Chapter Seventeen

THE ATLANTIC AND AFTER

ATLANTIC SUPREMACY AND THE GLOBAL OUTLOOK

From the Atlantic to the Pacific—from the Pacific to theWorld

Hogg spoke frequently about his theory, it was close to his heart. ‘To the Savage in the jungle,’ he would say, ‘to our Savage precursors, all life was a lottery. All his endeavours were hazardous in the extreme. His life was literally one big continuous gamble. But times have changed, civilization has arrived and society has developed, and as society develops and civilization marches forward this element of chance, of hazard, is steadily eliminated from the human condition.’ At this point he would pause, look around, and say, ‘Anyone here foolish enough to believe that?’

—WILLIAM BOYD,Armadillo
(London,1998), p.217

Eiken zijn de bomen van het dies irae;
Als de grond breekt zullen zij,
Over het land gezaaiden, toekijken
Met een oud, houten gezicht
Dat onbewogen blijft.

—PETER GHYSSAERT,Cameo
(Amsterdam,1993)

[Oaks are the trees of the last days.
When the earth breaks they’ll be there:
Strewn across the land, exchanging face to face an old, wooden stare
that’s undisturbed, in place.]

Crises and Renewals of Atlantic Civilization

During its formative centuries, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth, Atlantic civilization was shallow, feeble, and fragmentary. For all its transforming effects, the total amount of cross-ocean trade and colonization was small in comparison with those traditional in many other parts of the world. As American colonies developed their own identities, their own regional economies, and their own political preferences, they turned their backs on the ocean, sought independence from their European partners, and concentrated on expanding in their own hinterlands. From 1776 , when the fledgling United States declared independence from Britain, the survival of Atlantic civilization was threatened by a series of similar ruptures. France pulled out of most of her colonies by 1802 ; Spain granted independence to most of hers in 1828 . Brazil was effectively independent of Portugal from 1829 . Though European empires retained some colonies, especially in the Caribbean, the Atlantic seemed again to become a gulf, dividing the inhabitants of either shore from each other.

Luckily for the survival of Atlantic civilization, new political, social, and economic ties, new symbols of shared values and economy, began, almost at once, to replace those severed by the independence movements. No sooner was the crisis of Atlantic civilization over than its fragments began to reassemble. Economic links, intellectual exchange, and migrant traffic across the Atlantic were all greater after independence than they had been before.

Ideas proved particularly powerful in this respect. In the early nineteenth century, democracy seemed to be one of the “peculiar institutions” of America, mistrusted by most Europeans. In the long run, however, it became an American lesson, learned across the Atlantic, which re-established the moral unity of Western Europe and the United States. European visitors to America scrutinized democracy and its moral effects: the supposedly model prisons and moral factories, decent schools, enlightened madhouses, and the open-access temples of government. They seemed to see the future and found that it worked. In 1828 , Karl Postl recommended America as a model of how “to unite the people for the common good.” In 1831 , Tocqueville found democracy was a means of restraining the egotism unleashed by liberty; at about the same time, Sandor B^loni Farkas, “the Columbus of democracy,” returned to his native Hungary full of praise for “the young giant of human rights and freedom.” His fellow countryman and fellow revolutionary, Lajos Kossuth, found in exile in America that “democracy is the spirit of our age.”¹No one in Europe did anything about it—yet; but American evidence was intruding into the way the Old World thought about politics.

Romanticism—a scale of values which put emotions above reason—was another increasingly powerful force which spanned the Atlantic. Europeans’sense of indebtedness to the New World glowed in imaginations kindled by the “wild and rugged grandeur” of American nature or hearts beguiled by the presumed nobility of the hemisphere’s “savages.” Individualism—a system of priorities which puts the wants and rights of the individual ahead of collective interests, like those of society, the state, or even, in extreme cases, churches and families—became and remained, despite many challenges, the most distinctive feature of the shared thought of Western Europe and America.

Simultaneously, and paradoxically, socialism flowed with the ocean. Citizensof the United States believe they inhabit “the land of the free”; but the strengths of their society are virtues of solidarity, civic-mindedness, community spirit, and clubbability, which outweigh individualism, and which have grown out of American historical experience. America was never really a land of Lone Rangers. For every gun-toting individualist on the street or maverick in the corral, there were always a thousand solid citizens in the stockade or the wagon train. At a further stage of the kind of communitarianism the frontier nurtured, socialism throve in the soil of early America. Followers of …tienne Cabet, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier constructed backwoods utopias on socialist principles: cities of Icarus that dared and failed.²Today, only their ruins remain; Karl Marx’s prediction that America would be the first terrain of socialist revolution proved false—like most of his other predictions. But the desolate communes are a reminder of the evidence he had before him, and of how much America contributed to the development of socialism.

For almost the whole of the nineteenth century, America influenced Europe-by reflecting back at her ideas of European origin. Individual artists and writers of American provenance were recognized in Europe, but no homegrown American cultural movement took root in the Old World—unless one counts spiritualism, which originated around a middle-class dining table in upstate New York in 1842 and, within a couple of generations, approached the proportions of a mass religion on both sides of the Atlantic.³Nothing peculiarly American, meanwhile, captured European imaginations in the realms of high culture and big ideas. Despite the tireless recommendations of progressive spirits, democracy was treated with reserve or repugnance by European elites. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, a sudden explosion of American cultural influence overseas began to have a novel and transforming effect on the European scene: Atlantic civilization was taking shape anew—this time with an insistently white, Euro-American character, and with lasting effect.

It started in politics, with the publication in 1888 of a guide to the “American-commonwealth” by the Oxford historian and professor of jurisprudence, James Bryce. He drew up an extraordinary “shopping list” of lessons which European polities could learn from America. Manhood suffrage, for instance, needed to be tempered by property qualifications, since, in Bryce’s opinion, blacks and the poor could not be trusted with the vote. Salaried politicians wereto be avoided: they tended to have mercenary motives and venal habits. Plebiscites were a good idea, but an elected judiciary was not. On the whole, despite many exclusions, the general trend of American political development was exemplary, or at least ineluctable. Bryce likened it to Dante’s lamp, lighting the footsteps of those “European nations who are destined to follow where [ America] has led.”⁴In consequence, the democratic or democratizing reforms in the Europe of the 1890 s and early 1900 s, which embodied Bryce’s advice, reflected American examples. The same is true of the constitutions of Australia and New Zealand, which were being formulated at about the same time. With astonishing suddenness, the American constitution had been transformed from a pattern to be praised into a model to be imitated.

Almost immediately, genuine American culture began to cross the Atlantic. In 1893 and 1894 , in his New World Symphony and Biblical Songs, Anton Dvor ak, who had spent some years running an American conservatory, helped alert the world to the music of Negro spirituals; but the first distinctive American art form to have a transforming effect on the Old World was another kind of music, underappreciated and never credited with its due role in world history: ragtime. Debussy wrote “The Gollywog’s Cakewalk” in 1906 , and within a few years ragtime rhythms had intruded into work by Satie, Hindemith, Stravinsky. Ragtime sheet music was all the rage in Paris and London.⁵American musical taste is usually said to have begun to conquer Europe as a result of the First World War; the proof lay in the diffusion of jazz bands, the eruption of American musical comedy, and the arrival of invasions from Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood. The songs marched with the troops. The reception had already begun, however, with ragtime, music propelled by syncopation.

American visual art, it is often said, remained dependent on European inspiration until well into the second half of the twentieth century.⁶This, however, overlooks the importance of architecture, which is the only genuinely popular kind of high art, because people who never go to galleries cannot help but see it on their way to work. In the ragtime years, American architecture was taking a new departure, typified by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. The steel-framed skyscraper—invented in Chicago in the 1880 s—became a conspicuously distinctive American gift to the world. When the Woolworth Building was completed, just before the First World War, it was the most eye-catching pimple on the face of the planet: the most ambitious edifice, perhaps, since the Pyramid of Cheops.

While American art and music attained a new impact in Europe, so did American thought and science. In 1907 , William James published Pragmatism, which sold sixty thousand copies in Europe and was hailed by Bergson as “the philosophy of the future.”⁷It was half-baked nonsense—claiming that a proposition was true inasmuch as it was useful and therefore that Christianity, for instance, was sanctified by its social advantages; but it was, at least, a trulyhomespun American philosophy, drafted for America by a thinker who resented his brother’s notorious self-Europeanization and who crafted a thought system syncopated to the hustle of American life and the bustle of American business.⁸

In science, by the end of the nineteenth century, America already had a reputation for inventing world-changing technology: the telegraph, the telephone, the mimeograph, the sound recorder. The Wright brothers enhanced this reputation by beating the world to the creation of a viable manned flying machine. At about the same time, American methodologies were launching a scientific revolution in the field of anthropology. Among the supposedly scientific certainties treasured in the late-nineteenth-century West was that of the superior evolutionary status of some peoples and some societies: an image of the world sliced and stacked in order of race. It was upset in the first decade of the twentieth century, largely thanks to an undersung hero of the Western liberal tradition, Franz Boas. This German Jew, who became the doyen of anthropology in America, not only exploded the fallacies of racist craniology but also outlawed from the biggest, fastest-growing, and most influential national school of anthropologists in the world the notion that societies could be ranked in terms of a developmental model of thought. People, he concluded, think differently in different cultures not because some have superior mental equipment but because all thought reflects the traditions to which it is heir, the society by which it is surrounded, and the environment to which it is exposed.⁹

Boas was a fieldworker in his youth and a museum-keeper in maturity—always in touch with the people and artifacts he sought to understand. His pupils had native American peoples to study within little more than a railway’s reach. The habit of fieldwork clinched the conclusion that cultural relativism was inescapable. It reinforced the relativistic tendency by piling up enormous quantities of diverse data intractable to the crudely hierarchical schemes of the nineteenth century. It took a long time to spread beyond the circles directly influenced by Boas. But it was already influencing British methods by the first decade of the new century. In Oxford at that time, anthropology was dominated by R. R. Marrett—whom superficial judges might easily mistake for a conservative despiser of fieldwork. He claimed that there was no need to study savage habits in the field, as they could be observed in an Oxford Common Room. In reality, however, he was an assiduous promoter and encourager of field studies; he also helped disseminate the results by getting returnees from the field to talk to his Oxford seminar.¹⁰At about the same time, the status of the “primitive” was enhanced in Europe by the discoveries artists made of the virtues of artworks formerly despised as merely ethnographic in interest. In and around the first decade of the century, Brancusi, Picasso, and the artists of the Blue Rider group all imitated and revered works rescued from classification as savage. Gradually, though resisted for a while in France, Boas’s way of looking at humankind infused Old World thought.

This shared world of ideas, encompassing Europe and America, depended on two long-accumulating developments: first, new ocean-spanning technologies, and, second, the movement of the most effective vectors of cultural change, people and money. In 1819 , the first steam-assisted Atlantic crossing was made by the Savannah, from Georgia to Liverpool;¹¹by the 1840 s, steam power had liberated shipping from the tyranny of winds and currents. In the 1870 s, cable lines crossed the ocean, followed in 1901 by wireless communication. Shipborne communications did most to make Atlantic civilization possible, because ships could carry people and goods as well as ideas. Numbers of migrants from Western Europe to the United States rose from about 120 ,000 people to over five and a quarter million by the 1880 s, and more than six million in the first decade of the twentieth century.¹²By then, the United States had introduced immigration controls. The Statue of Liberty presided over a system of watchful welcome, which weeded out undesirables. In the same period, on a slightly smaller scale, surplus population from Europe flowed into other parts of the Americas, too—especially to areas like Canada, Argentina, and southern Brazil, with environments similar to those the migrants left behind. The flow of people was matched by a flow of investment. European investment, in both North and South America, was vital for the building of the railways, which, by the early twentieth century, had extended the range of transatlantic communications across the American hemisphere. The railways were equivocal in their effect on Atlantic civilization. On the one hand, they wrenched communications away from the ocean and rivaled shipping for ease and speed; on the other, they extended the frontiers of what was still an Atlantic order.

The solidarity of Atlantic civilization was confirmed by two events of the early twentieth century. In 1917 , the first of three million soldiers from the United States arrived in Europe for the first of America’s henceforth regular interventions in European conflicts. Ten years later, a conspicuous transatlantic event commemorated their achievement when Charles Lindbergh made the first solo airborne crossing of the ocean. His was really a modest success, for numerous aviators had made the journey in pairs, but a popular press campaign hailed him as a “new Christ” who had “conquered death.” At Le Bourget, the unprecedented crowds, unable to see clearly in the crush, venerated a boy who glimpsed the hero from his father’s shoulders. At Croydon, spectators were trampled in the rush. The hysteria was partly press-contrived, but Lindbergh’s arrival did symbolize a genuinely popular ideal of a straitened Atlantic—an alliance kept taut by a flight “guided,” according to the American ambassador in Paris, “by the same sublime destiny” as had directed American armies to Europe. This sense of shared destiny was renewed in the long spell from 1944 onwards, when American armed might played an essential role in defense of Western Europe, while American culture—especially in the form of popular films, foods, and music—seeped deep into Western European taste.¹³Meanwhile, BertieWooster could feel at home in New York, and American “buccaneers” could make matchless matches on the European side of the Atlantic.

This did not mean that Atlantic civilization was securely fastened at both ends, or that resentment of the links, in both Europe and America, was not strong enough to break them. The transatlantic entente of the First World War was imperiled by an isolationist, protectionist American reaction, which kept the United States out of the diplomatic world-system, such as it was, of the 1920 s and ’ 30 s. America almost severed the long human link which bound her to Europe: in 1913 , 1 . 2 million European migrants had crossed the ocean; when new immigration rules were introduced in 1921 , the number fell to 357 ,000. With further new restrictions in 1924 , the numbers were halved.¹⁴In the twenties, America was too secure and too rich to avoid the complacency which shut out the world. It took a slump and a war to put the chains back around the pillars of the Atlantic community.

Like generals, economic strategists are prisoners of retrospection, always fighting the last crisis. After the 1929 crash, a slump was deepened by tightwad techniques and conservative budgeting. Herbert Hoover looked safely backwards for something to blame. “The primary cause of the Great Depression,” he said, was the First World War. Yet the truth is that war was good for business: the problems started with the peace. After the postwar shock of a demobilized economy, America had seven fat years, bloated by credit-led inflation. Cars became consumer items. Construction flung “towers up to the sun.” Big business barged the little guys off the sidewalk. A few financial pharaohs bestrode “pyramids” of millions of shareholders, controlling stocks and manipulating voters, just as in Europe dictators took over nominal democracies. Capitalists—said Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never forgave undergraduate clubmen for blackballing him at Harvard—wanted “power for themselves, slavery for the republic.” Hoover, a cramped ascetic who also mistrusted the rich, got no thanks for predicting the consequences: the “fever of speculation” would burn out in depression. Fred Astaire tried to sing his fans out of it. Face the music and dance. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again.

According to myth, the New Deal did the dusting: moral economics provided the pickup. Roosevelt crafted social solidarity in the land of gun-toting individualism: the ornery outlaw and hobo retreated to the cinema screen. “No one,” Roosevelt announced, “is left out.” Really, however, the New Deal worked no magic: it coincided with the growth phase of a brief minicycle, then spluttered back into slump. Hitler ridiculed an America emasculated by poverty.¹⁵Isolation and impotence were the only foreign policies the republic could afford. Roosevelt had no big ideas: “Philosophy?” he queried. “I am a Christian and a democrat. That is all.” But he did have a consistent objective: the New Deal was devised to make ordinary lives secure; the arsenal of democracy was equipped to defend peace. Both were attempts to deliver “freedom from fear.”¹⁶

Eventually, Americans were rescued from recession by the event they most feared: war. By 1945 , they had their allies in hock and most of their enemies in pawn. The era of mean feelings was succeeded by that of “Grand Expectations.”¹⁷The illusion that the twentieth was an “American century” is among the results: it was announced in 1941 by one of the great vectors of American culture, Life magazine. Henry R. Luce, who invented the phrase, wanted to urge America into the Second World War; the idea of “the first great American century” was devised to reawaken Americans to the duty of belonging to an international community. In his “vision of the twentieth century,” America had a fourfold world-shaping role: “America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skilful servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of freedom and justice.” Until America entered the war, the American century remained just an idea, unrealized. Really, it was an American half-century-and-a-bit.

The most surprising outcome of war for America was that America got a taste for it. When she realized that “the arsenal of democracy” could be a bankable asset, she never went back into isolation. She maintained a mad deterrent—reflective of irrational overreaction, indifference to the danger of a holocaust, perverted spending priorities, obsessive desirer to be top nation—mad, at least, to those who felt more imperiled than protected and bristled with conventional defense. She went on fighting wars around the world—sometimes calling them “peacekeeping” and “missions.” In events of this period, it is tempting to identify the first signs of the next phase of the history of civilization—in which Atlantic civilization would go global. It seems to have been anticipated in the newfound American enthusiasm for a global role, together with the everwidening appeal of American popular culture, which came eventually to find a public all over the world.

Europeans reproach Americans as inward-looking, but that is unjust: Americans love their country’s superpower status, and though they grumble about the costs and burdens of being “the world’s policeman,” they take pride in the discharge of that duty. Wisely, they would trust no other nation to share it, except on terms of strict subordination. But from the Second World War onwards, they needed partners in sustaining their “top-nation” status. First, from the late 1940 s to the late 1980 s, they were engaged in a “Cold War” with a rival superpower and an ideological struggle with a rival system of economic and social planning. Called at first “international communism,” the enemy came to be known as the “Soviet empire.” When it collapsed in 1989 – 91 , it looked ramshackle in hindsight. That was not, however, how it had appeared at the height of its power, from the late 1940 s to the early 1970 s. Russia developed a nuclear arsenal and a space program that, for a while, leapt ahead in the “space race” against the United States. Despite the perils of the “macroeconomic lurches” ofa centrally planned economy, and the inefficiencies of state ownership, communist economics seemed to work. In the rapidly decolonizing world of the 1960 s, Russian rhetoric exploited anti-imperialism to win new allies among emergent nations. Russian success in enforcing her hegemony in Eastern Europe and extending her alliances induced in the West a form of paranoia known as the “domino theory,” according to which the world would topple, piece by piece, to communist takeovers. In an attempt to prop up a domino, America got involved in a disastrous war in Vietnam; defeat by a small country made her look vulnerable in a potential war against a big one. America had plenty of critics in the West who would have liked to sever ties with her—even to secede, in effect, from Western civilization and launch a new experiment in repudiation of the West’s defining ideologies. But they were always in a minority. The politics of the Cold War had a reinforcing effect on transatlantic ties. On both sides of the ocean, the shared sense of danger stimulated the trade in sentiment. “Atlantic civilization” and “Atlantic alliance” came to be almost interchangeable terms. In the end, America beat the Soviet Union in what was, in effect, a competition in spending power, because only a capitalist economy could afford “guns and butter.” Meanwhile, however, America never felt secure enough to revert to isolation. The fortress in which the West withstood communism was sustained by “the pillars of the Atlantic alliance.” Western Europeans grumblingly accepted, in their own interests, a role for most of their territory as America’s first line of defense—scattered with American bases, bristling with American weapons. Atlantic civilization huddled around the ocean for its defense. The last great age of Atlantic solidarity may appear, in hindsight, as a response to self-perceived weakness.

The collapse of Soviet power did not, at first, weaken the Atlantic system—though it will surely do so in the long run, since without a common threat Europe and America will cease to have the same level of common interest. Now, instead of needing them as allies against communism, America wanted the Europeans as partners in global policing. From the last years of the twentieth century, as America’s share of the world economy shrank, the costs of global peacekeeping soared. A world “safe for democracy” now had to be defended against the terrorism of cults and factions, and the menace of rogue states under unpredictable dictators, like the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and the Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic . Public opinion demanded increasing intervention in behalf of human rights and ecological propriety. Just-war theory had to be extended to the point of distortion to justify a new role for the Atlantic alliance as a “ humanitarian” warrior, bombing people into compliance with a moral imperative essentially unchanged since Woodrow Wilson involved America with the world: self-determination, democratic forms, nonaggression.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, Euro-American cooperation still looked deceptively impressive. The bombing power of NATO helped to enforcetwo radical new departures in the politics of Southeastern Europe. First was the effective partition of Bosnia into three bloodily butchered cuts, one for each of the main contenders in a civil war. More bombs were then used to force Serbia to concede supremacy in Kosovo to secessionist fighters. To some extent, these operations—in my judgment, dubious in their morals, equivocal in their effects—locked the United States and her European allies into an open-ended commitment to work together. The peacekeeping forces they installed in the region would be stuck there indefinitely: like field-hospital sutures, they were makeshift staunchers of blood which could not easily be withdrawn.

On the other hand, the operations were so mismanaged and so counterproductive that they made the Europeans and Americans mutually wary and recriminatory. The Kosovo operation exacerbated the war, accelerated massacres, and rewarded terrorists. It left a legacy of resentment among the innocent victims of NATO bombing in Serbia and Montenegro, and a hundred-billion-dollar cleanup bill. Though NATO propaganda tried to justify it as a “war for civilization,” it was really undertaken to save face:

If NATO backed down, it would lose its vaunted “credibility.” It had announced the bombing and so it must go ahead regardless of the consequences. The Pentagon, however, advised against. . . . So did senior European diplomats involved in Balkan affairs. . . . The reply came back: “Credibility.”¹⁸When the Atlantic alliance finally breaks down, and Western civilization is split by political schism, this thoughtless warmongering may be seen as one of the acts which deservedly condemned it, exposing its flaws, undermining its “ civilized” credentials.

The Limits and Limitations of Western Civilization

At its widest extent, including other lands deeply influenced by Western Europe and America, Atlantic civilization has come to be known as “Western civilization.” That alone is a remarkable testimony to the fidelity with which Europe and America reproduce each other. Technology spread it; so did its own power to attract imitators. We have seen many examples of civilizations capable of transcending their environments of origin, but Western civilization has been spectacularly successful in this respect. In the nineteenth century, industrial prowess transplanted it in previously intractable grasslands; superior firepower imposed some of its standards and some features of its cultures over almost every habitable environment in the world; in the twentieth century, its economic success strewed an equally large tract of the planet with its trash. It has more widelydispersed influence in the world than any predecessor, and it occupies at least as many kinds of environment as any rival. It has become an unprecedentedly multienvironmental civilization not only because it is technically dexterous, but because outsiders like the look of it and want to share its benefits.

Not everyone, however, beholds the results with equal satisfaction. Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, is said to have replied, “It would be a good idea.” The dominant presence of the United States is resented in some of the countries which reflect or resist it. Distinctive cultural values which have grown up in Atlantic civilization are fiercely resisted in other parts of the world: individualism is feared as antisocial, democracy as dangerous; art and music for mass taste are dismissed as decadent. The equality of the sexes is feared as the disturbance or subversion of a natural order. Industrialization, which in an obvious sense was the great achievement of Atlantic civilization, has spread over the world with sometimes unfortunate effects; inappropriate technologies and dislocating life-styles—including production-line workplaces, Western-style urbanization, unstable nuclear families, and armed forces raised by mass conscription—have intruded in environments where, but for the magnetism of the Western example, they might have been spared. Above all, the high value which democracies put on the material prosperity of huge numbers of citizens is genuinely a menace to the environment. Critics of Western civilization accuse its people of consuming the world’s resources at an unsustainable rate. Those of us who admire the West or like living in it have to understand the disaffection which threatens us, if we want Western civilization to survive.

Unease with it proceeds from sources so at variance with one another that they are impossible to counter except by apparently self-contradictory arguments. On the one hand, critics of the West feel that it is, in a sense, too civilized; on the other, it is deplored for not being civilized enough. Critics of the first kind measure the effects of Western civilization by its material impact on the natural world: the crushing, menacing scale of its adaptations of nature; the sprawling ugliness of most of its cities, and, even more, the new cities it has spawned or inspired in other parts of the world; the polluting effects of the industries which sustain those cities; the ruthlessness and destructive efficiency with which nature is raided to feed and fuel them—the species depleted, the beauties despoiled in the process. Critics of the second type cite the human costs: the moral deficiencies of capitalism, the social and political consequences of inequality, the pain or menace of the have-nots, the elusiveness of happiness. On recent or current showing, people in Western civilization are doing badly by the standards of the rest of the world, despite—or, perhaps, because of—enviable levels of material prosperity; they are certainly doing badly in comparisons with their own past, comparisons highly favored by the West’s conservative politicians. Families are foundering as divorce rates increase and people opt out of marriage. The numbers of the homeless and the alienated are increasing. Individualanomie takes a sinister turn when the pursuit of individual self-fulfillment makes people forsake loyalty to traditional communities, associations, civic responsibilities, and fraternities of mutual support. These trends are all grounds for indictment of Western civilization. To those of us on the inside, they are thingsto-improve. In the eyes of advocates of the superiority of value systems rooted elsewhere in the world, such as Islam or “the Asian way,” they are must-avoids.

This disenchantment has a long history, which started inside the Western world. In the nineteenth century, dissenters from the “gospel of work” and the creed of “improvement” were already loud and livid in Europe and America. In a sense, they make good guides to the progress of industrialization, which can be measured by the volume of the cries of its critics. At first, they seemed voices from the wilderness, enemies of civilization, for—measured by the new power men had to modify nature—the steam machine and the industrial city were the greatest achievements civilization had ever registered. Opponents were “ Luddites” or “deteriorationists,” indifferent or inimical to the beauty and necessity of progress, whereas the promoters of industrial “improvement” were heroes. Heroes may not make history, but history certainly makes heroes. You can tell the values and trends of an age by the heroes it chooses. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the English idolized explorers and “noble savages.” In the nineteenth, their heroes were engineers, entrepreneurs, and inventors. Lives of the Engineers became the subject of books—in the same spirit as Lives of the Artists in Renaissance Italy or the lives of saints and kings in medieval Europe.

The devisers of new technology, it was said, “approach . . . the qualities and pre-eminence of a higher order of being.” Mechanics became heroes in the “epic of tools.”¹⁹The band of the Royal Marines played “See, The Conquering Hero Comes” when Isambard Kingdom Brunel stepped from the platform at the opening of the majestic iron bridge with which he spanned the River Tamar in 1857 .²⁰ The inventor of the Armstrong gun, who pioneered the domestic use of hydroelectricity, was offered the Albanian throne. The sort of heroes who fought merely in wars against men could hardly compete for esteem: for the engineers were conquering nature. Steam’s most eloquent apostle was Samuel Smiles, who identified industrialization with progress and believed that industrial work could make men good as well as rich. “Early inventors,” he wrote in the 1860 s,

yoked wind and water to sails and wheels . . . but . . . coal, water and a little oil, are all that the steam-engine, with its bowels of iron and heart of fire, needs to enable it to go on working night and day, without rest or sleep. . . . The steam-engine pumps water, drives spindles, threshes corn, prints books, hammers iron, ploughs land, saws timber, drives piles, impels ships, works railways, excavates docks; and, in a word, asserts an almost unbounded supremacy over the materials which enter into the daily use of mankind.²¹

Industry conquered nature without necessarily offending romantic sensibilities. The romance of steam began with engines that seemed “noble,” beautiful, even debonair. J.M.W. Turner painted them as if they had blended into nature; Felix Mendelssohn wrote the songs steam sang into the musical account of his steamship journey off Scotland, where he was engaged in a common hobby of the time—exploring Europe’s misty, mythic past. Industrial experiments had an air of adventure, of improvization, even of ensorcellment. A contemporary account of one of the great moments of industrial history—the discovery of the Bessemer process, which turned iron into steel, is typical and suggests a magician’s trick rather than a scientific endeavor. As the great inventor Sir Henry Bessemer made his final adjustments,

the primitive apparatus being ready, the engine was made to force streams of air under high pressure through the bottom of the vessel. . . . The stoker in some bewilderment poured in the metal. Instantly out came a volcanic eruption of such dazzling coruscations as had never been seen before. . . . As the various stages of the process were unfolded to the gaze of the wondering spectators . . . no one dared to go near it . . . and most wonderful of all, the result was steel!²²

The quaint and romanticizing self-image of so many industrialists informs a newspaper’s praise of the factories of Sabadell, outside Barcelona, in 1855 : “And these factories, grand and elegant . . . ought to inspire their owners and all the people with pride . . . These palaces are not there to inspire vanity or arrogance, but love of work and respect for effort and for merit.”²³Poet of empire Rudyard Kipling uttered a similar sentiment in retelling the parable of Martha and Mary. Kipling’s sons of Martha “care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.” They “do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.”²⁴

Yet, outside the model factories and the model towns, in the streets and slums created by the concentration of labor, the effort to erect a romantic environment for the industrial society—to rebuild Jerusalem among “dark, satanic mills”—was a horrible failure. Alexis de Tocqueville, traveling around England in 1835 , saw the profits of industrialization as gold from a “sewer.” “From this foul drain,” he wrote, “the greatest stream of human industry flows over to fertilise the whole world.” As industrial revolutions migrated and dilated, they left characteristic tracks: the “bare soil” observed by the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins: “seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil,” wearing “man’s smudge.” Everywhere good intentions yielded dire effects. The advance of industry could be measured by counting profits and collating output; by logging the diseases and disorders that germinated in overcrowded and undersanitized towns; by chanting the litany of the saints of “the gospel of work,” who createdwealth through enterprise and spread it through “enlightened self-interest”; or by echoing the volume of the cries of the urban slum-dwellers, uprooted and replaced in ruthless environments. You can hear them in the novels, journalism, and official reports of the time. A third of London, according to one of Mrs. Gaskell’s characters in 1848 , gaped with “holes o’ iniquity and filth.” In 1842 , Gustave Dore went through London on a “pilgrimage in search of the picturesque,” but most of what he found made only for dark, somber, chilling art. His eye was drawn everywhere to the crippled, the homeless, the destitute, the exploited, the sick, the pathetic, the hungry, the cold. Even when he drew high society and prosperous traders or artisans, his pencil had a dark, sharp lead.²⁵

For, in most places where it happened, industrialization was nasty, brutish, and quick. It threw up gimcrack cities which were fearsome incubators of filth, violence, and sickness. The Barcelona physician Jaume Salarich in the 1850 s and ’ 60 s, and Manchester reformer Edwin Chadwick in the 1830 s and ’ 40 s, painted the same clinical picture of the victims of the textile mills—profuse sweat, languor, gastric trouble, respiratory difficulties, labored movements, poor circulation, mental torpor, nervous prostration, pulmonary corrosion, and poisoning from noxious machine oils and dyes. The poor of London in 1848 lived in a “beastly degradation of stink”—not an imaginative characterization, but the report of John Simon, the official responsible for public health. Urban reformers stressed sexual depravity as well as bad health among the effects of industrial overcrowding. Karl Marx, who slept with his housemaid, claimed that ruthless bosses threatened workers with sexual exploitation. The vanishing world of artisans and guildsmen was buried in the seismic upheavals that raised factories over old townscapes, like smoking volcanoes, and flattened the structures of traditional society. The industrial city, ennobled by painters of the early years of the century, was denounced, almost with one voice, by the cause of reform and the informed conscience. It was recast as the “infernal wen,” where alienation bred alongside poverty, disease, crime, and moral degradation. Through all the social improvements and fitfully growing prosperity of the last hundred years, part of this image of the industrial city has stuck: it remains in most estimations an equivocal environment, which can both embody civilization and subvert it—a place of plazas and boulevards, gutters and slums, where high art is displayed yards away from the homeless.

In the twentieth century, rejections of Western civilization multiplied. Of course, the growing volubility of the victims of Western colonialism, and the increasing freedom with which they could express themselves in the era of “ imperial retreat,” account for much of this. More significant for the durability of Western civilization was the loss of nerve from the inside—the collapse of selfconfidence in Western superiority. Criticism from within was not confined to the intellectual avant-garde or the habitually cynical left bank of civilization. Although “wholesome imperial sentiments” dominated most popular media untilwell into the second half of the century,²⁶populist campaigns for revolutionary change, mounted from left and right, expressed profound disquiet with the shortcomings of the civilization in which they arose. And some popular media were accessible to the disenchantment of particular progressive thinkers. The comic-strip book was, perhaps, the most important of these: the only genuinely new literary genre the century produced. Herge was an accomplished master of the genre whose work achieved uniquely wide circulation; indeed, he was one of the most widely translated authors of the century. Though often falsely claimed as an imperialist or even a fascist sympathizer, he always sided with the weak against the strong. In the book I like best, Le Lotus bleu, inspired by the Manchurian incident of 1931 , he includes a vignette, set in Shanghai, of a complacent colonialist who prates about the virtues of “ notre belle civilisation occidentale ” while beating up a “dirty chink.”

The white men’s empires which dominated the world when the century began were justified on the grounds that they had a “civilizing mission” to fulfill; yet they set examples of barbarism and failed to fillet savagery out of the worlds they ruled. Their failure suppurated in wounds opened by the first experiments in decolonization in the 1940 s in India, Palestine, and Indonesia; the colonial wars of the 1950 s in Kenya, Indochina, and Algeria were “savage wars of peace.” In the 1960 s, as most of the remaining white empires collapsed, and successor states dissolved in blood, disenchantment with Western civilization entered popular culture in a big way: in the work of protest songsters, the rhetoric of dropping out, the oriental turn towards eastern wisdom. After these episodes, Western civilization could never recover universal esteem: the record of its century of world-dominance was against it.

In revulsion from Western civilization, the world might turn to something better. But repugnance during the last century has been more sweeping: it has produced voices despairing of all civilization’s chances of survival, or actively calling for civilized traditions to be abjured. Civilization has come to seem not worth the effort. For the experience of the past century was bewilderingly paradoxical. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was born in hope and it developed in disaster. The twentieth century produced more creativity, more effort, more technical resourcefulness, more planning, more freedom, more power for good than ever before in human history. It was also the century of the most destructive wars, the most inhuman massacres, the most repellent tyrannies, the worst extremes of wealth and poverty, the foulest environmental degradation, the most trash, the cruelest disillusionment. It promised so much and betrayed so many. The big mystery of the twentieth century is: Why did civilization yield? Why, in other words, did progress fail? Four answers are currently popular.

First, people say, progress failed because men forgot God. The century’s wickedest excesses were perpetrated by godless movements, fascist or communist.It is no coincidence, according to this theory, that the most secular century has been the most iniquitous. Without God to fear, say religious moralists, human beings cannot be relied on to observe morality. This reasoning seems to me obviously false. For religious people have no monopoly of virtue, and over history as a whole, almost as much evil has been done in the name of religion as in pursuit of the irreligious alternatives.

Others claim that improvement was always an illusion, that it never really happens, that human nature never advances, and that all so-called progress—every new solution—generates problems of its own. To some extent, this is true. The discovery of new energy sources, for instance, has nearly always multiplied pollution. The conquest of infant mortality creates problems of population control. Women’s liberation has helped plunge families into crisis. The growth of tolerance has been accompanied by the increase of crime. The rise of democracy has been one of the twentieth century’s great achievements—but electorates can be manipulated for evil ends. Yet to deny progress altogether is to overlook a palpable fact, and, by the way, it lames our hopes for the future.

Finally, it may be that progress is subverted by its own contradictions. It is its own worst enemy, because it excites hopes which can never be fulfilled. According to John Neubauer, my colleague at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, the twentieth has been “the century of dreams.” Earlier ages misread dreams as portents. We have sacralized them as windows onto the subconscious origins of human behavior. We have made them the starting point of our art and even used them as a substitute for rational, critical thinking. “And what happens,” Neubauer said to me over a beer in the bar, “when dreams go sour?”

Alternatively, of course, the failure of progress may be a trick of the evidence—a triumph of bad news. The past century has been characterized by the rise of mass society: huge, rootless populations of city-dwellers, news-hungry but also eager for entertainment. As a result, sensationalism has been privileged. Bad news drives out good. People overlook success because failure makes a better story for journalists and academics. But illusions—if people believe in them—sometimes change the course of history. The falsehoods people believe are more powerful than the facts which really happen. So, even if the failure of progress were a myth, it would still be a potent part of our past.

The century started with dangerously overoptimistic fallacies, the first of which was that evolution made people better. In fact, if our sense of beauty and kindness is a product of evolution, it is like our intelligence: it got frozen long ago and has never developed any further. Strained by war or stress, enfeebled by drugs or demagogues, human decency vanishes. During the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of otherwise ordinary, decent people in Europe collaborated in the massacre of their neighbors. During the Vietnam conflict, nice, homey American servicemen, who loved Mom and apple pie, became so drunk with blood, so drugged with adrenaline, that they massacred women and childrenat My Lai. No doubt there were good guys among the executioners of Pol Pot, the tyrants of East Timor, the butchers of Rwanda, and the ethnic cleansers of Bosnia and Kosovo. Some of these outrages were worse than others, but they all combined to belie expectations that people would improve.

Moreover, when the century began, conventional wisdom said that history was heading somewhere: maybe towards universal freedom, maybe towards world government, maybe towards socialist revolution and a “classless society,” or maybe towards a millennium decreed by God. It now looks as though history does not happen like that. It lurches between random crises, with no direction or pattern, no predictable end. It is a genuinely chaotic system. The loss of a sense of “destiny” or even of direction makes civilization hard to sustain: without it, the progressive pull of teleological expectations slackens; the confidence in the future, which Toynbee and Kenneth Clark thought civilization needed, disappears.

Belief in progress was encouraged by what turned out to be faux amis. At intervals during the twentieth century, for instance, the accelerating pace of science fueled false hopes. Already, in the first decade, it looked as if nothing was beyond human ingenuity. As science showed its power to conquer every corner of the physical universe, people began to hope that it could do the same transforming job on morality and society. With planning, health could be universal, injustice could be eliminated. Everyone could be happy. In reality, planning almost always went wrong. Science proved more efficient in equipping evil than in serving good. “Scientifically” constructed societies turned into totalitarian nightmares. The extermination of whole races and classes was justified by the pseudo-science of Nazis and Stalinists.

Even the successes of genuine science were equivocal. The motorcar and the contraceptive pill did wonders for individual freedom, but they also threatened health and challenged morals. Industrial pollution could choke the planet to death. Nuclear power could save the world or destroy it. Medical advance has encumbered us with imbalanced and unsustainable populations, while diseasebearing organisms evolve immunity to our antidotes. The cost of medical technology has opened a cruel health gap between the world’s rich and poor. We have a surfeit of information and a deficiency of learning. Mind-boggling progress in food science was accompanied by an obscene paradox: worldwide food gluts and harrowing famines. The numbers of lives extinguished by totalitarian brutality in the first half of the twentieth century were exceeded by those aborted towards its end, in societies proud of their humane credentials. By the end of the century, people no longer trusted science to save the world; on the contrary, the Frankenstein image of science took over. Robotics and Infotec research aroused fear. Cosmological speculation induced bewilderment. Genetic manipulation inspired terror.

Politics has been even more disillusioning than science. For most of thetwentieth century, the world was a battleground of rival ideologies, which irresponsibly inflated their claims in the campaigns to win believers. Really, neither capitalism nor communism could deliver happiness. Communism tended to empower an overmighty state and to corrupt its own party elite. Capitalism rewarded greed and ruthlessness, spawned an underclass, pumped markets to bursting point, institutionalized instability, and clogged the world with consumerism. Early in the last decade of the twentieth century, optimism revived for a moment, because of the spread of democracy and a sudden global consensus in favor of economic freedom; but the mood dissolved. The century ended with a new round of uncontainable currency crises, uncontrollable natural disasters, and genocidal warfare.

There are few “lessons of history,” and in any case people never seem to learn from them. But the twentieth-century experience does seem to teach us one thing: If you misrepresent civilization as progressive, you are bound to disappoint people. If you cling to belief in ancient idealism, which sought to liberate virtue by manipulating society, your faith is doomed to unravel with experience. If you build morality into your model of civilization, you will make your model unworkable. If you imagine civilization as a kind of society capable of liberating human goodness, you will be self-deceived. The real “challenge to civilization,” so conceived, arises from within. Civilization is skin-thin: scratch it and savagery bleeds out. The civilized and the barbarous are usually thought of as mutually exclusive categories, but every society is a mixture of both. So is almost every individual. Stirred by demagogues or deprivation, nice people massacre their neighbors. The belief that civilization advances cumulatively is terribly dangerous. Appeasement, for instance, was the result of a reasonable belief: that Germans, who contributed so much to arts and sciences, would never regress to bestialism. No wonder historians of the twentieth century became obsessed with pessimism.²⁷In an evergreen definition, an optimist says this is the best of worlds, a pessimist believes him.

If anything good has come out of our last hundred years of disenchantment, it is perhaps that we shall face the future with more modest expectations. If so, we shall value our successes better and take courage in the struggle to relaunch progress and sustain it. Martin Gilbert spoke for millions when he took comfort from the pace of change and reaffirmed belief in popular wisdom. In democracies, “the most pessimistic forecast,” he says, “could be changed in the course of a single day.”²⁸It sounds like “making the best of a bad job”: but that is a pretty good example of the practicality of popular nostrums. The mood of the century’s end was captured by Jacobus Delwaide of the Catholic University of Brussels. “The next century,” he forecast in conversation with me in 1999 , “will be better than this. Of course it will—we’ve made such a mess of the world that there’s no way out but up.”

Next Stop after the Atlantic
The Revenge of Nature

Western civilization has dominated world history in recent times, but its decline has been predicted with growing insistence since the First World War. Today, it is threatened with immersion in a global civilization or replacement by a Pacific civilization. If history is anything to go by, it must, like all earlier civilizations, end by being ruined—or transformed.

For the history of civilizations is a path picked among ruins. No civilization has lasted indefinitely. Disaster has seen them all off: in some cases, the environment has been overexploited; in others, wars or revolutions have preceded retreats into barbarism. Is there any reason to suppose that we can escape the same fate? And while we await or elude it, how will the civilizations we live in change?

The threat most commonly identified today is ecological disaster. We have got used to imagining the biosphere as a thin veil around a naked planet—a veil we are fraying and rending. It is strictly impossible to calculate with certainty whether we are consuming the world’s resources faster than we can replace them. Food sources and cultivable land have been extinguished and turned to desert by reckless overexploitation. Our ability to distribute and supply food according to need has failed millions of famine victims. But dazzling advances in scientific agronomy have generated global surpluses. The amount of unused space on the planet—and beyond it—is still enormous, and our techniques for making underexploited environments habitable are improving all the time. Traditional sources of fuel are under grave threat from our improvident demands, but new deposits are constantly sought and often discovered. Our techniques for harnessing the practically inexhaustible power of the sun and the motion of the earth are still in their infancy. The earth’s atmosphere looks increasingly threadbare, and popular imaginations have been schooled to see it worn through with “holes in the ozone layer”; indeed, the viability of the planet really does depend on a balance of components in the atmosphere, which human activity can affect. Error on the side of prudence is therefore comforting.

Our ecological priorities, however, underestimate nature. It is a curious kind of human arrogance to suppose that the major theme of the history of civilization has been reversed in our own times, and that, in the struggle of man and nature, man now holds the upper hand.

I have already expressed little confidence in the “lessons of history.” Change always seems to take us by surprise. Still, for what it is worth, past experience suggests that, however savagely we treat the environment, it always fights back. We strike links out of the ecochain, but we remain bound by it. Most extinctionshappen despite us, not because of us. There are species which preceded us and which will probably still be around after our time. Sea and desert, jungle and ice, rain and wind reclaim the bits of the earth we quarry out of her.

We humans think we are the best beings on our planet. But we would, wouldn’t we? According to one of our favorite myths, Adam lost the lordship of creation when he was expelled from Eden. His descendants could lose it again. If we could look at our world objectively, we would probably see other species contending for top place: vegetation that will outlast our extinction, or the microbes that will cause “the coming plague.” One way of striving for objectivity is to reverse roles and see things from a nonhuman point of view. From Pongo’s perspective, for instance, in Dodie Smith’s story of a hundred and one Dalmatians, the humans in his household became his pets. The bull in the ring, fulfilling his nature in a fight to the death, defies the well-meaning human critics who would prefer to kill him unspectacularly in a sanitized abattoir. The cabbage screams under the gardener’s knife. More arrogant life forms than ours—if there are any—might endorse the modest place in creation which some past civilizations assigned to man.

No one knows how or when human beings got the idea that they were better-than the rest of nature. Primitive wisdom deferred to other species bigger, stronger, tougher, or faster than man. Animals who were enemies were treated with awe, those who were allies with admiration. The Mesolithic hunters who left the graveyard intact at Skateholm accepted their dogs as full members of society, burying them with the spoils due to prowess and, in some cases, with more signs of honor than are found in the graves of their men. Households like mine, which have scatter cushions embroidered “Dachshunds Are People, Too” have a long tradition behind them. For most of the human past, people not only feared and appeased the rest of the ecosystem, they mimed it in rites of zoomorphic dance. Or, when they made artifacts and buildings, they paid trees and beasts the homage of imitation. Instead of assuming that people were made in the image of God, they fashioned their own gods to look like animals. When they affected the supreme arrogance of divine disguise, they did so in pelts and feathers, horns and beasts’ head-masks.

In the civilizations usually praised or blamed for inventing our notion of our human supremacy—those of the ancient Chinese, Indians, Greeks, and Jews—the claim that man is monarch or steward of the planet cannot be traced back very far: not beyond a period well into the last millennium B.C. Once established, the claim was not widely shared. Egyptian civilization clung to gods with the faces of crocodiles and dogs. The civilizations of the Americas worshipped the parts of the environment they ate. The mutual sustenance of man and corn did not imply the superiority of the human partner. On the contrary, it was the people who tended the cobs in a lowly rite of servitude, while the corn seemed to exercise the divine prerogative of self-immolation for its worshippers’good. There is no practical paradox in the idea of a god who sacrifices himself to nourish his devotees: the God of Christians does it every day.

In most of the rest of the world, for most of the time, similar attitudes have prevailed. In collaboration with other parts of nature, people have thought of themselves as equal or inferior partners. Or, struggling for survival in hostile environments, they have eyed other species as equal or superior competitors. Until about three hundred years ago in Western Europe, it was still common for animals to have legal rights practically on a par with humans. Rats who despoiled barns, grasshoppers who ravaged crops, swallows who defecated over shrines, and dogs who bit people were tried in court for their “crimes,” represented by counsel, and, sometimes, acquitted.²⁹In Wales and France, pilgrims visited the shrines of canonized dogs; there could be no more powerful demonstration of the moral equivalence of man and beast.³⁰Today’s animal-rights activists are ultraconservative revolutionaries who want to put the clock back hundreds of years.

Man’s claim to superiority has arisen gradually, but it has had powerful authorities on its side. It is made explicit in Genesis: “every living thing that moves will be yours,” God says to Noah, “even the foliage of the plants. I give you everything.” The Stoics, too, thought that nature exists only to serve man’s needs. Renaissance humanism—the collective narcissism of an entire species—has made the doctrine part of the legacy of the modern world. Today, most of us probably think humans are God’s best shot, or, in secular language, the climax of evolution. Even the liberators of English veal-calves are moved by the compassion of condescension.

Yet there are still cultures in which people believe in material angels and demons who, inseparable from nature, patronize or imperil mankind with their daunting powers. Japanese, with their traditional mental picture of nature teeming with gods, surely represent the way human minds work more typically than Westerners of the present generations. In Hindu tradition, which assigns man top place as the last resort of reincarnation, human supremacy is only tentatively asserted. Nonhuman life forms are reverently handled in a spirit similar to what we now call “deep ecology”: not just conserving the environment or refraining from irresponsible exploitation of it, but treating it as sacred. In E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, when a missionary concedes that monkeys could enjoy “their collateral share of bliss,” “What,” ask the Brahmans, “about insects, oranges, crystals and mud?” Scientists who think life may have originated in a chemical accident ought not to blench at the inclusion of crystals.

Before we dismiss opinions so widely shared, we should look at the evidence for mankind’s supposed superiority and try a bit of disinterested selfcriticism. Most of what is usually cited as evidence is claim-staking for a privileged place in the world. Much of the rest are outpourings of a human identity-crisis: imperfectly convincing attempts to draw the line between manand other animals. Aristotle thought people were elevated by their social habits, but an objective eye might see the predictable, collaborative politics of ants or bees as providing a better model than ours. Man has often boasted of his unique ability to fashion tools; a student of Planet Earth, from somewhere else in the universe, might see this only as evidence of unique physical defectiveness. It is true that only people prepare food before they eat it—except for a few species, such as one kind of monkey that likes to rinse prospective nibbles—but it would be unpardonably self-important to make a virtue of this peculiarity. We congratulate ourselves on the size of our brains, which is a good test, but only by our own standards. Some of us like to claim that humans are the only property-owning animals, but even if this were true—for tribes of monkeys defend their turf, and dogs fight over bones— it would be a recommendation only from questionable ideological standpoints.

Cognition, higher consciousness, even perhaps conscience and soul are attributes we assign to ourselves in our desire for self-definition. We suppose that we alone have a notion of transcendence—but, like most of our claims to unique sagacity, this is a result of our inability to communicate with other species. It is like dismissing as dumb the people whose speech you cannot understand. No one has yet taught a chimp much human language.³¹On the other hand, even the most dedicated human students have made only rudimentary progress in talking to gorillas. Experimenters are disappointed when the chimps fail to respond to efforts to teach them sign terms for abstract concepts. Gorillas, no doubt, suffer from frustrations of their own with human interlocutors. The speed with which some microbes arm themselves under bombardment from antibiotics is so much greater than anything else which happens in evolution that its practical effect is equivalent to an intelligent response. The consciousness from which we exempt microbes may be discounted or ascribed, in a form or by a measurement unknown to us, to other species.

The very attempt to distinguish ourselves from animals is a delusive form of self-flattery. The line has never been satisfactorily drawn. In the eighteenth century, against a backdrop of mischievously satirical singeries, Lord Monboddo wearied readers with his theory that orangutans were human.³²The hero of one of Thomas Love Peacock’s novels was an orangutan who, possessed of every rational faculty except speech, acquired, with a reputation as “a profound but cautious thinker,” a baronetcy and a seat in the House of Commons. Pygmies, Hottentots, and Australian Aboriginals, meanwhile, were relegated to subhumanity. Now we prefer to classify humans as animals, linked by evolution in an embracing continuum, and have done with it. But, by comparison with our fellow creatures, we persist in giving ourselves top ranking.

There are points in our favor. Humans genuinely can survive in more environments than almost any other creature. We will probably pass muster as thespecies with the best collective memory—as far as we know, our ability to record information makes us best equipped for what we call progress and best placed to exploit vicarious experience—though we may be found wanting if judged by the use we make of this privilege. And just as historians measure societies relative to one another by their effectiveness in making war, so we shall be seen to advantage in our power to destroy other species. Only a few micro-organisms exceed us in this respect. Most other sources of the pride of being human are hard or impossible to value by objective standards. Irrespective of our own errors and efforts, we remain at the ultimate mercy of nature: we have no means of controlling the long-term climatic changes which have slowed, arrested, or reversed human development in the past. We are more likely to be surprised by a new ice age imposed out of the blue than frizzled by global warming through our own fault. Meanwhile, warming could wreck the planet in other ways, accelerating desiccation, singeing the edges of precious habitats, and heating into deadly “microbial gumbo” the accretions of algae and pollutants that float with the current around the world’s oceans. Wrecking the planet is a pretty ambitious goal, and the fact that a number of well-meaning environmentalists speak in such terms is more a sign of arrogance than analysis. Although species go extinct regularly, the continuance of life in general on the planet seems a sturdy bet.

Despite the “miracles” of modern medicine, disease seems unconquered, except in complacent or inert imaginations. Micro-organisms which cause disease tend to evolve rapidly. Just as staphylococci beat penicillin, so current strains are showing a tendency to resist new antibiotics; these adaptations, at present, are outpacing the ability of medical research to respond. A few years ago, tuberculosis was thought to be close to extinction as a result of global vaccination programs; the new W-strain of the disease is resistant to every available drug and kills half its victims. AIDS will certainly not be the last mass raptor to emerge with baffling suddenness and kill millions before a cure is found. More pandemics, like the influenza pandemic of 1918 – 19 , which was more destructive of human life than the First World War, are waiting to happen. As well as microorganisms, disease-carrying vermin are proving increasingly hard to control, especially malaria-carrying mosquitoes and the fast-growing populations of urban rats.³³Here is a speculation worth taking seriously: in medical history, as in most other respects, the last couple of hundred years have been a deceptive interlude—an atypical episode. We have convinced ourselves that the diminished virulence of disease was entirely the result of our own efforts in hygiene, prevention, and cure. It is worth considering a new line of explanation: that we have also, in part, benefited from an evolutionary blip, an undiscerned and unrecorded period of relatively low malignity in the biology of disease. If so, there is no reason to suppose that this period will be indefinitely prolonged.

The conservation movement has made us worry about the durability of thenatural world, as if nature could not last without coddling by us. Trees, lichens, weeds were here before us; they will be here after we are gone. What objective test could be more conclusive? In the poem by Peter Ghyssaert, quoted as an epigraph to this chapter, oaks are a fearsome symbol of the durability of nature. As the poem develops, they take hold of the world while the human species vanishes. They literally take hold of it, thrusting iron-cold, clawlike roots deep into the earth. I prefer to think of them succeeding without malevolence, but it is tempting to see their triumph as just. While we lament or celebrate our power over the environment, a still imperfectly domesticated nature waits to take its revenge.

The Self-Threatened Menace

We may not have to wait for Pan to scatter ruin: people can do it unaided. Civilizations spared by nature regularly destroy themselves. The danger of world immolation in nuclear war was generally thought to have receded in the late twentieth century, when political changes made the world’s great powers stop threatening each other with nuclear weapons. Yet most of the weapons remain intact; they are becoming available to more states, and therefore to ever less reliable regimes, and they can be manufactured on a potentially devastating scale by private enterprise—including that of terrorist and criminal organizations. The great danger for the future is therefore likely to be from what I have called “little local nuclear holocausts” rather than the comprehensive Armageddon feared in recent history. Biological or chemical warfare, which humanity has never faced on a large scale, looks increasingly menacing. When police arrested Aum Shinrikyo cult members in Japan in 1995 , the suspects were said to be preparing vast quantities of Clostridium difficile bacterial spores to supplement the poison gas they were already accused of releasing. Even the peaceful application of nuclear energy carries dangers with it: the meltdown of reactors can poison vast areas of the earth; we are still not sure how best to dispose of nuclear waste.

Civilizations have sometimes been engulfed by invaders. One of the most marked global trends today is the divergence of population statistics between areas where population is falling and the many parts of the world—overwhelmingly, the poorest and mostly underprivileged parts—where it continues to grow massively. This has raised in some minds the specter of a traumatic shift of people from the underdeveloped areas, where there are too many mouths to feed, to the rich areas, where there are surpluses of food. The result, it is envisaged, would be similar to the transformation of the Europe of classical antiquity by the “barbarian” invasions of the Roman empire, or the supposed destruction of the ancient civilization of the Indus Valley by immigrants from outside (see page 000 ).³⁴

Long-term trends in world population are, however, increasingly reassuring.Some recent speculation points out that the laws of compound interest work on population decrease as well as increase. If the birthrate comes down a point or two—which is happening in various places around the world—over a period of two or three hundred years, world population could drop below five hundred million. Except in Africa, current statistics show population rising containably where it is not actually in decline; alarmist predictions continue to be made for some other areas, especially China, but do not command wide assent among experts.³⁵To some extent, a shift of population from areas of relative underdevelopment into richer zones is indeed under way, but the migrants show no sign either of hostility to civilization in general or of threatening to engulf host societies. On the contrary, immigrants are vectors of cultural influence, which can have an enriching as well as a destructive effect. Beyond a rudimentary level of development, the traditional demographic balance is shifting, as birthrates fall and the old live longer: the world of boomers and busters, where “youth rules,” will become the gerontocracy of Darby and Joan. In the West, the change will be procured by the abuse of medical care to protract life; in China, by the demographic crevasse opened by tyrannous birth-control policies. The effects are widely feared but could equally well be benign. The elderly will work longer; fewer jobs will be vacated in favor of the young and incompetent; peace and stability will be favored in the conservative nirvana of an old folks’ world.

This is not to say that some other violent global showdown will not intervene. A world shadowed by militant religious fundamentalism—Islamic or Christian—or by an ambitious, frustrated, and isolated China has as much potential for ideologically motivated violence as ever before. Revolutions have destroyed civilizations in the past. Twice in the twentieth century, civilization in Europe has narrowly escaped overthrow by revolutionary movements led by dictators overtly hostile to the traditions of civilized life. Two current social trends in the developing world help to arouse fears of a revival of political barbarism. First, there is the downside of demographic change. The average age of populations is rising, and the proportion of able-bodied people of working age is falling, so that ever-larger numbers of old and sick have to be supported, at ever-rising costs, by a workforce under increasing pressure. Against this background, most of the world’s existing welfare systems look unsustainable in the middle term. Second, there is a growing “wealth gap” separating the richest from the poorest members of society; this has raised in some minds the vision of a resentful “ underclass”—underprivileged and undereducated—forming a potentially destructive revolutionary force.

The problem of the future of cities is inseparable from the problems of population shifts between relatively rich and relatively poor places, and of the revolutionary threat from new classes of the underprivileged. In 1900 , 5 percent of the world’s population lived in cities of over a hundred thousand people. Now the corresponding figure is 45 percent. More worrying still, many of the world’sbiggest or fastest-growing cities have expanded so fast, with so few environmental controls or relevant social policies, that millions of their inhabitants are without the most elementary sanitation and health care. The latest statistics compiled by the United Nations agencies show an easing of the problem: Mexico City and S„o Paulo, for instance, the world’s biggest cities, formerly reckoned at more than twenty million inhabitants apiece, are now thought to have
15 .6 and 16 million respectively. But the problems of fast-growing cities of the Third World of between one and ten million inhabitants remain acute and are worsening.³⁶They gather the rootless and stakeless, breed crime and disease, alienate and demoralize. At this rate, cities, which have traditionally been seen as the essential settings of civilized life, could choke it to death.

Unless we learn to live in a “multicivilizational world,” we face the prospect of “civilizational wars.”³⁷Europe is the best place in which to imagine them, across the dividing lines between “East” and “West,” Christendom and Islam. The wall is down, but Humpty-Dumpty seems to have survived. The mischiefmaking Lord of Misrule rolls around Europe with enhanced freedom, perching on new or re-erected parapets in formerly forgotten places and proclaiming unforeseen conflicts. After the wall, war is harder to predict and peace impossible to guarantee. The world after the wall resembles that beyond the looking glass: inversions of normalcy abound, contradictions coexist. Nationstates survive contrasting trends towards fragmentation and globalization. “ Modernization” yields Grossr‰ume which resemble old empires. Geopolitics seems subordinate to mentalities and identities, but blood and soil remain mutually, indelibly stained: the Dayton Peace Accords are caked in them; mass graves in Kosovo are dug and drenched in them.

The Berlin Wall was dismantled, it seems, only to be re-erected as a series of new barriers a bit farther east. The exclusion of Turkey and the Soviet Union from European institutions can be understood, and even justified, but it has been a mistake. A peaceful Europe has to be a plural Europe. To be lastingly peaceful, it has to be plural enough to embrace Muslims and bold enough to encompass its most populous periphery. If people believe fervently enough in the “clash of civilizations,” prophecies of it will become self-fulfilling. Russia and Turkey have alternative identities and allies at their disposal; they are, by any reasonable standards, European countries, but need not remain so. Other Europeans will have only themselves to blame if Russians and Turks decide to adopt the motto: “If you can’t join them, beat them.” One day, they may be in a position to turn that motto into policy.³⁸

Even without help from war, civilizations can wither by losing touch with their own traditions. Recent speculations have focused on the dangers that traditional religion will be swept away by secular erosion, or traditional education by the uncontrollable effects of new information channels, or traditional communities by social change, or traditional ethics by the frightening “progress” ofexperiments in genetics. Information technology—hailed by some as a boon for humankind—is seen by others as a force which could dissolve traditional social bonds. Artificial-intelligence research, which is intended to liberate people from chores better done by machines, has inspired fears of a future in which people lose control to robot masters. The pioneers of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence in one generation become the Dr. Frankensteins of the next.

No one who is really well informed about these prospects is inclined to fuel such fears. Welfare systems will be re-engineered to cope with demographic change or supplemented or superannuated by a resurgence of traditional “ family values”; the underclass will be bought off or repressed; the megacities will continue to dwindle to manageable proportions; information technology will go on having the selectively liberating effects its most adventurous users already enjoy; genetic research may not craft a world we want to live in, but it could make it enduringly secure by reversing evolution and beating hunger and disease. Yet popular anxieties about the uncertainties of a future procured by rapid change are not merely the issue of ignorance. Rather, they are symptoms of a genuine problem—the problem of a world in the grip of “future shock.”³⁹People who find change unbearable expect it to become uncontainable.

The result is a danger more grave than the victims’ conscious fears. For, in a state of mind unsettled by breakneck change and bewildering technology, electors reach for “noisy little men” and prophets of order. In increasingly complex societies—as they struggle to cope with rising expectations, gigantic collective projects, baffling demographic imbalances, and alarming external threats—order and social control come to be more highly valued than freedom and human rights. Perceptions of society undermined by moral irresponsibility, sexual permissiveness, an alienated underclass, terrorism, and rising crime are the fuel of totalitarian revanche and religious fanaticism. While waiting for the conservative nirvana, I am still haunted by a vision I conjured up at the end of Millennium, of communism and fascism back in the streets, clawing at one another like clones out of a dinosaur theme-park.

The new Kulturkampf is usually said to be between liberalism and the “moral majority.” In the global village, liberalism is a tool of survival. Without it, the multicultural, pluralistic societies to which history consigns us will dissolve in blood. Yet it looks doomed: programmed for self-destruction. If we want to keep freedoms, we must face up to their fragility. Totalitarian logic appropriates liberal language. “Man must be forced to be free.” “ Arbeit macht frei. ” Enfeebled by its inconsistencies, our liberalism could get wishy-washed away. Abortion and euthanasia are the slashed prices of life cheapened by glut. Advocacy of them imperils the inviolability of other unwanted lives: of criminals, say, the socially subversive, the genetically undesirable, the surplus poor and sick. In secular hands, liberal principles become the forerunners of death camps and eugenics. Cultural relativism—the precious touchstone of a richly diverseworld—has similarly equivocal implications: how can you invoke it in behalf, say, of polygamy or arranged marriage or incest while excluding cannibalism or female circumcision or “child abuse”? The heirs to our liberalism in my children’s generation are going to have to defend cultural relativism while protecting us from the worst of its effects. They will also have to find ways of protecting freedom from itself. Free speech and free association favor the incubation of parties which want to destroy them. Free societies are disarmed against terrorists.⁴⁰

Most of us would be unwilling to recognize the future as civilized if it dropped what we think of as civilized values: belief in the inviolability of human life; respect for the dignity of the individual person; and vigilance in the protection of the weak against the strong. Yet we have to face the fact that most civilizations of the past have not shared these values. Civilization and tyranny are reconcilable. Indeed, for most of history they have been inseparable.

Civilizations could never have arisen without the visionary drive of pharaohs and phalanxes, or the labor and sacrifices of millions of their subjects and victims. Short of destruction or a reversion to barbarism, civilizations which survive in the future will be different again. It may be impossible to predict what they will be like, but we can say something about where they might happen.

The Last Ocean

One possibility is that the Atlantic civilization which has dominated the modern world will be replaced by a Pacific civilization. Atlantic civilization came into being as the result of exchanges across the ocean. It has taken far longer for similar links to develop across the Pacific. Now, however, it is possible to think of a potential Pacific civilization encompassing some or all of the peoples of the Pacific Rim—an “Eastern civilization” around the Pacific to match the “Western civilization” which took shape around the Atlantic.

Because of its sheer vastness and the unremitting nature of its winds, the Pacific was a hard ocean to cross both ways under sail. Two powerful windsystems, formed by the most regular winds in the world, divide the ocean at the equator. Navigation from west to east is easy in central latitudes, but the return journey can only be made in latitudes far to the north and south, where, until the nineteenth century, coasts were unproductive and unfrequented. For all the navigators’ skill, Polynesian odysseys got no farther east than Hawaii and Easter Island. If Chinese or Japanese ships ever found their way to America in what we think of as ancient or medieval times, they are not known to have established any traffic. When Magellan made the first recorded crossing of the Pacific in 1520 – 21 , approaching from the east, his ships could not find a way back. The two-way route was not pieced together until 1565 , when Friar Andres de Urdaneta completed his record-breaking journey of 11 ,600 miles in five monthsand eight days, curling across the Pacific almost to forty degrees north in order to return to Mexico from the Philippines.

The Pacific could not become a zone of exchange on a large scale until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the power of the steamship began to reduce it to manageable proportions. Even then, the Pacific remained a backwater compared with other, busier oceans—the Atlantic and the Indian—until the spread of the industrial revolution to its shores. Relatively suddenly, in the second half of the twentieth century, the Pacific became an “economic giant,” supplying over half the world’s total product by the 1990 s and carrying most of the world’s trade. With particular intensity in the 1980 s, a huge transfer of people and investment, originating chiefly in East Asia, began to bind most of the Pacific’s coasts in a business network directed mainly from Japan, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles.

That the world was entering a “Pacific Age” became conventional wisdom in the early 1980 s, as dwellers on its shores exchanged admiring glances across “the ocean of the future.” “The inhabitants of the nations grouped by geographical accident around the Ocean’s coasts,” observed by the journalist Simon Winchester during his five-year research pilgrimage among them, “had started to look inward, at themselves, rather than caring any longer for the views of those beyond or behind. . . . They looked across the huge blue expanse of water, and they communed with each other—Shanghai with Santiago, Sydney with Hong Kong, Jakarta with Lima and Rappongi with Hollywood—and by doing so perhaps they achieved a kind of Pacific identity.”⁴¹

“Pacific civilization” will have come of age when the answer to the question-“Where is Vancouver?” or “Where is Brisbane?” will evoke the answer “On the Pacific” as readily as “In Canada” or “In Australia”; or when San Francisco and Seattle seem on the brink of the East rather than the edge of the West; or when Australians complete their so-far tentative self-reclassification as Asian people; or when white Californians or New Zealanders feel as united by common interest with Japanese and South Koreans as Netherlanders do with northern Italians, or Alsatians with Luxembourgeois. In the meantime, it may be overtaken by global civilization.

A trend that can be observed over the thousands of years covered by this book is towards ever-bigger civilizations. The growth of Atlantic civilization, out of relatively small heartlands in Western Europe, to cover a huge swathe of the world, is one eye-catching example. The spread of Islam from the Arabs’ original small strip of land, between sea and desert, is another. Taken to its logical conclusion, this sort of process would eventually spread a single civilization over the whole globe. Signs of “globalization” have already been detected by some observers, who can point to the enormous influence exerted in the rest of the world by Western imperialism. Even countries never subject to Western empires,like China, Thailand, or Tonga, have absorbed a lot of Western culture, which, in turn, has undergone some modifications as a result of influences transmitted in the opposite direction.⁴²

Interconnectedness is an unmistakable, accelerating influence on almost all the countries and cultures of the world “in all aspects of . . . life from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual,” which change with the “growing extensity, intensity and velocity of global interactions.”⁴³This trend has been accentuated by the effect of modern technology on trade and communications. Economics seems to be on the side of globalization. In a global marketplace, people and goods move around with greater freedom than ever before.⁴⁴Today, the planet’s only isolated human communities are in the very remotest recesses of tundras and ice worlds, deserts and jungles, and their numbers are fast diminishing. For the rest of us, who live in societies in touch with each other and constantly modified by the influences we exchange, our sense of getting more like one another is irresistible. “Global culture” has scattered the world with lookalike styles and products. Across most of the world, travelers can pass through a series of near-identical airport lounges with no sense of cultural dislocation. Instant communications broadcast shared images and a shadow, at least, of shared experience all over the world. Even without an external enemy, imagined in UFOs or prophesied in deep space, we identify progressively with each other because our sense of our common humanity arises from our habit of self-differentiation from the rest of nature. Enormous shifts of population, which have accompanied the modern history of the rise and fall of world empires, mean that there are few cultures which remain confined to a particular part of the world.⁴⁵

Increasing interconnectedness seems to lead to increasing interdependence, which in turn demands new, ever-wider, ultimately worldwide “frameworks” for action, transcending old nations, blocs, and civilizations.⁴⁶“Geo-governance” looms. Conspicuous current examples at the time of writing are the struggle for a world-embracing human-rights regime, the spread and range of reciprocal extradition arrangements, and the menace or promise of “global policing” by the United Nations or by America as the surrogate of a “new world order.”⁴⁷

In one lexicon, globalization means Americanization—not just because of the universal popular appeal of American culture or the magnetism of American models of how to achieve political greatness and economic success, but also because the world’s biggest businesses tend to be American-dominated. No one can control information technology, but the nearest approximation to control emanates from America, where most of the investment originates. Big business needs a world arena to fulfill ambitions.⁴⁸A globalized world will be a world in which multinationals operate everywhere—a world stained the color of Coca-Cola or roofed by golden arches. America generates most of the world’s cinema and soap opera, pop and pap. In partial consequence, for “globalization” “ au niveau lingistique on pourrait plus proprement parler ‘anglicisation.’”⁴⁹

But globalization has its limits, and “global civilization” probably lies at an unattainable distance beyond them. Where globalization is perceived as predominantly a movement of Western origin—a conquest of the rest of the world by Western culture—it is fiercely resisted as a threat to indigenous traditions in other parts of the world, and resented even in Western countries by communities who do not see themselves as full partners in Western civilization.⁵⁰Those who count themselves out include adherents of revolutionary and fundamentalist Islam, black consciousness, many Native American movements, even some forms of feminism.

Moreover, experience shows that when cultural influences cross historic frontiers they get adapted as well as adopted. Cultures can borrow from each other without sacrifice of identity. The most striking case is that of Japan, regarded in the West today as a sort of honorary Western country which became rich and successful by cleverly imitating Western ways. That is not how the Japanese see themselves. The surface of the pool shimmers with Western reflections, but the depths of Japan are unchanged beneath. The sense of national identity of the Japanese has depended historically on their conviction of their own uniqueness; and although they are adept at competing in Western markets, wearing Western clothes, playing Western music, and collecting Western art, no precious tradition of their own has been abandoned. When Japanese play baseball, they treat it as a game of their own, embodying their traditional cults of youthful heroism and purity. Western suits, worn by Japanese, become uniforms expressing the collective values of social harmony which the Japanese regard as their great source of strength in business.⁵¹I say this in no admonitory spirit and with no desire to endorse the apprehensions of some Japan-watchers. It is simply an illustration of a fact of globalization: identities are now forged in reaction to world trends, not merely by self-differentiation from neighbors.⁵²

The globalization of culture is likely to be a self-defeating phenomenon. Whenever people get involved in big entities, they reach for the comforting familiarity of their local, regional, or national roots. That is why superstates tend to break up after a while; and why old identities sometimes survive centuries of immersion in big empires. If the peoples of the whole world ever do come to think of themselves as sharing a single global civilization, it will be a civilization of a very heterogeneous kind, dappled with differences from place to place.

The history of civilizations has been patternless. Their future, therefore, is unpredictable. Most of the “phases” into which their pasts have been divided never happened, so talk of a coming phase is, to say the least, premature. Yet I cannot resist the temptation to array in phases the story told in the last part of this book. It has been a tale of three oceans, which have dominated, in turn, periods of unequal length: the forging of a unified Indian Ocean space produced an Islamic lake; from the crossing and recrossing of the Atlantic, modern Western civilization emerged; in a shadowy way, we can see how the development ofthe Pacific has begun to bring a new community of peoples into prominence. A last ocean remains. The start of the last phase in this oceanic history in the world may be discernible in the crossing of the Arctic by submarine and airborne routes which follow the great circle of the earth; if global civilization does come into being, I can imagine future historians describing how it took shape around these new routes, as its predecessors did around their own “home” oceans. The Arctic, maybe, is or will become or will come to be seen as the home ocean of the world.

If so, one lesson of this book will be reinforced: no environment is immune to civilization. Meanwhile, though I have struggled to avoid any kind of determinism, geography—in the broadest sense, the palpable realities of the planet, the exigencies of nature, the soils and seeds, the winds and waves—has shaped the world presented in these pages. In particular, as civilizations have grown out of their environments of origin, they have—according to the arguments presented here—been borne by the wind. I ought therefore to recall to mind some of the principles with which we started: the human initiatives to which nature gives shape and sets limits start in the mind and the passions. Everything that happens gets registered in coarse, sublunary matter, but it begins with ideas and affections. For the rest, as I approach the end of this book, I feel like Edmund Blunden’s geographer. “Such truths,” he told his listeners towards the close of his lecture,

we owe to blest geography
That’s certain as the magnet and the pole,
And with this learning we can put to flight
All horned chimaeras and vile fallacies. . . .

A few lines later he paused. The clock ticked. The lecturer looked up, to find his audience gone—doubtless, he consoled himself, to verify his theories. I seem to sense a similar fate awaiting me.

Epilogue: In Derek Jarman’s Garden

This has been a book of places: a search for a shrine or ruin or landscape or seascape where civilization can be instantly apprehended, in images, not ideas. I feel that apprehension—or the want of it—most acutely at my last stop: Dungeness, on the English Channel, the bleakest place in Britain.

Bleakness can be inspiring: a wild fen, a fogbound metropolis, a shoreline of glinting shoals. But Dungeness is bleak with a baffling, maddening, despairing bleakness. The landscape sags, as if the sea and the salt had squeezed or blotted all the energy out of it. It is unrelievedly flat, raises no eye or eyebrowupwards. Prostrate, abject, barren—sick with abuse or indifference—the earth cringes towards the sea. This is the kind of flatness threatened at the end of the world: hills made low, rough places drearily plain.

Two terrible edifices jut out of it: the blind, bare lighthouse and, spread behind, the skeletal metal of a nuclear-power station. Metal fences, coils, pipes, and jagged walkways dominate a patch of nature that already looks blasted by disaster. The air tastes of steel, smells of seaweed.

From the lighthouse, you look down on salt-pocked grass that struggles to meet the shingle shore. A few fishermen’s huts straggle above the waterline, of cheap construction and cheaper taste, instantly tawdry. Here, incredibly, there is a pub, where, every evening, trippers gather to cackle and hoot, mocking the affliction around them. Their cheeky, chirpy insensitivity is the last humiliation heaped on Dungeness: deserts demand reverence.

You plod the shingle. There is no elegant way to cross it. It is that shifting, scrambling sort that drags and sucks at your feet. Nothing much could grow in it, almost nothing live on it. Yet you are bound for a garden, planted in the stones by Derek Jarman.

He came here to die of AIDS. There was a kind of comfort in choosing somewhere horribly, brutally appropriate—somewhere already dead—like the resting place of a Promethean, staked to die on a rock, or a condemned man’s cell, or a comfortless oratory for a saint to confront God in. Jarman’s little bungalow is in the style of the fishermen’s huts. It looks temporary, jerry-built. The garden is around it, unfenced, inviting, yet repellent, for Jarman made it to externalize his own suffering—a garden of torture and decay and putrescence and pain.

He was unwilling to admit it. Before he died, he wrote a book about his garden.-He pictured Dungeness as eccentrically charming and his gardening as a form of gentle therapy. He described the labor of clearing patches in the shingle to fill with mulch and plant with ecofriendly seeds of local flora. Glossy photos prettified the place and cut out the horror. He hardly mentioned the tortured lumps of flotsam scattered through the garden in mockery of sculpture—the mangled stumps, the phallic spars. There were only two hints of a program of symbolism: Jarman’s denial that he planned a “white-witch” garden to neutralize the malign exhalations of the power station; and his allusion to a television crew that came to the garden to make a program about AIDS—but, according to Jarman, you can’t make programs about AIDS.⁵³Since he made such a program himself, this was a characteristically disingenuous disclaimer.

In front of the bungalow is a patch of conventional gardening—an effort to discipline Dungeness into optimism and fertility—a box of imported soil, a halfheartedly flowering rose. That is the only concession to propriety. In this Golgotha, flowers wear thorns. All over the rest of his ground, Jarman erected lumps and liths of salvage. He thrust them upright into the beds of shingle: sparsand yards from dead vessels, planks and keels of fishing boats crushed and snapped by the sea. All color has been drained or battered out of them. They are worm-eaten, like dead flesh—or hang like suffering limbs, misshapen, emaciated, twisted in agony, broken-kneed, pierced by nails. Nails jab out of them priapically, smeared with rust like blood. Most of the monoliths have been dragged out of the sea unscraped, barnacled with filth and mollusks, like the caruncles of a horrible, herpetic disease.

Cadaverously stiff mast-lengths and bowsprits loom and lean out of the gravel, budded with buboes—hard accretions of the sea. Anchor chains rust round the monoliths’ necks, like chains of office in some sadistic masonry, worn in death as if with pride. Between them, Jarman arranged small henges of stones, as if in remembrance of the circle-builders of early civilizations. As you walk among them, the shingle scrapes and screeches underfoot. This is the petrified forest of grim tales, where enchantment is evil and love corrupts. Yet the objects Jarman selected and erected belong to a long and civilized tradition: the objet trouve transformed into art by the unaided eye of the aesthete. More than any other precedent, the ravaged monoliths recall the weird-shaped “wonder rocks” which were part of the desk furniture of every self-respecting scholar in ancient China.⁵⁴

Civilization, we expect, will end on the beach. Under the power station at Dungeness, it looks as if it is already over. Yet Derek Jarman’s attempt to garden in this abominable desolation seems as heroic an act of environmental resistance as any in this book. In a landscape made loveless and meaningless by man, he restored meaning. From the sea, the source of life and swamp of death, he retrieved human works which nature had destroyed. He resurrected them. He took a place of despair and made it a memorial. Derek Jarman’s garden evokes every kind of reaction, from odium to adulation. Some visitors find it pointless or sordid or menacing or louche. Some see only the ravages of a beachcomber’s disease—fetishism made fanatical. Some shrug at a junkyard. When Jarman’s partner is dead, it is hard to believe that anyone will treasure this garden or preserve it as it ought to be preserved.

Perhaps it does not matter. Between the power station and the sea—symbol of human pollution and agent of revengeful nature—the garden, if not already dead, was made to die. Yet, as with so many civilized works, its very vulnerability is part of what makes it a monument of civilization: an act of defiance of the environment, a step in an unequal struggle. After all the disillusionments with which the history of civilizations is studded—the triumphs of savagery, the bloodlettings of barbarism, the reversals of progress, the reconquests by nature, our failure to improve—there is no remedy except to go on trying, and keeping civilized traditions alive. Even on the beach and in the shingle, il faut cultiver notre jardin.