This unprecedented human predicament is the theme that overarches my book.
A World of Two Souls
Even though the predicament is unprecedented, it was anticipated. Before the Industrial Revolution had reached its full strength, poets, writers, and artists had premonitions about the new historic force and the unfathomable changes it might bring. There is much in the Romanticist art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the music, paintings, and fiction—that speaks to the calm before the storm and reflects the tension between evanescent enjoyment and anxious anticipation. Examples are Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, Schubert’s songs, John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” the paintings of still-pristine American landscapes by Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Cole, and of course many passages in Goethe’s Faust.
Some writers used metaphorical stories to express their dark foreboding. In 1797, Goethe wrote The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a ballad about the irresponsible unleashing of a robot whose unstoppable energy spreads havoc all around. Two centuries later, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice resonates with our concerns about the proliferation of nuclear technology. In 1816 Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (published 1818), which became a highly popular book that spoke to the then-emerging fear that scientists might create humanlike beings who could inflict monstrous harm on society. To this day, the fear of future Frankensteins lives on in people’s imagination—a fascinating story told well by Jon Turney.1
It is as if mankind now has two souls—“the one strives to forsake the other.” One soul guided human development for millennia, inspiring people with religious faith, social sentiments, and cultural traditions. It embraces religions thousands of years old and political principles that had gained acceptance several hundred years ago. The other soul seeks scientific knowledge to expand the human conquest of nature. It reaches out to a horizon that is forever receding. During the past two hundred years, this second soul has inspired mankind to gain unprecedented power over natural forces. These advances, however, have not been matched in the political, social, and religious sphere. Our culture has become deeply divided.
Once we have come to understand this cultural split of the modern age, we need not look far to see examples. Consider, for instance, the American duality: the disjunction between the political foundations of the United States and its global role since World War II. What has endowed America’s military and economic power with a global reach beyond that of any other nation is the vigorous development and exploitation of new technologies. What gives the United States its internal strength, pride, and cohesion, all essential for political and military influence abroad, are its Constitution and political traditions. The constitutional provisions critical for the values and functioning of the American republic are more than two hundred years old, save for a few vital amendments (above all, the amendments to abolish slavery and, also, the amendment on female suffrage). It seems fair to say that the essence of America’s political order—its political soul—was created by a nation of fewer than four million inhabitants, more than two-thirds of whom worked on farms. After two hundred years, this “soul” still serves the nation splendidly, despite a 75-fold increase in the number of inhabitants, a huge expansion of the national territory, a vast transformation of the economy, and many other far-reaching changes. How long can America’s two cultural spheres harmoniously sustain each other?
Before the cultural split, all civilizations had been unitary. Religious faiths, societal traditions, political thought, artistic and scientific endeavors, all were intimately connected and dominated the entire culture. This cultural dominion left little freedom for revolutionary technological advances. The exceptions—such as the exploitation of scientific discoveries to design navigation instruments, develop metallurgy, and improve calendars and clocks—are well remembered because they were so rare. Only a few scientists of extraordinary courage and intellectual strength ventured beyond the accepted norms of interpreting nature.
Until the eighteenth century, religious and political beliefs, and the ways of thinking about nature fostered by these beliefs, determined the flow of history. The belief systems ruled over the evolution of all civilizations and illuminated the horizon of human creativity. They forced the early manifestations of man’s scientific and technological prowess to move in harmony with religion and the political order. They kept science in step with the evolution of society, instead of allowing it to race ahead. Being so closely intertwined, the two sides of human creativity shared their periods of flowering, times of stagnation, and periods of decline.
This harmony is marvelously illuminated by the fate of science and technology in China. Despite China’s many astonishing scientific discoveries during and before Europe’s Dark Age, it was to be more than a century after the scientific-technological revolution had swept through Europe, America, and Japan that Chinese science became emancipated from the constraining cultural sphere, and then only because of the impact of the West. In the early fifteenth century, China had acquired the knowledge and technical capabilities to navigate distant oceans. It could have become a major naval power. But in 1433 an edict by the Emperor Zhu Di put an abrupt end to any such adventures. Several scholars have sought to explain why the modern scientific-industrial age reached China so late—well after it had impacted Japan and Russia—when many scientific discoveries and masterful technical applications had blossomed in China so early. Wen-yuan Qian of the University of California in Los Angeles points to the “ideology of hierarchism” by which China “was shackled” for two hundred years, a way of conceptualizing the world that “explicitly endorses an obedient attitude, a self-contented outlook, and a pacifist stand to deal with an allegedly changeless world.” Donald J. Munro of the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese
