Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  Music helped to quieten rationalism, partly because it evokes emotion without expressing clear meaning. In the eighteenth century, God seemed to have all the best tunes. Isaac Watts’s moving hymns made singers pour contempt on pride. John Wesley’s brother Charles made congregations sense the joy of heaven in love. The settings of Christ’s passion by Johann Sebastian Bach stirred hearers of all religious traditions and none. In 1741 one of the Bible texts that George Frideric Handel set to music made an effective reply to sceptics: God was ‘despised and rejected of men’, but ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth, and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’. Mozart was a better servant of the Church than of Masonry. He died in 1791 while at work on his great Requiem Mass – his own triumph over death.

  You need understand nothing, intellectually, in order to appreciate music. For most of the eighteenth century, of course, composers reflected Enlightenment values in mathematically precise counterpoint, for example, or rational harmonics. But music was about to triumph as a kind of universal language, thanks to deeper currents of cultural and intellectual history. Mozart lay almost unmourned in a pauper’s grave, whereas when Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1834, scores of thousands thronged his funeral, and he was buried with pomp that would hardly have disgraced a prince.67 In the interim, romanticism had challenged enlightened sensibilities.

  The eighteenth century in Europe was supposedly ‘the Age of Reason’. But its failures – its wars, its oppressive regimes, its disappointment with itself – showed that reason alone was not enough. Intuition was at least its equal. Feelings were as good as thought. Nature still had lessons to teach civilization. Christians and their enemies could agree about nature, which seemed more beautiful and more terrible than any construction of the human intellect. In 1755 an earthquake centred near Lisbon shook even Voltaire’s faith in progress. One of Europe’s greatest cities, home to nearly 200,000 people, was reduced to ruins. As an alternative to God, radical philosophers responded to the call to ‘return to nature’ that Baron d’Holbach, one of the most prominent encyclopédistes, uttered in 1770: ‘She will … drive out from your heart the fears that hobble you … the hatreds that separate you from man, whom you ought to love.’68 ‘Sensibility’ became a buzzword for responsiveness to feelings, which were valued even more than reason.

  It is worth remembering that exploration in the eighteenth century was constantly revealing new marvels of nature that dwarfed the constructions of human minds and hands. New World landscapes inspired responses that eighteenth-century people called ‘romantic’. Modern scholars seem unable to agree about what this term really meant. But in the second half of the eighteenth century it became increasingly frequent, audible, and insistent in Europe, and increasingly dominant in the world thereafter. Romantic values included imagination, intuition, emotion, inspiration, and even passion, alongside – or in extreme cases, ahead of – reason and scientific knowledge as guides to truth and conduct. Romantics professed to prefer nature to art, or, at least, wanted art to demonstrate sympathy with nature. The connection with global exploration and with the disclosure of new wonders was apparent in the engravings that illustrated the published reports of two young Spanish explorers, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, who straddled the equator in the 1730s as part of the same project as took Maupertuis to the Arctic: determining the shape of the Earth. They combined scientific diagrams with images of awestruck reverence for untamed nature. Their drawing, for instance, of Mount Cotopaxi erupting in Ecuador, with the phenomenon, depicted in the background, of arcs of light on the mountain slopes, combines precision with rugged romance. Ironically, a scientific illustration was among the first artworks of romanticism.

  The merging of science and romance is apparent, too, in the work of one of the greatest scientists of the age, Alexander von Humboldt, who aimed ‘to see Nature in all her variety of grandeur and splendour’. The high point of his endeavours came in 1802, when he tried to climb Mount Chimborazo – Cotopaxi’s twin peak. Chimborazo was thought to be the highest mountain in the world – the untouched summit of creation. Humboldt had almost reached the top, when, sickened by altitude, racked by cold, bleeding copiously from nose and lips, he had to turn back. His story of suffering and frustration was just the sort of subject romantic writers were beginning to celebrate in Europe. The English poet John Keats hymned the lover who ‘canst never have thy bliss’. In 1800 the introspective but influential German poet Novalis created one of romanticism’s most potent symbols, the blaue Blume, the elusive flower that can never be plucked and that has symbolized romantic yearning ever since. The cult of the unattainable – an unfulfillable yearning – lay at the heart of romanticism: in one of Humboldt’s illustrations of his American adventures, he stoops to pick a flower at the foot of Chimborazo. His engravings of the scenery he encountered inspired romantic painters in the new century.69

  Romanticism was not just a reaction against informally deified reason and classicism: it was also a re-blending of popular sensibilities into the values and tastes of educated people. Its poetry was, as Wordsworth and Coleridge claimed, ‘the language of ordinary men’. Its grandeur was rustic – of solitude rather than cities, mountains rather than mansions. Its aesthetics were sublime and picturesque, rather than urbane and restrained. Its religion was ‘enthusiasm’, which was a dirty word in the salons of the ancien régime but which drew crowds of thousands to popular preachers. The music of romanticism ransacked traditional airs for melodies. Its theatre and opera borrowed from the charivari of street mummers. Its prophet was Johann Gottfried Herder, who collected folk tales and praised the moral power of the ‘true poetry’ of ‘those whom we call savages’. ‘Das Volk dichtet’, he said: the people make poetry. Romanticism’s educational values taught the superiority of untutored passions over contrived refinement. Its portraiture showed society ladies in peasant dress in gardens landscaped to look natural, reinvaded by romance. ‘The people’ had arrived in European history as a creative force and would now begin to remould their masters in their own image: culture, at least some culture, could start bubbling up from below, instead of just trickling down from the aristocracy and high bourgeoisie. The nineteenth century – the century of romanticism – would awaken democracy, socialism, industrialization, total war, and ‘the masses’ backed, by far-seeing members of the elite, ‘against the classes’.70

  ‌Chapter 8

  The Climacteric of Progress

  Nineteenth-Century Certainties

  The common man resorted to bloodshed. The noble savage reverted to type. The French Revolution streaked the Enlightenment with shadows. In Paris in 1798, Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s freak light show made monstrous shapes loom from a screen, or flicker weirdly through billowing smoke. Meanwhile, in demonstrations of the new power of galvanization, Frankenstein’s real-life precursors made corpses twitch to give audiences a thrill. Francisco Goya drew creatures of the night screaming and flapping in nightmares while reason slept, but monsters could emerge in reason’s most watchful hours. Prefigurations of how monstrous modernity could be appeared amid the hideous issue of scientific experimentation or in minds tortured by ‘crimes committed in the name of liberty’.

  The transformation of an entire culture was audible in the discords that invaded Beethoven’s music and visible in the deformations that distorted Goya’s paintings. After the Enlightenment – rational, passionless, detached, precise, complacent, ordered, and self-assertive – the prevailing mood in nineteenth-century Europe was romantic, sentimental, enthusiastic, numinous, nostalgic, chaotic, and self-critical. Bloodied but unbowed, belief in progress persisted, but now with sights trained desperately on the future rather than complacently on the present. With Enlightenment dimmed, progress was discernible but indistinct. Some sixty years after Barry’s paintings of progress for the Royal Society of Arts in London, Thomas Cole conceived a similar series on ‘The Course of Empire’ to illustrate lines from Lord Byron:

  There is
the moral of all human tales;

  ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.

  First freedom and then Glory – when that fails,

  Wealth, vice, corruption – barbarism at last.

  Whereas Barry’s sequence had climaxed in Elysium, Cole’s proceeded from savagery through civilization and decadent opulence to desolation.

  ‌An Overview of the Age

  Instead of a golden age of the past – the normal locus of utopias in earlier periods – the perfectibilians of the nineteenth century thought the golden age was still to come. They could no longer rely on reason to produce progress. The collapse of the Enlightenment brought down the house of reason, exposing human violence and irrationality. All that remained were ‘crooked timbers’ with which ‘nothing straight’ could be made: the language is that of the great transitional figure who, between Enlightenment and romanticism, ‘critiqued’ reason and lauded intuition: Immanuel Kant.1

  In place of reason, vast impersonal forces seemed to drive improvement: laws of nature, of history, of economics, of biology, of ‘blood and iron’. The result was a mechanized and brutalized world picture. Staggering conquests in science and technology sustained the illusion of progress. Steam-driven industrialization immeasurably multiplied the power of muscle. Science continued to reveal formerly unseen truths, teasing microbes into view, manipulating gases, measuring previously ill-known forces, such as magnetism, electricity, and atmospheric pressure, perceiving links between species, exposing fossils, and so disclosing the antiquity of the Earth. English journalists and politicians levered, cranked, and puffed progress as ‘the march of improvement’ – their misleading name for the noise and confusion of unregulated industries. Every advance was adaptable for evil: for war or exploitation. Intellect and morality registered none of the expected improvements, which were all material and largely confined to privileged people and places. Like the Enlightenment that preceded it, the nineteenth-century ‘age of progress’ dissolved in blood: in the cataclysm of the First World War and the horrors of the twentieth century.

  Those horrors flowed from nineteenth-century ideas: nationalism, militarism, the value of violence, the rootedness of race, the sufficiency of science, the irresistibility of history, the cult of the state. A chilling fact about the ideas in this chapter is that most of them generated appalling effects. They shaped the future, even if they had little influence at the time. That is not surprising: there is always a time lag between the birth of an idea and the engendering of its progeny. Factories went up in what was still a Renaissance world, as far as the elite were concerned; as William Hazlitt observed, they were ‘always talking about the Greeks and Romans’.2 Inspired, curious, high-minded, nineteenth-century scientists resembled artists or practitioners of higher mathematics: few had practical vocations. Science, as we have seen, could nourish industry. But the inventors of the processes that made industrialization possible – of coke smelting, mechanized spinning, steam pumping, and the steam-driven loom – were heroes of self-help: self-taught artisans and engineers with little or no scientific formation. Science was eventually hijacked for the aims of industry – bought by money for ‘useful research’, diverted by dogmas of social responsibility – but not until the nineteenth century was nearly over.

  All the technical innovations that reforged the nineteenth-century world started in the West. So did initiatives in almost every other field. Those that arose in Asia were responses or adjustments to the white man’s unaccustomed power – receptions or rejections of his exhortations or examples. At the start of the nineteenth century, William Blake could still draw Europe as a Grace among equals in the dance of the continents, supported, arm in arm, by Africa and America. But she reduced her sister-continents to emulation or servility. Though they sometimes took a long time to effect change in extra-European societies, Western ideas, exemplified or imposed, spread rapidly, symbolizing and cementing a growing advantage in war and wares. European cultural influence and business imperialism extended the reach of political hegemony. Unprecedented demographic, industrial, and technical strides opened new gaps. Industrialized and industrializing regions drew apart and ahead. Although Europe’s hegemony was brief, European miracles were the most conspicuous feature of the nineteenth century: the culmination of long commercial out-thrust, imperial initiatives, and scientific achievements.

  ‌Demography and Social Thought

  Demographic changes are the proper starting place, because they underpinned all the others. A brief summary of the demographic facts will also help explain the theories with which observers responded.

  Despite mechanization, manpower remained the most useful and adaptable of natural resources. In the nineteenth century, the fastest growth of population was in Europe and North America – ‘the West’, as people came to say, or ‘Atlantic civilization’, which embraced its home ocean, its ‘mare nostrum’, just as the Roman Empire clung to its middle sea. Between about 1750 and about 1850, the population of China doubled; that of Europe nearly doubled; that of the Americas doubled and doubled again. For war and work, people mattered most, though the West outpaced everywhere else in mobilizing other resources, too, especially in growing food and mining mineral wealth.

  Everyone realizes that the shift in the global distribution of population favoured the West. But no one has been able to show how it affected industrialization. Historians and economists compete to identify the circumstances that made industrialization possible. They usually refer to propitious financial institutions, a conducive political environment, a commercially minded elite, and access to coal for smelting and making steam. These were all relevant and perhaps decisive. None of the widely supported theories, however, confronts the great paradox of mechanization: why did it happen where and when population was booming? Why bother with the cost and trouble of machines when labour was plentiful and should, therefore, have been cheapened by glut? Population was key, I think, because of the relationship between labour and demand. Beyond a still-unspecifiable threshold, abundant labour inhibits mechanization: the most industrious, productive economies of the preindustrial world, in China and India, were like that. But below the threshold, I suggest, the growth of population generates excess demand for goods, relative to the manpower available to produce them. A propitious balance between labour supply and demand for goods is the essential condition for industrialization. Britain was the first country to meet it, followed, in the course of the nineteenth century, by Belgium and some other parts of Europe, and then the United States and Japan.

  Although relatively concentrated in the West, population growth of unprecedented magnitude happened worldwide. Acceleration had begun in the eighteenth century, when the transoceanic, intercontinental exchange of edible biota hugely boosted the world’s food supplies, while, for obscure reasons, probably traceable to random mutations in the microbial world, the global disease environment changed in favour of humans. At first the effects were hard to discern. Many late-eighteenth-century analysts were convinced that the statistical drift was adverse, perhaps because they noticed rural depopulation – a sort of epiphenomenon that was the result of the relatively faster growth of towns. Even those who spotted the trend early did not know what would happen in the long run and wrestled with conflicting responses to their own bafflement. Among the consequences was one of the most influential instances ever of a mistaken idea that proved immensely powerful: the idea of overpopulation.

  Too many people? No one believed there could be any such thing until an English parson, Thomas Malthus, formulated the idea in 1798. Previously, increased human numbers promised more economic activity, more wealth, more manpower, more strength. Malthus’s was a voice crying for the want of a wilderness. He peered with anxious charity into a grave new world, where only disaster would temper overpopulation. The statistics he used in An Essay on the Principle of Population came from the work of the Marquis de Condorcet, who cited increasing population as evidence of progress. Whereas Condorcet was a
n arch-optimist, Malthus re-filtered the same statistics through a lens dusty with gloom. He concluded that humankind was bound for disaster because the number of people was rising much faster than the amount of food. ‘The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man … Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.’3 Only ‘natural checks’ – an apocalyptic array of famine, plague, war, and catastrophe – could keep numbers down to a level at which the world could be fed.