Acceleration

The smoke came from burning the past. When the people of eighteenth-century Britain began to feed coal into furnaces to boil water into steam to drive machines, they were, though no one then could have known it, setting fire to the buried sunlight of Part II, the compressed remains of forests and swamps that had lain in the rock for three hundred million years. That ancient carbon, released at last, drove an explosion of power the like of which the species had never seen. A single steam engine could do the work of hundreds of horses or thousands of hands. Factories rose, and railways, and steamships; goods once made one at a time by a craftsman poured out by the thousand; and populations that had crept upward for millennia began to surge. In the space of a century the Industrial Revolution remade human life more thoroughly than anything since the invention of farming, filling cities, hammering the rhythms of the clock and the machine into human days, generating undreamed-of wealth and undreamed-of squalor in the same breath. We are still inside the world it made, and we are still, as the end of this book must confront, burning that same buried carbon, and beginning to pay for it.

But the deepest upheavals of this accelerating age were not in its factories. They were in the human self-image, which took, in a single century, a series of blows from which it has never quite recovered. First, the ground itself grew old: geologists reading the rock established that the Earth was not thousands of years but billions, and that whole worlds of vanished creatures had lived and died before we arrived. Then, in 1859, Charles Darwin, and independently Alfred Russel Wallace, published the idea that quietly dissolved the wall between us and the rest of life: that all living things, ourselves included, had been shaped by the blind, patient process of natural selection from common ancestors, that we were not set above the animals but risen among them, cousins to the ape and, further back, to the fish and the worm. Everything Part III told you was the fruit of this single, world-changing idea. Hard on its heels came others just as unsettling. Karl Marx argued that history was driven not by kings and ideas but by the raw economics of who owned what and who labored for whom. The physicists, discovering thermodynamics, found that the whole universe was running down toward disorder, the entropy we met among the stars. Friedrich Nietzsche looked at what science had done to the old religious certainties and drew the starkest conclusion, that God, as the unquestioned foundation of Western meaning, was dead, and that we had killed him, and would have to learn to live without the old scaffolding or find something to replace it. And Sigmund Freud proposed that we are not even masters in our own minds, that beneath the reasoning self runs a dark river of drives and buried memory we barely govern.

Taken together, these were a series of demotions. We had already been moved from the center of the cosmos. Now we were moved from the summit of creation, from the driver's seat of history, and from the throne of our own minds. It was liberating and it was vertiginous, and the vertigo is, in many ways, the modern condition: a species that had gained an extraordinary power to explain the world had, in the same motion, explained away most of the old comforts about its own special place in it. Not everyone chose to jump. This same age saw a great revival of the esoteric and the occult, new movements reaching back to the hidden stream and to the wisdom of the East, an attempt to answer the hunger for meaning that the new materialism had sharpened and could not feed.

And the science kept accelerating toward powers that looked like magic and would soon look like danger. Faraday and Maxwell tamed electricity and magnetism and revealed light itself as a wave in a single electromagnetic field, wiring the modern world. Pasteur and Koch proved that disease was caused by living germs too small to see, and in doing so began to save lives on a scale no healer in history had approached. And in the last years of the nineteenth century, almost as a series of accidents, Röntgen found rays that saw through flesh, and Becquerel and the Curies found that certain heavy elements were quietly, impossibly, pouring out energy from within themselves. They did not yet know what they had found. They had found the first loose thread of the atom, and pulling it would define, and nearly end, the century to come.