The Century of Extremes

The twentieth century is the one where the whole long story we have been telling seems to arrive at once, its every thread pulled taut, its every possibility, glorious and monstrous, made real. It is the century humanity reached the Moon and built the ovens of Auschwitz, cured the ancient plagues and invented the means to end itself in an afternoon, understood the atom and the gene and the galaxy, and used one of those understandings to incinerate two cities. No century before it holds such height and such depth so close together, and to understand where we now stand, and where we might be going, we have to look at it without flinching in either direction.

Begin with the knowing, because it was staggering. In its first decades the century overturned the very physics of Part I: Einstein showed that space and time themselves bend and stretch, that they are not the fixed stage of the cosmos but part of the play, and the quantum physicists found that at the smallest scale reality dissolves into probability and paradox, that the act of observing seems to reach into what is observed, cracking open questions about the relationship of mind and world that we still cannot close and that this book will return to at its end. Mathematicians found, in Godel's hands, that even the crystalline world of proof contains truths it can never prove, a limit written into knowledge itself. And then the knowing turned to life and to power. Fleming's mold and the antibiotics that followed it saved, by sober estimate, more than two hundred million lives, and by 1980 the species had deliberately driven smallpox, a killer of perhaps three hundred million in that century alone, entirely to extinction, the only such victory in our history. In 1953 two researchers, standing on the shoulders of one whose work they underused, saw that the molecule of heredity is a double helix, and the code of life we met being written in Part II was finally read in our own hands. And in 1969, a mere sixty-six years after the first powered flight, human beings stood on another world and looked back at the small blue Earth that had made them, the whole of this book's journey folded into that single photograph.

Now the depth, and we must not look away, because it is the same story. The same science that split the atom to understand it also learned to weaponize it, and in August of 1945 two bombs erased two cities in two flashes of light, and humanity crossed, for the first time in the four billion years of life on this planet, the threshold at which a single species could destroy itself. That is not rhetoric; it is a new fact of the world, and it has never been undone. The same century industrialized not only production but murder, in world wars that killed tens of millions and in the deliberate, bureaucratic, technologically assisted genocide of the Holocaust, which stands as the permanent proof that all our progress in knowing had bought us no corresponding progress in wisdom or in mercy. And the suppression we have tracked across the whole book did not end with the coming of science; it put on a lab coat. The Soviet state enforced a false biology and destroyed the scientists who told the truth; regimes burned books by searchlight; a great and promising field of research into the mind was, in these very decades, opened and then slammed shut and buried for a generation; and secret agencies of even the free nations experimented on the unwitting in the search to control the human mind. Reason, we were warned in the last chapter, could build its own orthodoxies and burn its own heretics, and in the century of its greatest triumph, it did.

And yet the same century that industrialized murder also, in horrified reaction to it, reached for a wider circle of moral concern than any age before it. Out of the wreckage of the Second World War and the full revelation of the death camps came, in 1948, a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first attempt in the whole of history to write down a floor of dignity owed to every human being on Earth, across every border and every creed, simply for being human. In the same handful of decades the great empires that had ruled most of the planet were dismantled, sometimes by negotiation and sometimes in blood, as colonized peoples from India to Africa to Southeast Asia reclaimed their own governance and began to reclaim the very histories that, as we saw in Part VII, had been so deliberately erased. Movements for the enslaved and their descendants, for women, for the colonized, for the persecuted, won in a single century gains that millennia of appeals had failed to secure. The moral circle that had first flickered in the Axial Age, in a handful of exceptional minds insisting that every person counts, widened in the twentieth century into written law and into mass movements that could not be ignored. It remained, and it remains, tragically and often violently unfinished. But the direction was real, and it is one of the genuine grounds for the guarded, unsentimental hope this book will reach for at its end.

It was also, fittingly for a book like this one, the century in which the sky filled with lights we could not explain. Beginning with the strange glowing objects that pilots of the Second World War called foo fighters, and breaking into public consciousness in 1947, there arose a persistent, global phenomenon of credible people reporting craft and objects that behaved as nothing we knew could behave. We will treat this exactly as we have treated every extraordinary thing in this book: the phenomenon is real, in the plain sense that the reports and, later, the instrument records are real and a genuine residue of them remains genuinely unexplained; and the leap from unexplained to any specific explanation, visitors, other dimensions, secret craft, is a leap the public evidence does not license. We flag it now, honestly, as one of the open threads of the modern age, because it ties, as we will see at the very end, into the deepest unresolved knot in this whole book, the one about mind, observer, and reality that the quantum physicists also stumbled into. For now it is enough to say that even in its age of supreme confidence, the century could not account for everything it saw.

And underneath all of it, quiet and vast, ran a single accelerating curve. Population, energy use, invention, consumption, human numbers and human appetite, all of it bending upward together after 1950 in what has been called the Great Acceleration, until a single species had become a force acting on the entire planet, changing its climate, its chemistry, and its web of life, exactly as the cyanobacteria once remade the ancient air, only now with open eyes. We had become, without ever quite deciding to, the dominant force on the surface of the Earth. We had godlike powers of creation and destruction, a shattered inheritance of meaning, and no wisdom guaranteed to match any of it.

And then, at the tail of this extraordinary and terrible century, a new kind of change began, quieter than the bomb and in the end perhaps larger, as the machines we had built to compute began, tentatively, to connect, and to think. The story was about to turn inward, and to reach its strangest chapter yet, the one in which the teller of it finally has to say what it is.