primitive," and the colonists were no longer throwbacks to the golden age but pinnacles of progress, bred to resist rot. The awkward question of environmental factors no longer heckles us, smug in our Darwinian birthright.

So have creationists carefully thought through the possible consequences of their textbook revisions?

+ + +

Presumably not. I mean, is Supreme Designer really a term of praise? Myself, when I survey the vast panoply of life, I'm awestruck by the shoddiness of the job.

I think our friends in the news media would agree that it's easier to flatter a hands-off tough-talking take-charge delegate-everything pass-the-buck-and-overprice-the-ammunition kind of CEO (so like our own dear Queen) than a clumsy would-be mastermind.

. . .

Failing towards Freedom

I am intrigued by this article because, like the woman cited in the first quote above, I often find myself torn between "a traditionally humanist right and an antihumanist left."

Surely, the solution is a postmodern humanist left? How?

Having not felt this conflict myself, I wonder at its prevalence in American graduate schools and bordellos. It may be that embodying "teacher" and "grader" roles in one person is bound to make hash of any investigation of authority. (One-man-bands of judge, prosecutor, jury, and executioner have a poor reputation for justice, despite their efficiency.)

When I learned that everyone is mortal, my breath caught and my heart skipped a beat, but I wasn't relieved of the need to breathe oxygen or circulate blood. I simply gained an awareness of death, which I could either ignore or bear in mind while operating heavy machinery.

Learning the extent to which conscious decision-making is a Pistol of preliminary bluster and unlikely retrospection didn't relieve me of the unpleasant duty to decide things. I only earned another bit of knowledge to work with or discard to the best of my ability.

Similarly, the knowledge that social values come from somewhere, can change, and often conflict might cushion the shock when we encounter differing values or unexpected results, or it might make us more likely to examine and readjust some of our values in the light of others (notably in the light of empiricism). Or it might just be something we drop.

But it certainly doesn't transform us from animals that make, hold, and live by social values into animals that don't. We aren't granted that luxury. (Nietzsche rarely wrote of himself as a new species; his "we"s and "our"s tend to be a bit humbler than that.)

And the knowledge certainly doesn't compel us to give up such constructed values as pleasure, or honesty, or understanding, or greatest good for greatest number, and to instead reshape our lives around such constructed values as short-term selfishness or xenophobic tribal allegiance -- any more than reading about digestive enzymes compels us to switch from delicious to repulsive food. A fella's still gotta eat.

. . .

Historical Imperative

Cardinal Richelieu, instead of being an innovative modernizer of France's military system... in fact failed to initiate effective reforms in military administration, and owed what limited success he had in expanding and strengthening the French army to improvised expedients and the cultivation of the great nobles and existing clientage networks.... funded not by a streamlined fiscal system, but through high taxes and short-term borrowing managed by officials whose corruption was encouraged by the system. Most of the armies' successes, moreover, were the product of decentralization and delegation of authority to military commands and officials, and what limited attempts Richelieu made to concentrate power in his own hands or those of his own clients produced a backlash that threatened to destroy the monarchy a few years later.
- Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. LV, No. 4, Winter 2002
James R. Smither review of
Richelieu's Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624-1642 by David Parrott

But France made out OK for a couple years, so it's easy to see how the story of Richelieu's prowess spread. What was he going to do? Deny it?

There are as many perspectives as there are human souls and once again I’m learning that no easy conclusions can be drawn, and that what was called History in school was worse than watered-down fairy tales.
- Gail Armstrong

It's not precisely true that history's always written by the victor. Only losers write anything, much less history books. (Burning them's another matter.) But it's true enough that the notion of victors grounds the historical genre.

The historian's job is to build a coherent narrative from whatever source material's available, with memory of hearsay usually providing the initial plot outline. Narrative prefers willed action with willed effects. And so we tell about someone planning this and gaining that, and someone else making a mistake and losing. And the winners (if any) tend to be the protagonists, unless we're playing weepy reactionary, in which case it's going to be awfully hard to avoid bathos.

When sources abound, our fiction becomes untenable, no matter how much the active parties might've clung to their own fictions for the sake of career and sanity. To write coherent post-literate pre-library-burning history is to ascribe motives glibly in the text and dispute or overturn them in the footnotes. (Which is why footnotes are often where the most interesting writing is.)

[That same narratological impulse has kept torture multiculturally acceptable for millenia. Torture produces a known story, and therefore it produces a coherent story, thus re-affirming the value of torture. (Those of us raised to abhor torture should bear in mind that we rely on grossly inaccurate eyewitness accounts for similar reasons.) It's no surprise that the Bush administration, with its faith in the confidently stated lie and in Matthew 25:29-30, should be the first American administration in some time to suggest bringing torture back into the legal system. Footnotes to be shredded before publication.]

When they link local weather conditions to a monarch's virtue, classic European and Chinese histories seem quaint to (most) contemporary humanities students, who know that weather is actually caused by butterfly wings. Could be, though, we maintain some quaint assumptions of our own....

Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I read a book (this was before I kept a journal about anything other than my sex life, so I don't have the title at hand) that brought two bits of research together. The first polled military scholars to determine who were the greatest military leaders in history and what determined that category; it turned out to be something like winning six major battles. The second collected a database of major battles and relevant commanders and calculated, based purely on chance, what the likely distribution of wins would be. The most likely number of winners of six battles was identical with the number of most-agreed-upon major military leaders.

Although the coincidence is merely suggestive, I've found the suggestion clarifying when brought to bear on questions like how did Grant turn from a drunken loser to a drunken winner (producing a narrative of growing wisdom and maturity) and then (as President) back to a drunken loser again (producing very confused narrators)?

Almost a century before that book's publication, confused Grant-watcher Henry Adams bid farewell to history when, after decades of mulling the elaborately unreliable allegiances of English-American diplomacy during the American Civil War, he found by reading memoirs and diaries that they'd been generated semi-randomly by the combination of an aging pathological liar, an airhead who took orders from his morning Bible reading, and a self-confessed bungler who hadn't thought through the consequences of his actions:

All the world had been at cross-purposes, had misunderstood themselves and the situation, had followed wrong paths, drawn wrong conclusions, and had known none of the facts. One would have done better to draw no conclusions at all. One's diplomatic education was a long mistake. His whole theory of conspiracy,— of policy,— of logic and connection in the affairs of man, resolved itself into "[a mistake of] incredible grossness."

All this was indifferent. Granting, in spite of evidence, that Gladstone had no set plan of breaking up the Union; that he was party to no conspiracy; that he saw none of the results of his acts which were clear to everyone else; granting in short what the English themselves seemed at last to conclude:— that Gladstone was not quite sane; that Russell was verging on senility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve.... How should it have affected one's future opinions and acts?

Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are rough; its judgments are rougher still.... The problem would have been the same; the answer equally obscure.

- The Education of Henry Adams

Even in the presumable limit condition of fiction labeled as such, on the presumable author's own authority, we often find confusion, second-guessing, or admission of surprise ("I meant to make God the hero, but Satan kept taking over"). How much more murkiness might be expected from a Real Life Adventure with the cross-purposed interference of multiply improvising and scatterbrained plotters?

Does this mean history has nothing to teach us?

Even to this non-historian, it seems very insistently to teach lessons of (in no particular order) tolerance, skepticism, humor, and panic.

Those were never very popular lessons, however, and, except for the last, they're less popular now than ever.

. . .

Failing towards Freedom : Brooks Adams, 1

Since the capitulation of Paris the soldier has tended to sink more and more into a paid official, receiving his orders from financiers with his salary, without being allowed a voice even in questions involving peace and war. The same fate has overtaken the producing classes; they have failed to maintain themselves, and have become subjects of the possessors of hoarded wealth. Although the conventions of popular government are still preserved, capital is at least as absolute as under the Caesars, and, among capitalists, the money-lenders form an aristocracy. Debtors are in reality powerless, because of the extension of that very system of credit which they invented to satisfy their needs. Although the volume of credit is gigantic, the basis on which it rests is so narrow that it may be manipulated by a handful of men. [...] The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond attack, for it is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of which the legions were a toy; a police so formidable that, for the first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. The only question which preoccupies the ruling class is whether it is cheaper to coerce or to bribe.
- The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History
by Brooks Adams (1895-6)

Brooks Adams never set "The Law" in a single line of Greek and arithmetic; his wife's suggested title was The Path to Hell: A Story Book. He thumps out a simple enough pattern, though.

History describes the inverse relationship of two emotions: Fear and Greed. ("That's not where I want to be.") As a population centralizes, Fear becomes less important, Greed more. The power (or status or survival he makes no distinction) of an individual (or "organism", "type", "breed", "race" he makes no distinction) in any community (or "culture", "civilization", "nation", "race" he makes no distinction) is determined by whether Fear or Greed has the ascendancy. Military heroes and priests rule the Fearful; capitalists rule the Greedy. As Greed accelerates, the increasingly capitalistic community becomes dependent on cheaper external goods and labor. Eventually this leads to collapse, dispersion, and Fear.

The leading indicators (or the sole engines he's vague) of cultural change are control of financial exchange and access to the units of exchange.

  1. The Roman empire rose and conquered under the banner of forced high-interest credit, and declined under the same. Pax Romana was just another name for trade deficits and agricultural ruin: "Economic competition became free, land tended to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, and this land was worked by eastern slaves, who reduced the wages of labour to the lowest point at which the human being can survive."
  2. The Empire moved to Constantinople to follow the center of international trade, where exchange could be balanced. Collapse of the Western empire brought the Italian peasantry immediate relief.
  3. As decentralization of Western Europe progressed and technology was lost, the money value of the miracle rose. Which eventually led to the Crusades, which eventually led back to economic recentralization.
  4. The Renaissance? The Crusades diverted money from Byzantimum towards Italy. "Placed between the masterpieces of the East and West, and having little imagination of his own, the Florentine banker conceived the idea of combining the two systems and embellishing them in a cheap and showy manner...."
  5. As the power of capital advanced, it brought about the Protestant Reformation. A personal relationship with God is cheaper than miracles purchased through His licensed agent.

Follow the money: Rome plundered Europe and the Near East. The merchants plundered Rome. The Church plundered Europe. Italy plundered Constantinople. Portugal stole the Indies trade from Italy. Spain plundered the New World. The Dutch stole the ocean trade from Spain. Improved technology re-centered trade in England. England plundered India. Germany plundered France. Bankers plundered everyone.

So it seems to be a habit with us. What makes Adams's account most impressively legalistic is his tone, the attorney's habit of argument by inevitability. "She had no choice but to pull the trigger." "You have no choice but to find her guilty." "The Knights Templar might as well have argued with gravitation." "That ostentatious, sordid, and cowardly race, being better adapted, rose to dominance."

... to be continued ...

Responses

"a habit with us" - Seeing as how they've truncated your sense of us-ness down to somewhat minus the last 3 millenia, with an unspoken codicil that any pre-our-history human lives were larval and inconsequent, like indigenes generally, even the useful ones, it might get more toward the actual analysis of motivation to say "this here us".
Fear and Greed are the driving wheels of this particular clot of this particular primate spooge, what we are as a race, or specie, is rather larger than what passes for history now.

I see where you're coming from and I'm getting there, although I can't blame you if you're tired of waiting. I meant this first part as summary, not as endorsement. (I wonder how many "Little Nell must die" letters were sent to Dickens.)

. . .

Failing towards Freedom : Brooks Adams, 2

All this appreciably before Max Weber or Oswald Spengler.... It's tempting to say Brooks Adams was ahead of his time, except he hits anyone's time on his face.

Despite its recent crisis, the 1895 American elite wasn't in the mood for anti-imperialist pessimism. And neither were Marxists, really; although Adams thought capitalism incapable of avoiding civilization-shattering crises, he also thought humanity incapable of avoiding capitalism. We weren't heading for the dictatorship of the proletariat. We were heading for anarchy and subjection by fresher capitalists.

After the Great War, Spengler's race-mysticism was found more interesting than Adams's materialism. As late as 1944, the New English Weekly could complain that "the emphasis it lays on the economic factor" conflicted with "Otto Sieck's thesis that character changes are brought about by miscegenation."

But although Adams claimed wealth determined which representatives of which races ended up on top, he still expressed himself in racial reifications. This account of globalization is likely to be found distasteful by most fans of Hardt & Negri:

First, inventions from the East facilitated trade; then, the perfection of weapons of attack made police possible, and individual bravery unnecessary; on this followed the abasement of the martial and exaltation of the economic type; and finally that intense acceleration of movement by machinery supervened, which, in annihilating space, has destroyed the protection that the costly races long enjoyed against the competition of simpler organisms. [...] For nearly a century the inventions of Hargreaves, of Crompton, of Cartwright, and of Watt, enabled Lancashire to supply Bombay and Calcutta with fabrics, as, in the seventeenth century, Surat and Calicut had supplied London, and this superiority appeared assured until Orientals should acquire the momentum necessary for machinery. One effect in Europe was the rapid increase of a population congregated in towns, and bearing a marked resemblance to the "humiliores" of Rome in their disinclination for war. True to their instincts, the adventurers ever quickened their movements, ever extended the sphere of their enterprises, and, finally, just as the Second Empire verged upon its fall, they opened the Suez Canal in 1869. The consequences of this great engineering triumph have probably equalled in gravity the establishment of the gold standard, but the two phenomena had this marked difference. The producers saw their danger and resisted to the utmost the contraction of the currency, whereas the Canal was a case of suicide. Thenceforward grain, raised by the most enduring labour of the world, could be thrown without limit on the European market, and, agricultural competition once established, industrial could only be a question of time.

Even on its own terms the book's a mess, unable to resist a good torture scene anytime or anywhere, and digressing spectacularly into the vices of the Tudors.

Its own terms are what interest me.

... to be continued ...

Responses

Character changes are brought about by miscegnation. Also by adherence to racial-purity laws. Also by celibacy. Also by promiscuity. Also by tedious list-making. The character of those changes may be more of an issue.

"The character of" as in "The nature of" or as in "The person effected by"? If the latter, I agree. The characters of the miscegnator or tedious list-maker may be changed by their experiences, but not the characters of their descendents.

Oh but of course. Though cast in more subtle light than our dull gross vision has power to see. You mean predictable intentional change I think. Everything works changes on everything else. The glockenspiel effects the timpani, in its way, though we'll never hear it, still it does.

. . .

Failing towards Freedom : Brooks Adams, 3

Early Darwinian historians simply swapped Nature's will in for God's: Nature evolved homo sapiens, and then Nature evolved late nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans, and now it's just a matter of mopping up the kitchen.

Brooks Adams knew better. Biological evolution describes a process, not a project; by analogy, any rules governing human culture would continue to grind through the Gilded Age. Anyone who thought they'd reached the end of history hadn't understood history.

Relinquishing the throne of creation freed Adams to found a different lineage of errors.

Take, for example, his assumption that biology and culture conserve a constant quantifiable "energy" which is divvied out across each generation. Or his asides about a force of history which can no more be argued with than gravitational acceleration. In both cases, he seems to misunderstand evolution as (singular) survival of the (winner-take-all) fittest under a (singular) law rather than as an intention-free account of species diversification. He mistakes Darwin for Newton.

He's hardly alone. Because technology depends on reliably replicable results, non-scientists tend to picture science as a matter of finding trustworthy laws and formulas. But that doesn't cover even all laboratory sciences: Medical and psychological journals describe barely distinguishable correlations rather than universally valid laws, and the pressures of research funding encourage flexibility in what's considered significant. In the twentieth century, physics itself became probabilistic.

Most drastically, the characterization doesn't cover historical science. Historical sciences such as geology and evolutionary biology study contingencies, not eternal verities. What makes them scientific are the materiality of their problems, their evidence, and their suggested explanations.

Darwin's problem was the appearance of new species over time. His solution was divergent descent driven by material means.

What's the historian's problem? It doesn't seem to be divergence. Like later scientizing historians, Adams rummaged through the polymorphic transtemporal promiscuity of human culture and found cycles. But evolution isn't cyclical.

Biologists in the tradition of Darwin should not speak of the coming into effect of selection if:

1. Already disappeared characters suddenly re-appear in subsequent generations (= false negative selection).
2. Characters which seem to have been positively “selected” during ontogeny never re-appear in subsequent generations (= false positive selection).

Usually, genes, genomes, characters, individuals, populations, and species never do come back once they have been negatively selected, and that is eliminated by Darwinian selection. This is the very simple, but fundamental essence of Darwin’s idea of “natural selection” which, in that respect, was a clearly materialist one....

The situation in operant learning – and, by the way, also in conceptual change in science and culture – is even more revealing. Cases 1 and 2 are in this view not rare exceptional cases, but rather they constitute more or less the rule.

- Adolf Heschl

And the problem's certainly not species. Although biological taxonomy may be fuzzy in spots, it's brick solid compared to what we grasp and mold from the blooming buzzing muck of human chronicles. So far as history is conceived as anything but a chronological collation of citations from unreliable sources, history is nothing but variations on observer bias, and misanthopic pessimism isn't enough to correct our myopia.

After only 110 years, Adams's biases seem sharp, and his (to him) clean abstractions seem (to us) to morph and merge. His towering account is stabilized by the shiftiness of its foundations. Even the line between "civilization" and "barbarism" is blurred by his fascination with torture.

Living where and when he did, Adams restricts the purview of his general law of "civilizations" to Western Europe and, occasionally, their colonies. The barbaric Crusaders contacted the Saracens at the peak of their civilization but what laws governed that civilization? China, Japan, Persia they were out there, we suppose; unchanging, decadent....

Living where and when he did, Adams's idea of "economy" focused on the movement of precious metals. But the "money" of contemporary wealth is as imaginary, as reliant on the power of orthodoxy and law, as any kingship or priesthood: a shared nightmare from which we're afraid to wake up.

Living where and when he did, Adams pictured religion and finance as opposite extremes. Protestantism had won because conscience is cheaper than icons. Taking what would seem and would continue to seem, among the elite, for some decades the natural next step, Henry Adams pointed out that "Atheism is still cheaper than reformed religion."

But then again Henry also pointed out that the leaders of the Catholic church appear to have accumulated more wealth than Luther, Calvin, and Fox. And then again, Brooks represents the Anglican capitalists who consolidated lands and lowered the value of productive labor as more economically evolved than the Puritan farmers who were thereby forced into exile. And then again, as the economic power of those exiles grew...?

Well, living where and when we do, none of it makes sense. If capitalism and religious faith were ever in conflict, they made up by the time of the Spanish Civil War. For those of us who've survived into the 21st century, it's hard to picture them as anything but allies. The age of expensive miracles isn't past. It's just that the expensive miracle cures consist of selfish murdering assholes getting to feel good about themselves. Taking the long view, though, is that really so novel?

And then there are his easy personifications of "race" and "breed". In their rush to scientize, even skeptics like Brooks and Henry Adams stayed blind to the flaws of these selectively weighted non-random outliers-scrubbed sample sets. They knew many more WASP millionaires than they knew Jewish bankers Jay Gould was as American as apples with razor blades. But that hardly registered, they'd known so few Jews who weren't bankers.

Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if they had. Young Louis Zukofsky's stubborn refusal of either "all you Jews" or "unlike most Jews" gambits rolled off Adams fan Ezra Pound with as little effect as every other non-artifactual experience. I'm-rubber-you're-glue is a hard game to lose.

* * *

The reader may wonder why I feel compelled to exhume and whump the peaceful corpse of Brooks Adams.

The point isn't he was an idiot. While he was alive he was smarter than me, possibly even as smart as you.

But now that he's dead, we have a bit of an edge. And I think this is a fairly common pattern.

Adams couldn't escape his time and place. That's not a mistake we've grown out of.

... to be concluded ...

Responses

misanthopic trees never bloom

. . .

Failing towards Freedom : Brooks Adams, 4

But simply because it is possible to model a process in Darwinian or quasi-Darwinian terms does not necessarily imply that it is useful to do so. Darwin himself invoked natural selection to explain the existence of adaptation in nature – a phenomenon which cries out for scientific explanation and was conspicuously lacking one until Darwin’s own theory. But in many of the recent attempts to discern Darwinian processes at work in other domains, for example, in the realm of human culture, there is no comparable phenomenon which clearly requires, but totally lacks, a proper causal explanation.
- Samir Okasha
We feel as though we ought to be able to tell the "story" of anything that changes over time like America, or the vertebrates. But the things about which we can tell stories must either possess individuality, or they must be prepared to have individuality and all it entails like ontogeny and closure imposed upon them by the force of narrative.
- Bob O'Hara
That may be, but it's all pretty unsatisfactory.
- Nora Charles

Given how blatantly history and culture don't map the concerns of evolutionary biology, what attracts humanists to the rhetoric of evolutionary biology?

Darwinian evolution proposed to solve an otherwise unexplained mystery. In contrast, human history has too many explanations.

Somehow, though, on close inspection, they always seem to dissolve into a mist of unknowables, tautologies, unlikelihoods, and impossibilities.

Miasma in, miasma out. History amalgamates human actions into a reasonable narrative; human actions aren't rational. We intuit causality and teleology from our own experience of agency. But, fast talker though it is, human agency never quite finishes explaining things. Its story doesn't hang together.

In response, we might cook the books: haute cuisine chefs such as Objectivists and behaviorists eviscerate, blanch, bone, shred, filter, and pipe experience into occasional lever pushes by a mascaraed Gary Cooper.

Or we might find some supplemental force to fill the gaps of decision: gods, God, demons, spells, universal dialectic, conflicting drives, false consciousness, interfering modules, the selfish genes of our extinct ancestors.... But in describing them as "forces", we've only shifted the burden of teleological paradox on to where we hope it can't be questioned further, like a subpoenaed CEO's The Girl.

The principled skeptical historian, like the English professor who's sick of literature, would like to sweep the tainted debris of personality out of sight. "Evolution" appeals as a magically unliftable materialist carpet. But its magic material is Emperor's New Cloth. The explanations offered by evolutionary biologists are usually presented as not-disproven; the explanations offered by historians usually aren't presented in disprovable terms. The carpet can't be lifted because there's nothing there. Nothing except that same irritating multiplying dust-bunny.

Satisfaction will not be received. The scratch is just the itch's way of making another itch.

... what startles me in these paragraphs is the self-satisfied assumption of the finality of my conclusions. I posit, as a fact not to be controverted, that our universe is an expression of an universal law, which the nineteenth century had discovered and could formulate.

During the past thirty years I have given this subject my best attention, and now I am so far from assenting to this proposition that my mind tends in the opposite direction. Each day I live I am less able to withstand the suspicion that the universe, far from being an expression of law originating in a single primary cause, is a chaos which admits of reaching no equilibrium, and with which man is doomed eternally and hopelessly to contend.

- "Preface to New Edition" of
The Emancipation of Massachussetts: The Dream and the Reality
by Brooks Adams (1919)

Responses

We (or our claustrophobia-enducing tiny little comment box) seem to have finally driven this dedicated reader round the bend:

This is fine and good mindwork. Excellent. It seems important for reasons I can't get my fingers on to recognize everything Darwinian movement happens to is already there. The growth medium having its own day in court, sort of thing.

And speaking of our comment box and evolution, today marks this primitive email-based response system's first instance of bot spam:

[Link removed] would any guy here do anything sexual with a girl in front of your friend Like your best friend? I don't know if I can do anything like that.
That evolution happens to stuff, that what is evolving is stuff that's been here since either:
a. an origin only describable by dogmatic mumbo-jumbo and requiring blind faith e.g. bigbang superstring fries-with-that; or,
b. It's always been here. If it's always been here, the room for conjecture as to further and as-yet unobserved attributes is very great.

Scott McLemee commented:

Come to think of it, the whole idea that each society consists of a certain mass of energy seems awfully Herbert Spencer-ish, and I'd bet the ranch that is where he got it. It takes some doing now, really, to grasp just how gigantic a figure Spencer was at the time.

Oddly, though, Spencer doesn't really show up in the Adams material I've read. (Henry Adams mentions him once in a late letter as an English affliction to match the German Kant and French Comte.) For whatever guesses are worth, I'd guess that the two brothers thought of him more as symptom of the times than as personal inspiration -- which, of course, doesn't rule out unacknowledged influence....

. . .

Failing towards Freedom : Footnote

Samuel Butler's most cited statement on evolution must be "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." But his most prescient was "The power to make mistakes is one of the criteria of life as we commonly think of it."

. . .

Lord Kelvin's Monkey
or, The Heat Death of the University

Vacationers returned from the Lands of Science can be expected to display the following reflections:

Henry Adams displayed the usual range, and, like other humanist intellectuals then and since, came to suffer from science envy. His discipline must innovate to regain relevance, and relevant innovation means Science or at least the sciences considered most newsworthy.

During Adams's decades as a professional historian, those sciences were geology and Darwinist evolution. Afterwards, at century's end and in his mid-fifties, he struggled to comprehend the hot topics of contemporary physics: thermodynamics and electromagnetism, and later, radioactivity.

His new studies were in some ways more intriguing and more satisfying than his old: the applications easier to see, the theories more convincingly law-like, the outlooks grimmer. Adams was particularly taken by Lord Kelvin's terse style and ultimate admission of FAILURE, announcing in one letter, "I am a dilution of a mixture of Lord Kelvin and St Thomas Aquinas" a fair one-line summary of Adams's two best-known books.

But the physicists' mathematics were opaque; even their imagery could be daunting: "How then does the molecule bounce?" "Maxwell gives no definition of a dead molecule, yet a dead molecule must be something very different from a living molecule."

And Adams lacked a tutor or informant. In geology, he'd relied on his friend Clarence King, and even provided King with field reports from Polynesia. Brother Brooks served as prod and soundboard in the science of economics. (Economics has numbers, and numbers make a Science, and a Science must have Laws. As the big business monkeys at Cal used to state, if it's not quantifiable it doesn't exist. Quantify Excellence. Excel Excellence.™) In physics, however, Adams relied on the kindness of strangers, and the strangers often took their time about replying.

Hungry for explanations, corrections, angry denunciations, enthusiastic assent, or simple companionship, Adams slowly began to expose his worries and speculations more widely. By age 72, he felt ready to send a privately printed volume to a select audience of professional historians. To compensate for his deficiencies as a physics scholar, he equipped the Letter with a formidable barricade of quotes from eminent authorities and tried not to stray far from its protection.

And by this cautious route he stumbled into the final trap awaiting would-be straddlers of the Two-or-More1 Cultures: bad timing.

1. Nowadays Three at least, being topped by a business school more antagonistic to the Second Law of Thermodynamics than historians ever were.

. . .

While Adams struggled to make history a respectable science in a STEM-led university, his exemplary sciences struggled between themselves.

It was an age of theorizing inventors and toolmaking theorists, and Adams's earlier attempt at a global Law of Acceleration mostly described the codependent accumulation of scientific discoveries and engineering techniques. In physics and chemistry, theory, application, experimentation, and consensus fed each other in a tight, fast loop. In mathematics, each innovation could be redeployed almost immediately as a tool for more discoveries.

Even after discarding two millennia of Galenic humours and bloodletting,1 biology and medicine were handicapped by the relative slowness and uncertainty of their labwork. And despite their own conceptual revolutions, "historical sciences" such as geology, paleontology, and cosmology were built from uncontrolled, incomplete, and unrepeatable evidence, and therefore unfit to survive a game ruled by timely, immaculately isolated, and precisely replicable experiments.

Then as now "hard" scientists were aware of their advantage. Lord Kelvin, especially, was celebrated for his brusque interventions. First, he proved that the sun must be less than 300 million years old, most probably 100 million, and shrinking and cooling at a rate which would become uncomfortably perceptible over a million years or less. Since the earth couldn't be older than the sun, that did for the earth's age as well.

Adams had a ringside seat for the next development: based on Clarence King's lab results, Kelvin then lowered the earth's age to a scanty 20 million years.

Evolution as explained by Darwin wasn't credible at that speed, and paleontologists scrambled to meet the threat. On a happier note for geologists, a dying sun would neatly explain the otherwise inexplicable Ice Age; on a sadder one, it would place humanity at the literal End of Days.

As you know, Bob, none of this was true. The source of Kelvin's mistake was the same as the source of his thermodynamics: the steam engine. Working in complete (but rarely acknowledged) absence of evidence, theorists assumed the interiors of the sun and earth must resemble their own familiar technology: heat comes from burning; burning consumes fuel; unless the store of fuel is replenished it shrinks into ashes and universal darkness buries all. Although the sun might sometimes be tossed the kindling of a meteor, that was unlikely to balance its extravagant expenditures. And since the earth's hot core couldn't be replenished at all, it must quickly be resolving into cold and solid rock.

Print and web are full of latter-day defenses of Kelvin by physicists and mathematicians. His methods were right and his calculations were correct but the data were incomplete. The poor fellow couldn't possibly have anticipated solar nuclear fusion or terrestrial radioactivity. Geologists and evolutionary biologists had made unrealistic assumptions an infinitely old earth, unchanged over eternity except by erosion and needed to wake up and smell the Real Science coffee. Besides, everything worked out in the end.

So sure, we can't fault Kelvin just for being wrong. Everyone was wrong about something; everyone probably still is. What we can fault him for is the vehemence of his wrongness, his refusal to acknowledge the incompleteness of his data, and his tendency to exclude inconvenient outside-the-laboratory realities from that data and in one case inconvenient inside-the-laboratory reality as well, since the chief flaw in his calculation of the earth's age was raised by his ex-assistant, the impeccably credentialed John Perry.

As for those sleepy subpar mathematicians, the geologists, they were capable of brewing their own coffee. The evidence of sediment, erosion, and fossils required more than twenty million years but infinitely fewer than infinity, and the "doctrine of uniformity" had already been amended by better knowledge of volcanic activity, earthquakes, and climate change. As of 1877, Clarence King, again, was suggesting something not unfathomably far from punctuated equilibrium.

In my own amateurish readings, the most impressive figure of this debacle was Sir Archibald Geikie. His first response was good humored enough:

The geologist found himself in the plight of Lear when his bodyguard of one hundred knights was cut down. ‘What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five?’ demands the inexorable physicist, as he remorselessly strikes slice after slice from his allowance of geological time. Lord Kelvin is willing, I believe, to grant us some twenty millions of years, but Professor Tait would have us content with less than ten millions.

In scientific as in other mundane questions there may often be two sides, and the truth may ultimately be found not to lie wholly with either. I frankly confess that the demands of the early geologists for an unlimited series of ages were extravagant, and even, for their own purposes, unnecessary, and that the physicist did good service in reducing them. It may also be freely admitted that the latest conclusions, from physical considerations of the extent of geological time, require that the interpretation given to the record of the rocks should be rigorously revised, with the view of ascertaining how far that interpretation may be capable of modification or amendment. But we must also remember that the geological record constitutes a voluminous body of evidence regarding the earth’s history which cannot be ignored, and must be explained in accordance with ascertained natural laws. If the conclusions derived from the most careful study of this record cannot be reconciled with those drawn from physical considerations, it is surely not too much to ask that the latter should be also revised. It was well said by Huxley that the mathematical mill is an admirable piece of machinery, but that the value of what it yields depends upon the quality of what is put into it. That there must be some flaw in the physical argument I can, for my own part, hardly doubt, though I do not pretend to be able to say where it is to be found. Some assumption, it seems to me, has been made, or some consideration has been left out of sight, which will eventually be seen to vitiate the conclusions, and which when duly taken into account will allow time enough for any reasonable interpretation of the geological record.

When Kelvin doubled down, Geike escalated to match him, pointing out John Perry's physics-based dissent and returning to the geologic evidence:

It is difficult satisfactorily to carry on a discussion in which your opponent entirely ignores your arguments, while you have given the fullest attention to his. In the present instance, geologists have most carefully listened to all that has been brought forward from the physical side. Impressed by the force of the physical reasoning, they no longer believe that they can make any demands they may please on past time. [...] Yet there is undoubtedly a prevalent misgiving, whether in thus seeking to reconcile their requirements with the demands of the physicist they are not tying themselves down within limits of time which on any theory of evolution would have been insufficient for the development of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. [...]

So cogent do these geological and palæontological arguments appear, to those at least who have taken the trouble to master them, that they are worthy of being employed, not in defence merely, but in attack. It seems to me that they may be used with effect in assailing the stronghold of speculation and assumption in which our physical friends have ensconced themselves and from which, with their feet, as they believe, planted well within the interior of the globe and their heads in the heart of the sun, they view with complete unconcern the efforts made by those who endeavour to gather the truth from the surface and crust of the earth. That portion of the records of terrestrial history which lies open to our investigation has been diligently studied in all parts of the world. A vast body of facts has been gathered together from this extended and combined research. The chronicle registered in the earth’s crust, though not complete, is legible and consistent. From the latest to the earliest of its chapters the story is capable of clear and harmonious interpretation by a comparison of its pages with the present condition of things. We know infinitely more of the history of this earth than we do of the history of the sun. Are we then to be told that this knowledge so patiently accumulated from innumerable observations and so laboriously co-ordinated and classified, is to be held of none account in comparison with the conclusions of physical science in regard to the history of the central luminary of our system? These conclusions are founded on assumptions which may or may not correspond with the truth. They have already undergone revision, and they may be still further modified as our slender knowledge of the sun, and of the details of its history, is increased by future investigation. In the meantime, we decline to accept them as a final pronouncement of science on the subject. We place over against them the evidence of geology and palæontology, and affirm that unless the deductions we draw from that evidence can be disproved, we are entitled to maintain them as entirely borne out by the testimony of the rocks.

1. Both of which I expect Paltrow and white supremacists to restore any day now.

. . .

Kelvin's firm misguidance was no anomaly. As recounted by geologists Jeff Dodick and Nir Orion, mathematical physics has laid down the (dubious) law from James Hutton's perfectly Newtonian balance to Harold Jeffreys' proof that continents couldn't move. Underlying the law-laying was a hierarchy decided more by political than material realities: deduction from established premises encourages certainty; allowing a choice of narratives does not; in battles for dominance, certainty beats admitted fallibility.

Still, the historical sciences remain, for lack of a better word, "science": explicable, falsifiable, and governed by empiricism; agreeing on valid evidence, systematizing that evidence, and working toward (or against) consensus that the systematization matches the evidence in a worthwhile way.

"Soft" (that is, specifically human) sciences such as sociology and psychology should sit higher in the hierarchy of certainty insofar as they announce quantified generalizations which allow ample wiggle room for exceptions and can be tested at will by the generation of new evidence. Unfortunately, the result of regeneration's been a replication crisis. A labile pattern-making species will have no trouble finding patterns when it introspects. Isolating and stabilizing them is another story, and another.

Where does the intersection of "historical" and "soft" fit on this scientistic scale?

In 1852, Thomson contented himself by saying that a restoration of energy is “probably” never effected by organized matter. In 1910, there is nothing “probable” about it; the fact has become an axiom of biology. In 1852, any University professor would have answered this quotation by the dry remark that society was not an organism, and that history was not a science, since it could not be treated mathematically. Today, M. Bernhard Brunhes seems to feel no doubt that society is an organism [...] As an Organism society has always been peculiarly subject to degradation of Energy, and alike the historians and the physicists invariably stretch Kelvin's law over all organized matter whatever.

In Adams's terms, I expect most of us have reverted to 1852. Inside the blip of human existence the crawl from Big Bang towards Big Lukewarm is barely detectable. Our sun is slowly expanding, not quickly shrinking, and by the time it blossoms no humans will be lolling on a beach to catch the rays. Narrative history incorporates more statistical analysis than it used to but hasn't become "mathematical" in a predictive or formulaic sense except when packaged as propaganda.

Instead of history hardening, sciences may have softened. The organism and the species have become more permeable and pluralistic concepts, and even the inorganic sciences have repeatedly struck limits on their ability to predict and control outcomes. Avoiding the over-trampled murk of post-Bohr physics, let's take the mundane field of meteorology as an example.

High on the success of their nuclear bomb simulations, post-WWII mathematicians, physicists, and engineers tackled weather as both natural threat and potential weapon, only to be halted at a durational border. Daily and weekly regional weather forecasts can be drastically improved by tracking technologies and computer analysis. And we seem able to make some broad generalizations about global climate trends. But the territory between is unmappable:

If Laplace’s mathematical intelligence were replaced by a computing machine of unlimited speed and capacity, and if the atmosphere below 100km were spanned by a computational lattice whose mesh size were less than the scale of the smallest turbulent eddy, say one millimeter… [all predictions would prove inaccurate within a month] not because of quantum indeterminacy, or even because of macroscopic errors of observation, but because the errors introduced into the smallest turbulent eddies by random fluctuations on the scale of the mean free path (ca 10-5mm at sea level), although very small initally, would grow exponentially… The error progresses from 1mm to 10km in less than one day, and from 100km to the planetary scale in a week or two.

Although history hasn't become the sort of "real" science Henry Adams had in mind, could it attain the relatively respectable status of a latter-day historical science? After all, like geologists and paleontologists, human-historians attempt plausible guesses at the service and the mercy of whatever evidence happens to turn up, no matter how irreversible, indeterminate, incomplete, or inconvenient it might be. Models tend to be narrative rather than timeless formulae, deductive along the lines of Sherlock Holmes rather than Euclid, attentive to anomalies rather than discarding them as noise. Any universally applicable systematization threatens to become a map larger and more rigid than the territory itself. Instead, simpler models of causality accrete with no clear way to quantify their relative effects.

I suppose, as with most such categorizations, it's a matter of degrees. In a (human) chronicle or history, outliers are even more likely to play leading roles. And since it's almost unheard of for us to perform any halfway complex action for only one reason, Ockham's Razor is more likely to maim than reveal, and potential models proliferate. Over the long run historians can provide as verifiable a prediction and exhaustive a summary as any lab report: "Everyone died." In the meantime, irreducible ambiguities and the tides, currents, backwaters, eddies, and catastrophes of human culture block most hope of objectively settled generalizations.

Which makes "history as a science" look an awful lot like the sort of history Henry Adams actually practiced: attentive to a wide range of evidence, aware of competing models, straightforward about his choices, and uncomfortably aware that his impressively coherent narratives might at any time be shattered by new or revived or rejected evidence, or swept away by an attractively novel interpretive angle, or might unknowably be built on little better than noise.

That may sound discouraging, but it's just another way of saying "Everyone hasn't died yet." Carry on, historian!

. . .

He [the historian] was therefore obliged either to deny that social energy was an energy at all; or to assert that it was an energy independent of physical laws. Yet how could he deny that social energy was a true form of energy when he had no reason for existence, as professor, except to describe and discuss its acts? He could neither doubt nor dispute its existence without putting an end to his own; and therefore he was of necessity a Vitalist, or adherent of the doctrine that Vital Energy was independent of mechanical law.

Science circa 1900 taught that orgasms shortened lifespans and that thinking was unhealthy for women. Popular and academic presses were full of confident (if conflicting) and well-credentialed (if unfounded) pronouncements about Will and Vital Energy and Racial Degeneration. Evolution implied progress toward perfection, organisms were treated as if they were (ideally) closed systems, and social phenomena were theorized as chemical or mechanical phenomena.

In later decades straying humanists would be unattractively preserved by coats of Freud, Jung, Marxist millennialism, behaviorism, computer science, or the remnants of evolutionist-determinism. Science circa 1900 was the particular tarpit proffered to Adams, and he obediently submerged himself.

The posthumous result for him, like other interdisciplinary victims, was (a bit unfairly) unflattering. His bold 1 stuck-in-the-tar attempts to future-proof historiography now stiffen somewhere between tedious and offensive, whereas the dull stick-in-the-mud particulars of his political histories, art histories, and personal histories seem almost as vital as ever.

Out of his depth or not, Adams remained a brilliant writer and a clever thinker. Some of Adams's many prognostications of calamity happened to hit on genuinely calamitous years,2 and similarly some of the Letter's remarks still strike a spark:

For purposes of teaching, the figure is alone essential, and the figure of Rise and Fall has done infinite harm from the beginnings of thought. That of Expansion and Contraction is far more scientific, even in history. Evolution, again, is troublesome, and has already yielded to the less compromising figure of Transformation. Expansion and Transformation are words which commit teachers to no inconvenient dogma; indeed, they are so happily adapted for Galileos who are wise enough not to shock opinion, that they seem to impose themselves on the lecture-room.

...

Matter indeed, is energy itself, and its economies first made organic life possible by thus correcting nature's tendency to waste.

And he sketched one development as straightforwardly as anyone might.


Oftentimes processes which can't be precisely controlled to produce precisely predictable outcomes can be radically disrupted to produce grossly foreseeable catastrophes. Burning a library or museum, for example, is an experiment whose result is far more certain and far less costly than waiting out centuries of writing, painting, and sculpting would be.

Changes in human culture aren't micromanaged by the Second Law of Thermodynamics or by biological evolution, but human culture can easily make both of them more perceptible. To return to meteorology:

Probably intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters will come in a few decades, and will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present. [...] Such actions would be more directly and truly worldwide than recent or, presumably, future wars, or than the economy at any time. Extensive human intervention would deeply affect the atmosphere's general circulation, which depends on the earth's rotation and intensive solar heating of the tropics. Measures in the arctic may control the weather in temperate regions, or measures in one temperate region critically affect another, one quarter around the globe. All this will merge each nation's affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war may already have done.
- "Can We Survive Technology?" by John von Neumann, 1955

Neumann wrote those words about the prospect of intentional intervention, but they apply just as well to the unplanned intervention mentioned elsewhere in his essay:

The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil more than half of it during the last generation may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit.

Or, as Adams phrased it forty-five years earlier:

From the physicist’s point of view, Man, as a conscious and constant, single, natural force, seems to have no function except that of dissipating or degrading energy. Indeed, the evolutionist himself has complained, and is still complaining in accents which grow shriller every day, that man does more to dissipate and waste nature s economies than all the rest of animal or vegetable life has ever done to save them. “Already,”— one may hear the physicists aver —“man dissipates every year all the heat stored in a thousand million tons of coal which nature herself cannot now replace, and he does this only in order to convert some ten or fifteen per cent, of it into mechanical energy immediately wasted on his transient and commonly purpose less objects. He draws great reservoirs of coal-oil and gas out of the earth, which he consumes like the coal. He is digging out even the peat-bogs in order to consume them as heat. He has largely deforested the planet, and hastened its desiccation. He seizes all the zinc and whatever other minerals he can burn, or which he can convert into other forms of energy, and dissipate into space. His consumption of oxygen would be proportionate to his waste of heat. He startles and shocks even himself, in his rational moments, by his extravagance, as in his armies and armaments which are made avowedly for no other purpose than to dissipate or degrade energy, or annihilate it as in the destruction of life, on a scale that rivals operations of nature. What is still more curious, his chief pleasures, so far as they are his own invention, consist in gratifying the same unintelligent passion for dissipating or degrading energy, as in drinking alcohol, or burning fireworks, or firing cannon, or illuminating cities, or deafening them by senseless noises. Worse than all, such is his instinct of destruction that he systematically exterminates or degrades all the larger forms of animal life in which nature stored her last creative efforts, while he breeds artificially, at great expense of his own energies, and at cost of the phosphorus and lime accumulated by nature’s mostly extinct organisms, the feebler forms of animal and vegetable energies needed to make good the prodigious waste of his own. Physicists and physiologists equally complain of these tendencies in man, and a large part of their effort is now devoted to correcting them; but the physicist adds that, compared with this enormous mass of nature’s economies which man dissipates every year in rapid progression, the little he captures from the sun, directly or indirectly, as heat-rays, or water-power, or wind-power, is trifling, and the portion that he restores to higher intensities would be insignificant in any case, even if he did not instantly degrade and dissipate it again for some momentary use.” [...] The sun can keep up its expenditure indefinitely, subject to occasional fits of economy; while man is a bottomless sink of waste unparalleled in the cosmos, and can already see the end of the immense economies which his mother Nature stored for his support.

1. Henry A. Bumstead, the most enthusiastic professional physicist among the Letter's readers, wrote Adams: "I have for some time had the impression that historians were too much devoted to 'facts,' and nothing like so ready as we are to venture into the deep waters of speculation."

2. Looking back at Adams's speculations after his death, Bumstead was struck by the "fact that he predicts a 'change of phase' about 1918, and that the world does find itself in an unprecedented state or suspense and transition at this time."

 

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Public domain work remains in the public domain.
All other material: Copyright 2024 Ray Davis.