Ideas

by Peter Watson

  ‘Although Darwin gradually abandoned his belief in a benevolent creator, he was certainly inclined to hope that the white race did indeed represent the high point of an inevitable (if irregular) advance toward higher things.’92 In the Descent, he knew that, above all, he had to explain the very great–the enormous–increase in mental power from apes to humans.93 If evolution was a slow, gradual process, why did such a large gap exist? This was the answer that the religious sceptics were looking for. His answer came in chapter four of the book. There, Darwin advanced the proposition that man possesses a unique physical attribute, the entity with which this book began, namely an upright posture. Darwin argued that this upright posture, and the bipedal mode of locomotion, would have freed the human’s hands and as a result we eventually developed the capacity to use tools. And it was this, he said, which would have sparked the rapid growth in intelligence among this one form of great ape.94 In the Descent Darwin did not offer any cogent reason as to why ancient man had started to walk upright and it was not until 1889 that Wallace suggested it could well have been an adaptation to a new environment. He speculated that early man was forced out of the trees on to the open savannah plains, perhaps as a result of climate change, which shrank the forests. On the savannah, he suggested, bipedalism was a more suitable mode of locomotion.

  The importance of the upright posture, despite the fact that the idea was introduced by Darwin himself, was not at first regarded as very significant. It was not until Eugene Dubois discovered ‘Java man’, Pithecanthropus (now Homo) erectus, in 1891–1892, that the theory came into its own (and confirmed the importance of the Neanderthal finds: see Chapter 1). The Pithecanthropus remains included a femur constructed in such a way as to suggest bipedalism, together with a piece of skull of a size that indicated a brain capacity between that of apes and humans. Even so, the importance of man’s upright posture was not fully accepted until the 1930s.95

  The legacy of Darwinism is complex. ‘The advent of evolutionism is seen by some as a watershed separating modern culture from the traditional roots of Western thought.’96 There is no question but that its timing, quite apart from its intellectual substance, played a major role in the secularisation of European thought, considered in Chapter 35.97 Darwinism forced people to a new view of history, that it occurred by accident, and that there was no goal, no ultimate end-point. As well as killing the need for God, it transformed the idea of wisdom, as some definite attainable state, however far off. This undermined traditional views in all sorts of ways and transformed the possibilities for the future. To mention just two, it was Darwinism’s model of societal change that led Marx to his view of the inevitability of revolution, and it was Darwin’s biology that led Freud to conceive the ‘pre-human’ nature of subconscious mental activity. As we shall see in a later chapter, Darwin’s concept of what comprises ‘fitness’, in an evolutionary context, has been much misunderstood, and gave rise, consciously or unconsciously, to many social arrangements that were unjust and cruel. But since the rediscovery of the gene, in 1900, and the flowering of the technology based on it, Darwinism has triumphed. Except for one or two embarrassing ‘creationist’ enclaves in certain rural areas of the United States, the deep antiquity of the earth, and of mankind, is now firmly established.

  32

  New Ideas About Human Order: the Origins of Social Science and Statistics

  To Chapter 32 Notes and References

  Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was born in Saintes in the west of France on 28 May 1738, the ninth of twelve children. By a curious irony his birth was premature, precipitated by his mother’s chance witnessing of a distressing public execution. Perhaps because of this, as Joseph-Ignace grew up, he was always aware that in France, as elsewhere, execution techniques varied widely according to the social standing of the condemned criminal. In general, members of the aristocracy suffered a quick death, while for those lower down the scale it was often protracted and agonising. In France in the eighteenth century there were more than one hundred offences that carried the death penalty, the most grotesque of which was reserved for François Damiens (1714–1757), the unfortunate who attacked Louis XV with a penknife and succeeded in scratching the royal arm. Damiens’ flesh was torn from his breast, arms and thighs with red-hot pincers, his right hand–which had held the penknife–was burned in sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil were poured on the exposed flesh where the skin had been torn away and then his body was quartered by four horses pulling in four directions. The executioner showed his sympathy for his victim by loosening the sinews of the man’s joints with a sharp knife so that he could be more easily torn apart.

  By the time of the revolution, Joseph-Ignace was a substantial figure, a distinguished doctor, a professor of anatomy and Doctor-Governor of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris. He became a representative in the National Assembly. He was also a pacifist and, motivated by humanitarian concerns, in December 1789 he introduced into the Assembly six propositions aimed at creating a new and more humane penal code, one which treated all men the same and did not distinguish, in the penalties imposed, between different ranks. The second article of this new code recommended that capital punishment should henceforth consist of decapitation by means of a new and simple mechanism. The Assembly spent time examining Dr Guillotin’s recommendations, before adopting them, and during the debates a journalist asked–sarcastically and rhetorically, for the new mechanism had not yet been designed, let alone built–‘Should this device bear the name of Guillotin or Mirabeau?’

  Guillotin did not either design or build the instrument that did, indeed, come to bear his name. The designer was another doctor, Antoine Louis (at one stage the plan was to call the new device a ‘Louisette’), while the man who actually constructed the execution machine was a Monsieur Guedon or Guidon, the carpenter who normally provided the state with scaffolds. The new contraption was tested on 17 April 1792 (using straw, sheep and several corpses). When a corpse with a particularly thick neck was not decapitated after three attempts, Dr Louis raised the height of the drop and changed the shape of the blade from a convex curve to a straight blade angled at 45°. A banquet was held to celebrate ‘Dr Guillotin’s daughter’, with toasts to a ‘most distinguished project for equality’.

  The guillotine was first used ‘in anger’, so to speak, a week later, on 25 April 1792, when the thief and assassin Jacques Nicholas Pelletier met his end.1 Thousands flocked to see the new instrument but many were disappointed–the execution was over so quickly.

  Neither Dr Guillotin or Dr Louis could have foreseen how often their new, improved instrument was to be used in the years ahead, or at how efficiently it struck at all ranks equally. The French Revolution of 1789 is remembered first and foremost for what Hegel called its ‘shrieking aftermath’, five years of bloody terror, lynchings and massacres, and for years of tumultuous political upheaval, culminating eventually in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte and unleashing twenty years of war. The roll call of people sent to the guillotine, often for the flimsiest of reasons, still has the power to shock: Antoine Lavoisier, the chemist, because he was a former tax-gatherer; André Chénier, the poet, because of an editorial someone didn’t like; Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, denounced by Robespierre; Robespierre himself, along with 2,500 others. Robespierre’s loyal follower Philippe Le Blas blew his brains out but even so was taken to the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde) and beheaded all the same. People spoke of ‘guillotinemania’ and of ‘the red mass’ being celebrated by ‘worshippers of the scaffold’.2

  How many lessons may be learned from this mayhem? The historian Jacques Barzun argues that many of the ‘revolutionaries’ who wanted the monarchy, nobility and clergy brought to heel, under the banner of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, were ordinary but articulate people–lawyers, artisans, local officials or landowners–who for the most part lacked political and administrative experience. Such individuals, even though many were educated, c
ould behave as a mob at times, and this helps to account for the vicious switchback of fortunes that the aftermath became. Abroad, in Britain especially, the French Revolution was regarded with horror.3

  But its legacy was much more complex–and in a score of ways more positive–than that. One indication of the seriousness with which many regarded those events may be had from the statistic that Rousseau’s Social Contract (see above, page 545) was reprinted on average every four months in the decade that followed 1789.4 And a whole system of reforms was introduced, some of which didn’t last, but many of which did. The universities and grandes écoles were reshaped, reducing the powers of the church, the royal library was reorganised as the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Conservatoire established, where musicians could be trained at public expense.

  One of the most enduring and influential innovations was the metre. Under the old system, there were in France an incredible 250,000 different units of weights and measures, though the most widely used unit of length was the pied, held to be equal to the length of the king’s foot, and this had other uses–for example, the ‘point’ in printing, which was 1/144 of a foot. Perhaps nothing could have been more incendiary than this in a revolutionary context, even though, in this instance, the events of 1789 only precipitated reform that had been talked about since 1775, when the chief minister, Turgot, had asked Condorcet to draw up a plan for a scientific system of weights and measures based on the one-second pendulum. This went back to Galileo, the idea being that the basic unit of length should be the distance a pendulum swung when beating for one second (this was Talleyrand’s idea). But there were too many problems associated with this, mainly having to do with the fact that the earth is not a perfect sphere, being flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator. Even Newton had been aware that gravity varies slightly with latitude, and not consistently, so that the swing of a pendulum is more erratic than one might think. The next proposal was to base the unit on something from nature, and a commission appointed by the French opted for a measure of the circumference of the earth, in which everyone had a stake. The commission calculated that a measure equal to the circumference divided by 40 million would give a value very near the aune of Paris, a familiar three-foot length comfortably on the human scale.5 This proved popular, the more so as it could be seen as the basis for a far more rational system of measures: a gram would be one cubic centimetre of rain water weighed in a vacuum at the temperature of maximum density (4°C); a franc would be 0.1 grams of gold, divisible into 100 centimes. All this came to pass, save for the decimalisation of time: the new calendar which named twelve months of thirty days–again after nature–never caught on (Brumaire, the month of fog, Thermidor, the month of heat, Ventôse, the month of wind), nor the practice of dividing days into ten hours and hours into a hundred minutes. People never got used to the idea that five o’clock was mid-day, or that ten o’clock was midnight, and the system was ignored.

  But the metre was important for more than itself. It occasioned a celebrated experiment, or seven-year survey, when two men, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-François-André Méchain, mapped the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona (passing through Paris), which determined the exact length of the circumference of the earth, on which the metre measure was based. The survey led to the first international scientific conference, in 1799, to consider collaboratively the evidence produced by Delambre and Méchain and to decide on the definitive length. Ironically, the survey produced a set of errors which, because of their importance, formed an important stage on the way to the invention of sophisticated statistics, which are discussed later in this chapter.6 The length the two men calculated for the circumference of the earth differs from modern-day satellite surveys by less than eight pages of this book.

  But the most shattering aspect of the aftermath of the events of 1789 was of course the Terror, followed by the Directorate and the Consulate. This suggested to many that the old oppression had merely been replaced by a new kind. For still others, the aftermath merely reinforced the view that man’s true nature was as savage as it was wicked, vengeful as it was baleful, justifying the need for absolute authority in both the temporal and spiritual realms.7 A third reaction was different again. This view held that the revolution had got out of hand because while some people had been eager to put liberty before order, for others the priority was the other way round, order before liberty. What was the best form of order to maximise liberty? This was one of the founding sentiments which gave rise to the idea of sociology.

  Roger Smith notes that it was the French revolutionaries who described change as l’art social, and that one of the first references to la science sociale came in a tract by the abbé Sieyès, What is the Third Estate?, which tried to identify what, exactly, was ‘the commons’ in France, in contrast to the monarchy, or the nobility, or the church. La science social was, in the mind of Sieyès and others who came after him, in effect a new stage in thought, a step on from the idea of a secular world, because men were now considering social organisation, social order, without resort to political grouping.8 Condorcet, who among other things was the permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences (and had been in hiding, under threat of the guillotine), took up Sieyès’ phrase on the founding of the Société de 1789, the specific aim of which was the social reconstruction of France using les sciences morales et politiques. Although the Société did not outlast Condorcet’s death, in prison, the ideal of a science of society lived on and, following the reform of the universities and grandes écoles in 1795, the Classe des sciences morales et politiques at the new Institut National had a department named Science sociale, et législation.9

  It was not at all surprising that la science sociale should prove popular in France. After the Revolution, the French nation was no longer composed of ‘subjects’ but of ‘citizens’, which, it was felt, meant learning a new way of living together. This was made all the more pressing because citizens of both the left and the right (terms which were first used to reflect the seating plan in the French Constituent Assembly after 1789) felt the need for something new.10

  If Sieyès and Condorcet were the first to coin the term ‘social science’, the first social scientist worth the name, at least in France, was Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). He had fought for the Americans in the War of Independence, and was therefore well aware of how the young republic was using Enlightenment ideas, where appropriate, to bring about democracy, science and progress, and, like many Frenchmen of his generation, he was much taken with the recent advances in mathematics and the natural sciences. The contrast that he saw about him between their steady advance and the mayhem and aimlessness of political manoeuvring pushed him in the direction of la science sociale. This progress of the sciences, and the general optimism which they brought with them, caused him to introduce the term ‘positive’ to describe those activities of man that had finally eliminated any reliance on metaphysical explanations. Following the Revolution he thought that the science of man would become more and more positive, especially if physiology continued the progress it appeared to be making. He believed there were regularities, patterns, to be found within ‘the concrete conditions of social life such as climate, health, diet and labour’. He became convinced that there was organisation in life that had nothing to do with politics (or theology, come to that). For Saint-Simon, medicine was a better metaphor for this organisation of society, and physiology in particular. He began to ask whether there might be laws governing social conduct, of which we are unaware, just as at one time the principle of the circulation of the blood was unknown.11

  But if the social sciences, as a new way of thinking, a new theory of human order, emerged first in France, it was rapid industrialisation, in particular the wholesale migration from the countryside to the towns in England, that threw up the obvious practical need for this new approach. Between 1801 and 1851 the population of England and Wales more or less doubled, from 10.5 million to 20.8 million, but in the cit
ies the increase was out of all proportion. Birmingham went from 71,000 to 233,000, up by 328 per cent, Glasgow jumped from 84,000 to 329,000 (392 per cent), and Manchester/Salford from 95,000 to 401,000, a staggering rise of 422 per cent.12 Such massive increases could not but have enormous consequences, the worst of which were the bad housing, the overcrowded factories, the vicious cruelty of child labour, primitive and inadequate sanitation and its associated diseases. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers lived in cramped and crowded homes, in buildings that were disfigured by soot and smoke from blast furnaces and lacked even the most basic amenities. Conditions were so bad that an entire region, between Birmingham and Stoke, became known as ‘the Black Country’.13

  John Marks has collected several accounts of the horrors of child labour and disease. ‘Large numbers of poor children were handed over to employers from the age of seven, to work for over twelve hours a day, Saturdays included, under the control of overseers who often used the whip on them. Sometimes children worked for fourteen or fifteen hours a day for six days a week, with meal times being given up to clean machinery…Here is part of the evidence given to the government Committee on Factory Children’s Labour in 1831–32: “At what time in the morning, in the brisk time, did those girls go to the mills?” “In the brisk time, for about six weeks, they have gone at 3 o’clock in the morning, and ended at ten, or nearly half past, at night.” “What intervals were allowed for rest or refreshment during those nineteen hours of labour?” “Breakfast, a quarter of an hour, and dinner, half an hour, and drinking, a quarter of an hour.” “Was any of that time taken up in cleaning the machinery?” “They generally had to do what they call dry down; sometimes this took the whole of the time at breakfast or drinking, and they were to get their dinner or breakfast as best they could; if not, it was brought home.” ’14 Beginning in 1819, Acts of Parliament were passed to limit such excesses but they didn’t go anywhere near far enough and conditions remained pitiable.