The Speculist

Roots of the Modern World

I spent part of my Saturday at the Colorado History Museum, where one of the displays is a timeline running along an entire wall on the first level. There are two timelines, actually. One sits at the top of the wall tracking national events; the other is at about waist-level, tracking Colorado events. Between the two timelines there are pictures, newspaper articles, and other artifacts attesting to the events listed. The timelines run from the beginning of 1800 to the end of 1949.

It's interesting to see how sparse the walls (and the timelines themselves are) on the far left side of the wall and how crowded they become as you move to the right and forward in time. It's a neat demonstration of accelerating change. I suspect that one reason the timeline ends at 1950 is that the museum directors don't want to devote every inch of wall space on all three levels to the period from 1950 to the present, which they would have to do in order to do the era justice.

I got to thinking about that timeline when I read Glenn Reynolds' interview with Neal Stephenson. Stephenson's new novel, Quicksilver, is the first of three volumes making up a larger work called The Baroque Cycle. Set in the 17th century, and peopled with historical figures as Isaac Newton and the pirate Blackbeard, Quicksilver is both science fiction and historical fiction.

(Quick rant: I read a newspaper review yesterday that described the book as genre-defying. I doubt it. That sounds like a term lifted from the publisher's press release, a come-on to those who are intrigued by the book's premise, but who don't want to admit they're reading science fiction. Describing a work of science fiction as such doesn't disparage the author's work, nor does it demean the scope of his vision. A critic reviewing a science fiction novel should be sufficiently familiar with the breadth of the genre not to be taken in by this kind of marketing nonsense. Of course, I say all this without having read the book.)

One of the topics that Reynolds and Stephenson touch on in their discussion is the idea that the 17th century is the source of much of what makes up the modern world.

What I found interesting on a political level was that the Cromwell types were pushing a bunch of ideas that struck people as nuts at the time, but that are bedrock principles of modern society -- things like free enterprise and separation of church and state and limited government that took years to actually achieve.

Many of the people called Puritans were small businessmen and independent traders. They had a real bent toward free enterprise, and they developed a real resentment of government and taxes -- as a result, they were free traders. It's like what we see with a lot of pro-business people today.

That's very interesting. So is the 17th century the source of the modern world?

It is beyond question that all of our social constructs, institutions, and political ideologies are rooted in the past. But it's intriguing to consider that we may be especially linked to one particular era, an era that gave birth to the world we know.

I first came across this idea reading Umberto Eco. In a series of essays written in the late seventies/early eighties, Eco drew parallels between the modern world and the middle ages, asserting that the roots of our present civilization lay there. He later expanded on this theme with his novel, The Name of the Rose, a "genre-defying" murder mystery set in a 13th-century monastery. Eco goes beyond suggesting that the earlier era has had a strong influence on the current one; he intimates that we are living in the middle ages, albeit a technically enhanced version thereof. The idea is that history is cyclical, and that the middle ages represented a time of transition that we are currently going through again.

How interesting. Eco tells us that the roots of our era lie in the 13th century, Stephenson insists that it's the 17th. Both make a pretty compelling case. (Well, Stephenson's case is compelling on the face of it. Again, I haven't yet read the book.) Why the disagreement? I can think of three possible explanations.

1. They're talking about slightly different things. Eco points out that modern institutions like banks and universities had their origins in the middle ages. As quoted above, Stephenson gives the 17th century credit for introducing such concepts as free enterprise and separation of church and state. They're both right, it's just a question of what you want to emphasize.
   
   
2. Speaking of emphasis, maybe it has something to do with the fact that Eco is a European while Stephenson is an American. Perhaps European civilization is rooted in the middle ages, while American civilization is rooted in the enlightenment. I don't think I'd get any argument on that from my warblogger buddies.
   
   
3. Maybe Eco is right about the cyclical nature of history. A quarter of a century or so ago, perhaps we were revisiting the middle ages. Eco's essays certainly made a lot of sense at the time. But today, I think I would have to agree with Stephenson that our era is firmly rooted in the 17th century. It's another example of accelerating change.

If the third explanation is correct, it means that we've gone through four hundred years worth of social change in the past 25, emerging from the doldrums of the middle ages to a dynamic age of enlightenment. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes. I don't know enough about history to guess where we'll go next, or how long it will take for us to wind back around to ancient Egypt, or wherever it is that the cycle begins. But I would venture to say that any era you're particularly interested in should be coming up fairly soon.

Posted by Phil at October 7, 2003 10:06 AM | TrackBack