Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  By winter, I received my first raise, on the order of 2.5 percent. Against a national inflation of 14 percent, this represented a sizable pay cut. The vice-president of personnel (people in the vernacular) rushed to assure me privately that this did not reflect the quality of my work. He said I was one of the few who carried my weight in the office. But then, I’ve always been rather light for my weight.

  But our business, this fellow explained to me, was one that prospered or panicked in proportion to the stock exchange, and a sustained loss of confidence in equities caused an equal loss of confidence at the executive level at our end. “Trust begets trust; lack of trust begets lack of trust.” Or perhaps it was the other way around. I’ve never been very good with economics. It made sense when he said it.

  If I had been twenty-five still, I might have argued against his circularity. But I didn’t care about the money, and only wanted to be free from his office. I thanked him for the 2.5 percent, and hoped that would cut the interview short.

  It did not. This fellow, who had mercifully left me alone until that day, now began an in-depth analysis of how America had to go about getting back on the track of economic recovery. These theories seemed the product of an unhappy home life. His wife, no doubt, would not let him keep a pet. From a discourse on the steady crumble in capital value of most of the country’s technical blue chips, he rowed across an ocean of similes back to a discussion of my salary review: I was a serious worker, perhaps too serious. My problem was that I threatened morale, and thereby production, with my standoffishness. Why didn’t I mingle a little bit more? He allowed me to leave only under oath that I would attend the office Christmas party.

  When the day came, I lugged myself out to the president’s house in a wealthy South Shore suburb to keep that promise. The train out took two hours, pleasantries an hour and a half, the turkey raffle a quarter hour, and toasts and caroling another forty minutes. I was about to consider the four and a half hours of Saturday a total loss when I made my most important discovery since the photograph. I met the office’s immigrant cleaning woman, Mrs. Schreck, with whom I had had no prior contact outside of cryptic, cellophane commodities, apparently chocolate bonbons, she sometimes left as presents on my desk.

  She was a strong woman, though obviously at least a decade in violation of the forced retirement act. Letting her work on was perhaps the only decent felony our mutual employer had ever committed. We spoke while looking over our host’s treasure of artifacts, a large collection he maintained as a hedge against inflation. Mrs. Schreck held one of these, a German ambulance driver’s cap from the First World War, and delivered herself of a marvelous private story. As she told me, in almost impenetrable accent, a harmless detail from her early life, I found her words opening a way back to the photo, a way that I thought had been closed to me for good.

  I was back on the scent. And though it was the stink of the past, it had the aroma of something new and strange.

  IN 1913, CHARLES Péguy, then forty and an unlikely combination of poet, journalist, Socialist, and Roman Catholic, made the famous and often-repeated statement that the world had changed less since the death of Jesus than it had in the last thirty years. He described, for his millions of contemporaries, the concurrent horror and excitement of geometrically accelerating culture.

  Hidden in Péguy’s formulation is the idea that each tool, each measurement, each casual observation of the nature of things—even Péguy’s—accelerates and automates the acquisition of the next tool. The first rock-chipping rock logically extends itself, along a series of ever-shorter steps, into the assembly line and the self-replicating machine. This increasingly steepening curve applies to every endeavor where the product of growth contributes directly to growth’s progress.

  As with free-falling bodies, it seems apparent that such quickening change, whether evolutionary, cultural, or technical, cannot accelerate indefinitely but must reach some terminal velocity. Call that terminal velocity a trigger point, where the rate of change of the system reaches such a level that the system’s underpinning, its ability to change, is changed. Trigger points come about when the progress of a system becomes so accelerated, its tools become so adept at self-replicating and self-modifying, that it thrusts an awareness of itself onto itself and reaches the terminal velocity of self-reflection.

  Trigger points represent those times when the way a process develops loops back on the process and applies itself to its own source. A billion years of evolution eventually, along an increasingly steep curve, produces a species capable of comprehending evolution. After Darwin (or, as increasingly metaself-conscious scientific historians argue, Alfred Wallace, or even the previous generation of anonymous naturalists), evolution cannot ever follow the old path again. Having reached a trigger point, natural selection re-forms itself as conscious selection. Even if we, the product of but now the proxy agent for evolution, choose not to directly help or hinder the cause of a particular species, the result still becomes primarily a product of mental rather than environmental choice. If one buys nothing else from Marx, whose ideas may be the trigger point of economics applied to itself, he is at least untouchable on quantitative changes becoming qualitative ones.

  In the process of psychological adaptation, the trigger came with depth psychology and Freud. Now that our culture is glibly aware of defense mechanisms, the self can never again defend itself in the old ways. Art that was once a product of psychological mechanisms is now about those mechanisms and—the ultimate trigger point—about being about them. The Industrial Revolution cusped in the computer, a machine capable of designing its own replacement.

  Gödel pulled a trigger point on mathematics, using a formal system to demonstrate the incompleteness of itself as well as any system strong enough to prove its own incompleteness. Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, and other co-conspirators similarly turned physics back onto itself, bringing a new reflexive element into the limits of the discipline. (A by-product of physics’ trigger, Los Alamos represents a trigger point in the history of warfare.) Change in these fields does not stop at the trigger point. Only the curve of progress reaches a critical moment, the second derivative goes to zero, and a new curve begins, pushed forward into a new country.

  So what of Péguy’s—and hundreds of others’ concurrent with him—triggering observation that culture and its tools had changed more in thirty years than in the previous 1900? Culture had finally created people who were not only the passive product of but also the active operators and commentators on their own culture’s acceleration. Culture had replaced its own by-products more and more quickly until it arrived at a trigger frame, one whose members knew of and were synonymous with the fact of their own replaceability. No longer just a changing culture, but a culture of change.

  The artifacts of societal behavior came down the turnpike of years, a decade doing the work of the previous century, two years overturning a decade, adding new combinations of content and epiphenomena, threatening, in the years before 1913, a Malthusian catastrophe of population. Then, as when the velocitized particle in a cyclotron slams into a waiting plate and transmutes it, the accelerated cultural change, released by the Péguy pronouncement, slammed into and transmuted the old societal iron into a new metal. And all about, people breathed the air of a new planet, the new qualities of concurrency and self-reflexiveness.

  Cultural change had achieved the old joke of the runner so fast that she passes herself on the road. By 1913, changing tastes, doctrines, isms, theories—which once obeyed the old model of sequential cultural progress—now replaced one another so rapidly that they overran each other, collapsing into the spontaneous. The avant grew so far ahead of the garde that they lapped and began running side by side. The Futurist Manifesto of “faster,” having reached a terminal velocity, could only become a doctrine of “all-at-the-same-time.” And this simultaneity still holds true today, with Third World militarism, bank-by-mail, television game shows, the rebirth of orthodox religion, conceptual art,
punk rock, and neo-romanticism thriving side by side.

  Hyperprogress transmutes, paradoxically, into stillness. It is still true that things have changed more in the last thirty years than in all the time since Christ. Since it is still true, then nothing has changed since Péguy. Social culture has taken tail in mouth and rolled a benzene ring. Art takes itself as both subject and content: post-modernism about painting, serialism about musical composition, constructivist novels about fiction. At that, the century has become about itself, history about history: a still, eclectic, universally reflexive, uniformly diverse, closed circle, the homogeneous debris in space following a nova. Nothing can take place in this century without some coincident event linking it into a conspiratorial whole.

  PÉGUY HIMSELF SUFFERED from the self-modifying nature of his own observation. His life changed more in the year following his statement than it had in the forty before it. All his eclectic, simultaneously held beliefs—Catholicism, mysticism, socialism, aestheticism—paled before the Ism that he received at the Battle of the Marne, only a month after the start of the war. Separate casualty figures for the Marne are difficult to determine, but at least a few hundred thousand received baptism into the same terminal belief as Péguy’s. And they have held that faith now longer than any living conviction. It may well turn out to be the century’s triggering and most durable religion.

  The squeezing of any trigger point results in some explosion. The Great War was the century’s way of catching up to itself. For Simultaneity to set itself up as the new governing condition, it had to clear a spot for itself out of the rubble and clutter of royal dynasties, imperialism and colonialism, moribund belles-lettres, top-heavy property systems, and the grip of nostalgia so often confused with historical precedent. The curve of cultural tradition had outrun itself, reached its trigger point of self-reflection, and just as a sonic boom results when an object catches up to and pushes ahead its own sound, so the twentieth century propagated a considerable shock on catching up with the twentieth century.

  An unthinkable number of individuals—over ten million, if the number means anything—did not make it through the catching up. Nor did any aspect of the old order make it through untouched. The violence of that cesarean section is written into every trivial detail, every congenital and hidden memory of our waking lives.

  The incidental cause of the war—“Some foolish thing in the Balkans”—seems even at this late a date wholly arbitrary, largely irrelevant, and only moderately interesting. Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, a Czech veteran of the Balkans and obedient volunteer for the new conflagration, by turns certifiably imbecilic and insanely lucid, has the last word on the blind lead of the royal assassination:

  “I’d buy a Browning for a job like that. It looks like a toy, but in a couple of minutes you can shoot twenty archdukes with it, never mind whether they’re thin or fat. Although between you and me, Mrs. Muller, a fat archduke’s a better mark than a thin one.”

  The “cause” of the war—the events of June and July 1914—seem now to be nothing more than the clumsy working out of intrigues and diplomatic pressures laid out for some time before. The telegrams between royal first cousins at the head of states, the secret deals, forced ultimatums, blank checks, and eleventh-hour regrets can no longer be fully or satisfactorily unraveled by anyone so distant or implicated as ourselves. Again, Švejk’s mis-explanation is as good as any:

  “There’ll have to be a war with the Turks. ‘You killed my uncle and so I’ll bash your jaw.’ War is certain. Serbia and Russia will help us. . . .”

  His alliances may have turned out all backward, but he has the spirit of the thing. The war resulted from the common attitude summed up by England’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey: “If we are engaged in war, we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside.”

  But was the war necessary? A.J.P. Taylor observed after the fact that “No war is inevitable until it breaks out.” This lucid epigram makes a formidable effort to preserve the best of humanity—reason—from its worst, fatalism. But one might as well say that no one ever got hurt jumping from a tall building until hitting the pavement. In an environment where Austria-Hungary thought that the Germans assumed that Russia believed that war between Serbia and Austria-Hungary was inevitable, not to mention France, Britain, and Turkey all rushing to position themselves advantageously so as not to be preempted by others’ positioning, Taylor’s statement seems snared in a circular tangle: “No war is inevitable until one or more parties believes it to be inevitable, or until one or more parties believes that another believes it to be inevitable.”

  Social developments often collect such a massy inertia that years pass before a tendency shows its results. The private automobile provides a good illustration. Ford perfected the under-five-hundred-dollar automobile in the first decade of the century, but it took another seventy years for this country to find itself hostage to oil-rich nations, increasingly susceptible to respiratory and oncological diseases, unable to get from A to B except through private ownership, and every fifteen years acquiring enough highway fatalities to level the city of Houston. Similarly, the war may have resulted from some agent long since vanished, caused by the past, but seemingly inevitable to the present. Perhaps the dead dictate necessity to the living.

  Barbara Tuchman raises this possibility by suggesting that von Schlieffen and the German General Staff, although guilty of laying down the immediate plans of destruction, acted under the centuries-broad umbrella of German thought. The invention of total war lay tacit in Fichte and Nietzsche, who urged the strong and culturally superior to achieve their rightful dominance; and especially in Hegel, who described continual upheaval as the instrument of progress and change. The French were likewise under the spell of an equally well-worn tradition of progress. Henri Bergson’s doctrine of élan vital maintained that vital force, or the French, would triumph over base material, that is, the Boches. Thus the war had long ago started in the entrenched belief in progress and the triumph of the Great Personality.

  Nineteen-thirteen was a time richer in Great Personalities than any since the Renaissance. Vienna and Paris—arguably the two best representatives of the warring factions, the one outgoing and monarchical, the other incoming and anarchical—boasted between them Freud, Picasso, Wittgenstein, Proust, Apollinaire, Schönberg, Webern, Berg, Gide, Jarry, Debussy, Klimt, Stravinsky, Bernhardt, Mahler, the General Hospital physicians and scientists, Stein, Meliès, Krauss, Werfel, and Rousseau, to name only a few, breaking off before the list stales the palette. The era is often described in paraphrased lives of these individuals, a forgivable practice, as the time seems to have seen itself in the same way. It is as if the last gasp of the old way of progress—successive leaps made by individual genius—would only give way to the new era of simultaneity by blowing itself out in one final burst of fecundity.

  Then, perhaps, the war may have been made necessary by some genetic predisposition in humans. The love of the moribund, the belief that the sickly and perverse hold more possibility for experience than the status quo, has been our times’ epidemic of preference. But an opposite mentality, a perennially unfounded optimism, is equally to blame for catastrophe. Consider that almost every observer at the time, from the ignorant to the overly informed (with the exception of a few powerless pawns at the heads of armies such as Kitchener and von Moltke), went on record in predicting a short war.

  This optimism came in part from reasoning about the new weapons technologies: dividing the total available European fighting men by a reasonable kill rate for field-emplaced artillery and machine guns gave an estimate of a little over four weeks before all draftable men of both sides would be dead. Others argued that European nations had become so economically interdependent that none could survive a war of attrition. Nor could a modern war government remain in office after more than a few months of fighting. In Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the officer Saint-Loup, mastering the paradoxical art of political
reasoning, explains to the sickly civilian Marcel that the war would not last beyond a handful of weeks because neither side was making plans for it to do so.

  Yet to say that the war was necessary because of social tendencies laid down long before does not absolve the casual individual of his act of complicity. The heads of state who acted under trumped-up charges have to be held accountable. More subtly, every individual who gave in to the context of deteriorating trust contributed to it through his or her own omissions: the woman anxious over admittance to Oxford, the brickmaker in Holland, the German landed farmer, all guilty in waiting for history to blow over, guilty in assuming that death could never happen in their lifetime.

  There is no pinning down necessity after the fact. Every speculation on the origin of the Great War putrifies after a point, stalls in postmortem abstraction. “It’s bad,” says imbecile Švejk, “when a chap suddenly gets caught up in philosophizing. That always stinks of delirium tremens.” Explanation of cause must at some point turn back to recounting of effect, back to the ugly fact.

  And yet, of the war’s consequences, the most material are the least important. The more than ten million dead, an unthinkable number now or then, made only the smallest dent in the steady doubling and redoubling of the world’s population. In fact, influenza alone took more lives than weapons did during the war’s last two years. Over twenty million surviving casualties mattered more. As a result of increased medical technology, countries had to reabsorb, for the first time on so large a scale, the maimed and amputated. Sander’s objective, unprecedented portrait of the one-legged, uniformed veteran pandering in the street for loose change, an image later taken up by painters George Grosz and Otto Dix, salutes this new social caste.

  Changes in warfare—the tank, warplane, submarine, poison gas—incomparable horrors, remain at best tactical devices, quickly outdated in terror and effectiveness by the arms of the next generation. War in this century has been largely a field test for new technologies. Nor do most historical texts, in such phrases as “the entire map of Europe and her colonies was redrawn,” get the point. The colonies simply changed hands. The colors of the map changed, but in small tailorings and alterings, not touching the flawed system of national states itself.