CHARLES GALTON DARWIN
1887–1962
The Next Million Years
Some years ago I wrote a book called The Idea of Progress, in preparation for which I read most of the works that have been written on this interesting subject. Looking back on this large body of material, I must conclude that the great majority of these writings are absurd. A few books stand out. One of the best, I think, is Charles Galton Darwin’s The Next Million Years.
The literature of progress does not, or should not, include works that predict events of the next decade or the next century. The idea of progress, as such, is an idea about the entire course of human history. Up to now there has been a good deal of undoubted progress; to deny this would be to deny obvious facts. But what is the future course of human history? Is progress, or improvement, to be general and more or less constant as long as we remain humans? Or must we look forward to some other future, decidedly less happy, than the one the most passionate optimists foresee?
Perhaps no one was better equipped than Charles Galton Darwin to make a reasonably accurate stab at an answer to this question. Grandson of Charles Darwin and a great nephew of Sir Francis Galton, whose name is associated with the science of eugenics, C.G. Darwin followed in the footsteps of both his ancestors; he was a biologist but also a eugenicist and a student of human heredity.
He wrote The Next Million Years in 1952, when he was sixty-five, and he apologizes in a foreword for the fact that it is not a typical “scientific” work—that is, it does not contain a large number of citations and scholarly apparatus of the sort that makes such books difficult for anyone but specialists to read. Darwin, who was himself a specialist, wanted this book to be read by everybody, and it is indeed a most readable book, considering the wide range of technical subjects with which it deals.
C.G. Darwin begins by explaining that a book about the average future of the species Homo sapiens could not have been written until quite recently, because not enough was known about the world in which we live, nor about the human nature that we all share, especially about the role of heredity in determining our traits and behaviors. He also explains that he is far from expecting to be able to predict the events of the next million years. That, indeed, must be taken as obvious.
He has chosen the period of a million years, he goes on to say, because a million years is the amount of time, on the average, that is required to produce a new wild species. For the next million years, Darwin is saying, man can be expected to continue to be man—more or less the species we know. Beyond that no prediction is possible, since wild species usually become something else in longer periods of time.
But is man a wild animal, after all? This is probably the most important question Darwin addresses in this book. And his answer is a persuasive yes. Man is not a tame animal, because there is no one to tame him besides himself and no animal can be self-domesticated. If man could be tamed, he might, like the dog, be radically improved in a period as short as ten thousand years. But since that is impossible, a million-year future must be assumed, during which man will remain more or less recognizably human.
There is one if or but, of course: what if man destroys himself? A cataclysm can always occur in the life of any species, says Darwin, and in that case man will have no future after all. If he does not destroy himself, says Darwin, this is what his future will hold for him.
At this point I think I must apologize and say that Darwin’s forecast of the future will disappoint almost everybody. But that, in my opinion, is why the book is so important. There are certain facts that we always ignore but that we should not ignore; when they are taken into account, it becomes obvious that the future cannot be characterized by constant improvement. Instead, the picture is rather dark, although the darkness is relieved by occasional flashes of brilliant light. But let our author say it in his own words:
The regions of the world will fall into provinces of ever-changing extent, which most of the time will be competing against one another. Occasionally … they will be united by some strong arm into an uneasy world-government, which will endure for a period until it falls by the inevitable decay that finally destroys all dynasties. There will be periods when some of the provinces relapse into barbarism, but all the time civilization will survive in some of them. It will survive because it will be based on a single universal culture, derived from the understanding of science; for it is only through this understanding that the multitudes can continue to live
… Most of the time and over most of the earth there will be severe pressure from excess populations, and there will be periodic famines. There will be a consequent callousness about the value of the individual’s life, and often there will be cruelty to a degree of which we do not willingly think. This however is only one side of the history. On the other side there will be vast stores of learning, far beyond anything we can now imagine, and the intellectual stature of man will rise to ever higher levels. And sometimes new discoveries will for a time relieve the human race from its fears, and there will be golden ages, when man may for a time be free to create wonderful flowerings in science, philosophy and the arts.
That may be the least sentimental paragraph on the subject of human progress ever written. You may not like the picture, but I do not think you can deny it. And if you throw in nuclear weapons, perhaps even it is more optimistic than it should be. However …
FERNAND BRAUDEL
1902–1985
The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II
Fernand Braudel was born in Paris in 1902 but it was not until after the end of World War II that he received his doctorate. The story is worth telling. He was ready to write his dissertation in 1939; he began in his study, surrounded by thousands of notes on carefully filed cards. In the fall war broke out and Braudel was called up. He was stationed on the Maginot Line, and there was no time for writing there, even during the boring months of the “Phony War.” In the spring of 1940, the Germans attacked. Braudel was captured and sent to a prison camp. For two years he suffered from boredom and frustration. Finally, he decided he must write his book anyway. He filled scores of school copybooks with his careful prose, writing from memory. After the war he rewrote the book, all sixteen hundred pages of it, inserting the notes and citations. He did not have to change the text, he said.
This book, for which Braudel received his Ph.D., is officially titled The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. That period is, roughly, the last half of the sixteenth century, when Spain was the dominant power in the Western world, challenged only by the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The place is the Mediterranean world, with the accent on “world”; not just the sea itself, not even the sea and all its islands and coasts, but the whole world that the Mediterranean affected, from the Sahara to France and Germany and of course Italy and what are now Yugoslavia and Greece, and even including the Atlantic sea lanes that led to the gold and silver mines of the New World. Philip II is the king of Spain, son of the famous emperor Charles V. Philip ruled Spain for more than fifty years, from 1542 to 1596, when he died.