Debating the End of History: The Marketplace, Utopia, and the Fragmentation of Intellectual Life

Chapter 5: Ecologists On Why History Will Never End

121 5 ECOLOGISTS ON WHY HISTORY WILL NEVER END The relationship of science to the current middle-class world is one of monumental irony. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, bourgeois men in Europe and in their American colonies appealed to the authority of their new science to demonstrate that they and they alone were rational. They contrasted themselves to what they were beginning to define as the European “Dark Ages.” But, for them, all traditional cultures were irrational, unstable, and timeful. Once urban middle-class men had been trapped within such an oppressive old world, but their science showed them that there was an alternative new world. This was the timeless space of nature, where the rational individual could escape the complex, unstable systems that characterized traditional societies. Here in the endless plenitude of nature one was free of generational experience; one was free from the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth; one was free from the limits of renewable resources. Today orthodox economists present the marketplace as such a magical space. There one can transcend interdependence with neighbors, family, and a living nature and act as an autonomous individual. There one can leave behind such emotions as love and hate, pride and humility, sadness and joy. There one is supposedly able to be a purely rational individual. There one can transcend concern for children or illness or old age. If one believes in this middleclass magical kingdom, nature and the marketplace are timeless. They are outside history. But since the early nineteenth century scientists in a variety of fields have been creating a picture of the earth that directly contradicts this bourgeois vision of an independent individual in harmony with a timeless space. Supposedly rational modern people have not 122 ecologists on why history will never end denied the claims of the scientists who present a nature with a history. They have, however, segregated them. This compartmentalization has allowed modern middle-class people to keep their master narrative. They are moving or will move from timeful complexity to timeless simplicity. They are moving from scarcity to plenty. They are moving from the flux of history to the end of history. The first magic trick that modern middles classes had to perform to make scientific evidence disappear was with the new science of geology , which was created in the first half of the nineteenth century. In stark contrast to Newton’s affirmation that space is timeless, geologists argued that the supposedly timeless earth imagined in the eighteenth century had existed for millions of years. But certainly this news that the earth had been changing constantly during its long life span had to be hidden in a closet. Over the years, new generations of geologists provided detailed pictures of those changes. Mountain ranges appeared and disappeared. Inland areas once had been oceans. And finally they presented the theory that all of the continents had once formed a single land mass that had, over a long period, drifted apart to form our current group of separate continents. Our political and economic leaders today, however, continue to believe there is a space—the marketplace—without time, a space that allows endless economic growth. I assume that geology departments in universities, therefore, are intellectual ghettos that are isolated from the mainstream. Perhaps Foucault’s argument that we internalize cultural norms and police ourselves explains why most geologists during the past century and a half have not identified themselves as heretics . They have not pointed out that the modern, middle-class hope of straight-line economic expansion cannot be fulfilled on a planet with a timeful history.1 This pattern also fits the science of biology as it developed in the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment, with its abstract philosophers and abstract businessmen, affirmed a new world of timeless nature as a refuge from timeful culture. But biologists, like geologists, defined a nature that was timeful. Newton and the capitalist members of his generation saw a nature without generations. But generations, of course, were central to the new science of biology. Humans were linked to their ancestors. They were linked to the animals and plants that had sustained the members of traditional cultures. They were part of a chang- ecologists on why history will never end 123 ing and unstable natural history. All living things experienced mutations . The future was unpredictable.2 Since most modern people today continue to believe they can predict...