Shakespeare, DNA, and Natural Profit

SHAKESPEARE, DNA, AND NATURAL PROFIT / Frederick Turner SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION of the late eighteenth century the dominant model of industry has been one of the exploitation of natural resources. In the traditional mode of subsistence and husbandry, farmers and peasants labored like Adam in the Old Testament to make the earth fruitful. But the new class of entrepreneurs rejected this NeoUthic mode of thought. The lords of the mines, cotton müls and railroads wanted a faster accumulation of capital. EnUghtened capitaUsts Uke Josiah Wedgwood, the eighteenth-century pottery king and phUosopher, wanted not only to make money but also to inaugurate a culture and society that would Uberate the human race from drudgery and oppression. But progress depended upon the conquest of nature. Thus they accelerated economic activity by felling forests, burning fossU fuels, damming rivers, tearing up the earth for mines and construction, and finaUy harnessing the substance of human Ufe by time and work studies. Instead of hving inefficiently off the interest generated by natural increase, they broke into nature's capital assets and dismantled them to create an urban world. Given the science avaüable to the first industriahsts, this model made perfect sense; no alternative would have been "reaUstic." The Newtonian physics bequeathed by the eighteenth century to the nineteenth had portrayed the universe as a piece of clockwork. Clockwork has two characteristics: it is predictable in its operations (the whole virtue of a clock is predictabUity!) and it runs down, living things are just another part of the machine; their growth and development is merely a temporary gain made at the cost of a greater diminution in natural order elsewhere, and with the prospect of extinction when those resources give out. As part of the universe we too are subject to economic and historical determinism. If the universe is running down, then we are in competition with one another and with nature for a diminishing stockpUe of usable energy. The nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics triumphantly confirmed this analysis: disorder (entropy) increases irreversibly with time, and we are here, as Matthew Arnold put it, "upon a darkling plain/Where ignorant armies clash by night"—the Ught 292 · The Missouri Review is growing dimmer and chaos mounts. Thus our only defense as human beings is to burn up the avaüable order in the natural universe at a rate that is faster than the natural decay of the world, so as to fuel human progress and enüghtenment. Civilizations decline and faU; and the social classes are locked in a relentless conflict over resources and labor. Malthus foresaw a final coUapse, as the human population overwhelmed the natural resources of the planet. Wagner portrayed the final victory of the forces of darkness in the Götterdämmerung, and Oswald Spengler gave it historical form in The Decline of the West. We in the twentieth century have largely inherited this view of the world, despite the fact that it is now, as I shaU show, so incomplete as to be scientificaUy obsolete. Whenever we speak of dwindUng natural resources, of America's disproportionate consumption of energy, of sharing out the national wealth in a fairer manner or of Uberation from biological destiny, we are unconsciously adopting the rhetoric of nineteenth-century industrial exploiters and the nineteenth-century revolutionaries who sought to despoU them of their gains. But the rhetoric itself limits what we can think. A new scientific vision of the world is emerging, one which has much in common with the traditions of husbandry and natural fruitfulness that were replaced by the model of industrial exploitation, though at the same time the new vision makes possible a rate of progress undreamed of by the peasant and the farmer. The word "progress" itself needs to be redefined to include the ideas that nature itself generates value by the interplay and synergy of its elements, and that human economic activity is a continuation of the natural process of evolution and increase. As the master of the supremely synergistic art of drama, and as an inhabitant of an age in which old ideas of husbandry and new concepts of technological progress coexisted and could be compared and...