A species of fish, the cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus), responds to its reflection and attempts to remove marks on its body during the mirror test -- a method held as the gold standard for determining if animals are self-aware. The finding, publishing on February 7 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, suggests that fish might possess far higher cognitive powers than previously thought, and ignites a high-stakes debate over how we assess the intelligence of animals that are so unlike ourselves.
The study's researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (MPIO) and Osaka City University (OCU), say that their results provide clear evidence of behaviours that appear to pass through all phases of the mirror test, but that the interpretation of what these mean is less clear: Does a 'pass' mark in the mirror test demonstrate that fish possess self-awareness -- a cognitive trait thought only to be present in primates and some other mammals? Or can the mirror test be solved by very different cognitive processes than previously thought?
"The behaviours we observe leave little doubt that this fish behaviourally fulfils all criteria of the mirror test as originally laid out. What is less clear is whether these behaviours should be considered as evidence that fish are self-aware -- even though in the past these same behaviours have been interpreted as self-awareness in so many other animals," says Dr Alex Jordan, senior author on the study.
The ability to perceive and recognise a reflected mirror image as self (mirror self-recognition) is considered a hallmark of cognition across species. To test for this phenomenon in fish, the researchers applied the classic 'mark' test to the cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) -- a marine fish best known for its behaviour of "cleaning" external parasites from client fish -- by placing a coloured mark on fish in a location that can only be seen in a mirror reflection. In order to gain a 'pass', the test requires that the animal must touch or investigate the mark, demonstrating that it perceives the reflected image as itself. This is clearly a challenge for animals such as fish that lack limbs and hands.
The researchers observed that fish attempted to remove the marks by scraping their bodies on hard surfaces after viewing themselves in the mirror. Fish never attempted to remove transparent marks in the presence of a mirror, or coloured marks when no mirror was present -- suggesting that marked fish were responding to the visual cue of seeing the mark on themselves in the mirror. Further, unmarked fish did not attempt to remove marks from themselves when interacting with a marked fish across a clear divider, nor did they attempt to remove marks placed on the mirror itself -- suggesting that fish were not innately reacting to a mark resembling an ectoparasite anywhere in the environment, for instance due to hard-wired feeding responses.
Dr Jordan acknowledges the controversial nature of the study, saying: "Depending on your position, you might reject the interpretation that these behaviours in a fish satisfy passing the test at all. But on what objective basis can you do this when the behaviours they show are so functionally similar to those of other species that have passed the test?"
The PLOS Biology editors also recognized the potential for controversy, and commissioned an accompanying commentary from Professor Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist at Emory University who has studied mirror self-recognition in mammals. While de Waal finds the fish study intriguing, he urges caution in interpreting it. In doing so, he calls for less black-and-white approach to animal self-awareness. "What if self-awareness develops like an onion, building layer upon layer, rather than appearing all at once?" asks de Waal. "To explore self-awareness further, we should stop looking at responses to the mirror as its litmus test. Only with a richer theory of the self and a larger test battery will we be able to determine all of the various levels of self-awareness, including where exactly fish fit in."
Journal Reference:
Masanori Kohda, Takashi Hotta, Tomohiro Takeyama, Satoshi Awata, Hirokazu Tanaka, Jun-ya Asai, Alex L. Jordan. If a fish can pass the mark test, what are the implications for consciousness and self-awareness testing in animals? PLOS Biology, 2019; 17 (2): e3000021 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000021
American Progress by John Gast, 1872, Library of Congress. It depicts Manifest Destiny.
Late in November 1939, Walter Benjamin an unemployed Jewish writer who had been residing in Paris, was released from a makeshift prison camp for German nationals housed in a disused chateau near the city of Nevers, in central France. He had been confined there for nearly three months since Hitler had invaded Poland, leading France to declare war on Germany. Influential friends were able to secure Benjamin’s release. He returned to his one-room, seventh-story flat in Paris and, as Europe tumbled into war, began writing what would become his final work, the twenty paragraph-length fragments that together form the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
The “Theses” is an essay of lasting strangeness, dense and elliptical, intended, per Benjamin’s biographer, Bernd Witte, “as a fundamental consideration of the essence of historical time.” Yet for all its abstraction, much of it feels depressingly topical. In one fragment, Benjamin expresses scorn for the “current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century.” As if to prove his point, well into the twenty-first, with fascism on the creep from Washington and Brasilia through the capitals of Europe, we find ourselves astonished once again: How can this still be happening?
Then as now, Benjamin would argue, the problem—one of them anyway—was and is an unexamined faith in a highly irrational notion, one that blinds us to facts and conditions that would otherwise be obvious—and that, against all evidence opposing it, continues to inform the shape of our thoughts and the contours of our political discourse. In short, we are in thrall to the fetish of progress: the belief that history has a direction and a purpose, the faith that humankind is ascending a steady if circuitous route to greater and greater perfection.
Against this creed, Benjamin posed a curious interpretation of a then-obscure drawing by Paul Klee, one he had splurged to buy in 1922 and had hung like an amulet on the wall of every apartment in which he lived. It depicted an angel. Its wings were spread, its head spun all the way around so that it stared backward at the viewer. Thus, Benjamin wrote, was the “angel of history” propelled into the future while facing the past: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel is pushed onward, he went on, by a terrible storm. “This storm is what we call progress.”
By 1940, when Benjamin was forced to flee his last apartment in Paris, the notion of progress had for more than a century provided the dominant narrative that allowed Europeans to understand themselves. The always imperiled edifice of Western civilization—the far-right’s fears today are not so different from the far-right’s fears 80 or 160 years ago—is unimaginable without it. Progress described for Europeans their past, their position on the path that carried them into the future, and their relation to everyone else on the planet. It created an easy hierarchy into which every time, every place, and every people could be slotted. By the mid-nineteenth century, faith in progress was already so ubiquitous as to be largely invisible to its adherents, whether they counted themselves revolutionaries or traditionalists and whether they lived in Europe itself, in the rapidly expanding settlements in the Americas and Australia, or in colonial outposts in Africa and Asia. To question it with any seriousness was to marginalize yourself as a crank, a heretic, or a fool. In the European imagination—which increasingly operated in racial terms, understanding itself as white—progress defined the world.
The Flouring of Humanity
Despite its pretensions to cosmic immutability, the idea of progress in the West has a legible history—one bound from the outset to conquest, and to fantasies of racial dominance. Its first explicit articulation is generally agreed to have appeared in a speech delivered in 1750 by the brilliant political economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, then just twenty-three. It is surely no coincidence that an early evangelist of economic liberty—“All branches of commerce ought to be free, equally free, and entirely free,” he wrote in 1773—would also be the first to lay out the ideology that would everywhere accompany the spread of capitalism.
Turgot would have ample opportunity to test his economic theories, if not his conviction that mankind was destined to shed its every flaw. In 1774, serving as the controller-general of finances under Louis XVI, he issued an edict abolishing all restrictions regulating the trade of grain in France. That year’s harvest was poor. Merchants, freed from laws that had outlawed stockpiling, hoarded wheat to drive up prices. Famine ensued. Riots broke out. In an uprising that later historians would view as a prelude to the French Revolution, crowds, many of them led by women, forced landowners and merchants to sell their grain at prices they deemed reasonable. The Flour War, as it would be known, ended with a fierce repression. The government called in twenty-five thousand troops. By 1776, court intrigues would lead to Turgot’s dismissal, and his reforms were soon reversed. Perhaps he was lucky. Turgot died a private man, of gout, twelve years before the monarch met the guillotine.
His quiet demise, at any rate, makes for a dramatic contrast with his quasi- millennial visions of the prospects for human improvement—so long as the humanity in question was white and European. At the very beginning of the lecture in question, “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind,” Turgot made a surprising move. Once he’d laid out the key difference between the sort of time that governs humankind and that which governs nature—unending fealty to the cyclical rule of death and regeneration in the latter case, while human events succeed one another in a linear and “ever-changing spectacle” as the species lurches from “infancy” to “greater perfection”—he evoked the specter of “the Americans.” They put in their appearance on the second page. He was not thinking of the well-armed citizens of the current American polity, but of the original inhabitants of the hemisphere, whose presence posed something of a problem. If history was to be narrated as the story of the growing perfection of mankind, how to explain all those who seemed to lag behind, the tribes of so-called primitives scattered across the jungles, plains, and desert wastes?
We might think that progress is a way of thinking about history, and hence about time, but very nearly the first thing Turgot did was transpose time onto space by summoning the Americas as the place of the past. He explained the apparently uneven development of humankind and the anachronistic existence of the people he regarded as savages as a result of naturally occurring inequalities: “Nature, distributing her gifts unequally, has given to certain minds an abundance of talent which she has refused to others.” Differing environmental circumstances allowed those original talents to develop at different rates, “and it is from the infinite variety of circumstances that there springs the inequality in the progress of nations.”
We the Supreme
Before it was anything else, progress was a doctrine of supremacy—a fresh new faith for a rising era of unchallenged European dominance, a way of celebrating European hegemony by anchoring it in time, and rendering Europe, and specifically Bourbon France, the very apotheosis of human achievement. In a parallel move three quarters of a century later, Hegel would claim that same honor for the Prussian monarchy. “World history travels from east to west,” he declared, “for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.” One-and-a-half centuries after that, thinkers like Francis Fukuyama would advance much the same claim for an empire still further to the west—American liberal democracy in its most aggressively capitalist guise in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. As an ideology of over-confident elites, progress would prove itself remarkably resilient.
It’s worth recalling, though, that even in their earliest, most self-regarding rhapsodies, the initial prophets of progress had to ignore an enormous share of countervailing evidence. The first Europeans to lay eyes on the great cities of the Americas, for example, did not see them as Turgot did. Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, wrote to King Charles V that the Inca capital of Cuzco, which Pizarro plundered and largely destroyed, “is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would be remarkable even in Spain.” Cortés apologized to the same monarch that he did not have the literary skills to adequately describe the marvels of Tenochtitlán, built across Lake Texcoco, its temples and wide causeways rising from the water, with fragrant gardens and great public squares and markets filled with endless riches. Cortés’s soldiers, his lieutenant Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote, “had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome,” but they had never seen anything so wondrous as the Aztec city. “I stood looking at it, and thought that no land like it would ever be discovered in the whole world,” Díaz wrote. “But today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.”
Issue Forth, Europe!
Just this past March, a team of British and Brazilian archaeologists published a paper about their discoveries of the remains of villages, roads, and fortified settlements long concealed by foliage in the Amazon, traces left by as many as a million people who nearly all disappeared at the same time—roughly when Europeans arrived on the continent. “Diseases traveled much faster than people,” the lead archaeologist told theGuardian. The Amazon’s population may have been largely wiped out before the Portuguese ever reached the area. Genocide helped too. The indigenous population of the Americas likely would fall by some 90 percent in the first 150 years after the conquest.
It’s a good trick, really, so seamlessly clever that Turgot and many millions since didn’t see it as a trick at all: allow biological agents to help you conquer half the world, slaughter and enslave whoever the microbes let live. You can then declare the hobbled remnants of the civilizations you have destroyedprimitiveandsavageand interpret the degraded manner in which many of your victims survive as evidence of your inherent superiority, your right to rule over them and to continue to exploit them under cover ofcivilizingmotives. As an ideology that put European culture at the pinnacle of human history and consigned everyone else to time’s lowland wastes, progress would function at once as an explanation of European dominance and a rationale for the slaughter and pillage on which it depended, and continues to depend.
Turgot went on to sketch out a narrative that, with some modifications, would soon become widespread: the mantle of civilization passed from the once-great civilizations of Egypt, India, and China, all strangled by their own despotism, and onward, via the Phoenicians—in themselves mere “agents of exchanges between peoples”—to Greece and then Rome. This latter empire, a victim of its own descent into tyranny, “at last suddenly collapses” under the attacks of opportunistic hordes. The rise of Islam merited brief condemnation, almost parenthetically, as “a raging torrent which ravages the whole territory from the Indian frontiers to the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees.” The glories of Baghdad and al-Andalus were passed over without comment, though Turgot acknowledged that Islamic scholars did perform the service of transmitting Europe’s past to its future by disseminating “the feeble sparks” of Greek wisdom that they had managed to preserve. That was all it took. “The treasures of antiquity, rescued from the dust . . . summon[ed] genius from the depths of its retreats. The time has come,” Turgot enthused. “Issue forth, Europe, from the darkness which covered thee!”
His discourse concluded with a paean to the king—not the one Turgot would later serve and who would still later lose his head in the Place de la Concorde, but his predecessor, also named Louis, who died in his bed in the palace at Versailles, of smallpox. “O Louis, what majesty surrounds thee!” Turgot crooned. “Century of Louis the Great, may your light beautify the precious reign of his successor! May it last for ever, may it extend over the world!”
God’s Perfect Children
It is now such a reflex to consider past civilizations stupid and superstitious—or stupider at least than we are—that it’s hard to imagine the relief that thinkers of Turgot’s era must have felt on unburdening themselves of the past, launching themselves into a limitless future. Previous generations of human beings on nearly every patch of the planet had regarded their ancestors with veneration—and what a drag it must have been to have to lug those old farts and all their dumb ideas everywhere, and always with a smile. Turgot’s jubilation broke through in his punctuation, and in the impatience of his syntax: “What ridiculous opinions marked our first steps! How absurd were the causes which our fathers thought up to make sense of what they saw! What sad monuments they are to the weakness of the human mind!”
The first thing he hastened to toss over was the notion that all things are alive and infused with divinity. This idea—then still pervasive in the animistic beliefs of conquered and not-yet-conquered peoples across the globe, in the folk beliefs of Europe and in the more pantheistic strands of its esoteric theologies—was, by Turgot’s reckoning, one of “those delusive analogies to which the first men in their immaturity abandoned themselves with so little thought.” Like children, Turgot explained, they imagined that all the things they perceived that “were independent of their own actions were produced by beings similar to them, but invisible and more powerful.” Thus, they supposed, superstitiously, “All objects of nature had their gods.” Against this, he allied himself, if only half-heartedly, to a sterile monotheism, nodding to the Christian deity later in the lecture, but only in passing, and without a shred of the enthusiasm that he brought to subjects such as Reason, Europe, and France. But the task of denuding the natural world of agency and divinity was apparently an important one, and could not be neglected. For the grand procession of progress to march, the stage had to first be cleared of rivals. All the world must be dead, and man alone alive, rushing to the glory of his fate.
This odd notion would show up again, and with even greater force, in the work of Turgot’s friend and biographer, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, better known as the Marquis de Condorcet. An ardent republican, Condorcet served during the early years of the Revolution as secretary of the Legislative Assembly until that body was dissolved, and the king dethroned, in 1792. In those days, surely, the world must have felt like it was ending, or beginning again. Condorcet welcomed its rebirth. He was at odds, though, with the Revolution’s most radical factions, and was sharply critical of the constitution drafted in June of 1793 by Robespierre and Saint-Just. In July, a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Condorcet would spend the next nine months in hiding, cooped up in a house on a small Parisian street just north of the Luxembourg Gardens. Three months into his confinement, he would be condemned to death in absentia. The Terror had begun. Despite these pressures, Condorcet continued to work on the text for which he would be best known, a book-length treatise of astonishing optimism entitledOutlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. “The perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite,” he wrote in the introduction, and “the progress of this perfectibility . . . has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.”
He would not live to see the work published. Early in April of 1794, informed that his capture was imminent, Condorcet fled Paris. Two days later, bleeding from a wound on his leg, dirty and bedraggled from sleeping in the open, he walked into an inn in a village just outside the city. He ordered an omelet. When the proprietor asked how many eggs he wanted, Condorcet, who had presumably not eaten for days, aroused the suspicion of his host by answering, “a dozen”: only an aristocrat would presume to order an omelet of a dozen eggs. He was dragged to the prison in the commune of Bourg-la-Reine, which at the time was known as Bourg-l’Égalité, or, roughly, Equality-ville. Accounts vary, but either the following morning or the one after that, the Marquis de Condorcet was found dead on the floor of his cell.
While still in hiding in Paris, at work on theOutlines, confined to the rooms of the small house on Rue Servandoni, his country at war against most of Europe, hearing frequent news of the beheadings of friends and colleagues, Condorcet surely must have suspected that his own death, and not a pleasant one, was likely near. He nonetheless remained convinced, with a fervor that can only be described as ecstatic, that there was no other path for humankind than that of ever-increasing perfection. The final chapter of the text was devoted to forecasting the outlines of that bright future. Everyone on the planet, he predicted, would “one day arrive at the state of civilization attained by those people who are most enlightened, most free . . . as the French, for instance, and the Anglo-Americans.” This would mean an end to “the slavery of countries subjected to kings, the barbarity of African tribes, and the ignorance of savages.”
Condorcet was serenely confident that Europe held exclusive title to reason, peace, and justice despite the conflicts that had wracked the continent over the previous century—a seven- year war that had killed nearly a million just three decades earlier, the wars over the Austrian and Spanish successions that between them killed another million and a half—and despite the conflict into which it had recently been thrown. Europe had lit the way for humanity thus far, and so the continent was likewise destined to cut through all remaining darkness, leading the scattered people of the earth to a future without war or oppression or discrimination based on sex or tribal prejudice. Sanitation would improve, and nutrition, and medicine. Human lifespans would grow longer. One universal language would spread across the earth “and render error almost impossible.” Except for the language bit—English functions well enough—this is still the faith that fuels contemporary neoliberalism and the logic of “development”: the global extension of European ways, meaning open markets and liberal institutions, will spur technological improvements and improve the lot of all, indefinitely. One day the natives will thank us. It’s a powerful and alluring vision—at least for those who’ve appointed themselves as its lead administrators. Little wonder that Condorcet clung to it even as the world he knew was being washed away with blood.
The Biography of Races
Of course, there are blood sacrifices along every stage of the progress myth—though some stand out in especially high relief. In volume three of his monumentalBlack Athena, Martin Bernal wrote of the surprising discovery, in 1978, at Knossos, of ceramic pots, likely more than 3,600 years old, containing the dismembered remains of children. Their bones were scarred with knife marks. They had been butchered and, apparently, cooked. Nearby, archaeologists found pottery and amphorae decorated with shields and the head of a Gorgon, images associated with Athena. Others would be more cautious, but for Bernal the find confirmed that Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, “was associated with human, and especially child, sacrifice.”
In that volume, which is largely concerned with presenting linguistic evidence for the African and Asian heritage of ancient Greece—Classical Greek, by Bernal’s estimate, owes as much as 40 percent of its vocabulary to the Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic languages—Bernal also argued that Athena was a descendant of the Egyptian goddess Nēit and a near cousin to the Canaanite deity ’Anat. All three were powerful figures—bloodthirsty warriors “of renewable virginity,” as Bernal put it. All three were associated with weaving and birds of prey: Nēit with vultures, ’Anat with eagles, Athena with the owl. Plato and Herodotus both attested to Athena’s identity with Nēit. Inscriptions in Cyprus, where Athena and ’Anat shared a temple, equated the two deities.
“There are no simple origins,” Bernal cautioned. It is never a question of a direct and singular genetic inheritance, of roots leading up a trunk and bifurcating into branches. Human history, he suggested, is more like a river, splitting off into tributaries, merging and diverging again and again. Or perhaps like a crowd, joining arms and letting go, splitting into smaller groups that at times reach out to clasp hands with one another. The worship of Nēit would be largely subsumed by a cult to Isis, the veneration of whom would in turn be transferred to the Virgin Mary. ’Anat, whose worship may have involved the sacrifice of virgins, was in northwest Syria regarded as the sister and sometimes the consort of Ba’al, one of the primary gods in the Canaanite pantheon, who was alternately adored and rejected by the ancient Israelites. Archaeological evidence uncovered on the Nile island of Elephantine, in the contemporary Egyptian city of Aswan, suggests that an isolated community of Jewish mercenaries living there in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. worshiped ’Anat as the “Queen of Heaven” and the consort of Yahweh, who was regarded by other contemporary Jews as the one and only god. Behind and beside any One there is always an other, and behind each of those wait many more.
Bernal’s larger argument was not about ’Anat or Athena or even language, but about the making of history itself. (Black Athena, it should be said, sparked a furious controversy. Many of Bernal’s etymological claims have been discredited, but his broader historiographical argument has held up quite well and, in some cases has been confirmed by the outsized fury of his conservative critics.) Until the early nineteenth century, he proposed, there was little controversy about the debts Greek culture owed to Africa and to points farther east. During the Renaissance revival of Greek thought, “no one questioned the fact that the Greeks had been the pupils of the Egyptians.” Throughout the Enlightenment, too, European intellectuals were openly fascinated by Egypt.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, though, a new paradigm took hold of Europe. It arose, not coincidentally, as European economies reconfigured themselves around the by-then steady flow of wealth from the Americas, most of it procured through the labor of African and indigenous slaves. This wealth, and the quick pace of technological change that followed in its wake, only served to validate the ever-deeper conviction in the superiority of European civilization. All that exploitation had to be justified somehow; or if not justified, disguised. History was reconceived, in Bernal’s words as “the biography of races,” a narrative subject to the laws of something called progress.
If Europe represented the mature stage of human development, it would need a lineage. Since the genealogically obsessed tend to favor purity, it would help if its ancestry suffered as little admixture as possible. Greece—whose natives were unquestionably European, famously clever, and passably fair-skinned—would be elevated. The Greeks would be reinvented to match the most flattering self-image that Europeans could muster: a people supremely rational and wise, with the stubborn independence of a noble race, uniquely capable of self-governance, and mercilessly strong when justice and necessity demanded it.
That this image would not have been recognized by either the Greeks’ contemporaries or by the inhabitants of the continents being mowed under by “Western civilization” was irrelevant to the larger project of historical reclamation. Plato and Aeschylus became the heritage of the English, the Germans, and far-flung white Americans. Greek joined Latin as an indispensable part of the education of the European elite. Classics emerged as a discipline. By the early nineteenth century, wrote Bernal, it had become “increasingly intolerable that Greece—which was seen by the Romantics not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood—could be the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites.”
Egypt, until recently the object of admiration and awe, would now be “flung into prehistory to serve as a solid and inert basis for the dynamic development of the superior races, the Aryans and the Semites.” As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the Semites, too, would be tossed out in a hurry. All Phoenician and Canaanite influence on Greece, and any evidence of substantive cultural exchange with the cultures of Mesopotamia and the Levant, which had until recently been considered uncontroversially obvious, would become suspect. Except to the undeniable degree to which Christianity was inconceivable without them, the Jews would also be largely crowded out. Thus was established what the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand calls “the mythology of white continuity.”
One more thing about Athena. Homer customarily followed her name with the adjectiveglaukopis, which is usually translated as either “bright-eyed” or “grey-eyed” and holds a range of meanings from bright and flashing to blue, light grey, or even green. The point would likely have been lost on most early twentieth-century lovers of the classics, for whom fair eyes were an indicator of racial superiority. But for the Greeks, Bernal wrote, blue eyes were associated with ferocity, and with misfortune. “The paleness of Athena’s eyes,” he concluded, would have “added to the terror she inspired.”
The Hermetic Vanishing Trick
There is another way to think about the origins of progress. In the mid-1960s, the British historian Frances Yates began to document the influence of the Hermetic tradition on Renaissance thought:Hermeticas in Hermes Trismegistus—the mythic figure associated with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth—to whom the varied writings grouped together as theCorpus Hermeticumwere for centuries attributed. The god Hermes, whom the Greeks considered identical to Thoth, was a mediator between gods and mortals, a guide to the paths that stretch between us and the heavens. Hermes/Thoth was the messenger, the patron of travelers, thieves, and seekers. In his more ancient form, as Thoth, he was the scribe of the gods—at times depicted with the head of an ibis or the head of a baboon, or with the face of a dog on a baboon’s body. It was Thoth who brought hieroglyphs to humanity, and with them astronomy, medicine, botany, mathematics, gifts of all the many forms of knowledge of the cosmos.
His supposed heir, Hermes Trismegistus, or “Thrice Great Hermes,” was likewise a sort of gateway between divine wisdom and human ignorance, passing on wisdom that had been lost for generations, and illuminating the secret pathways that access the divine. InThe City of God, Augustine wrote that Hermes Trismegistus lived “long before the sages and philosophers of Greece,” and was a grandson of the god Hermes and hence a distant cousin of Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and presented it as a gift to mankind, just as Thoth had given us writing. The actual Hermetic texts are a diverse bunch, and not nearly as old as Augustine supposed, though Cosimo de’ Medici did not know that when, in about 1460, he had them brought to Florence from the monastery in Macedonia where his agents had discovered them. Cosimo ordered Marsilio Ficino to translate them as quickly as possible into Latin. He already had Ficino working on a translation of the complete works of Plato. Put that aside, he told him, and do this one first. Cosimo was old, and wanted to read the fabled Hermes Trismegistus before he died; Plato mattered less.
The texts themselves were likely composed by several different authors from the middle of the first to the end of the third century A.D. They were written in Greek but were likely composed in Egypt. In them theology, cosmology, magic, and the seeds of what we would now call science—astronomy, medicine, botany, mathematics—are inseparably linked. Together, Yates argued over the course of her career, they form a hidden and much-repressed current that in various ways informed many of the great minds of the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment: from Bruno, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola to Bacon, Leibniz, and Newton. In other words, the proudest treasure of what we persist in calling Western Civilization, its tradition of empirical and critical reason, was until the eighteenth century in fruitful and more or less constant conversation with esoteric works of Egyptian, gnostic mysticism attributed to the grandson of a trickster god.
In the years that followed, this lineage would be meticulously erased. The strands of thought and belief with which it had fruitfully intersected—Jewish and Christian mystical traditions, Paracelsian alchemy, Neoplatonist philosophy—would be marginalized and mocked. Just over a decade after Newton’s death, the German historian Johann Jakob Brucker published a monumental and influential history of philosophy, the first of its kind, in which he characterized the Hermetic texts—as well as Kabbalah and Neoplatonism—asPhilosophia Barbarica. They were, to Brucker, corrupt, pagan superstitions that stood opposed to the eminently rational history of Christian, European truth-seeking. Many of the entries in Diderot’sEncyclopediawould be cribbed straight from Brucker, whose ideas were smuggled hence into the heart of the French Enlightenment.
This was the same historical moment when the grand narrative of progress, that glorious arc of Reason that had traveled to Paris and London from Athens and Rome, was beginning to take shape—as well as the critical interval at which, as Bernal documented, the Greeks were being elevated and all traces of Africa erased. Brucker’s work had been published in Latin by 1744, theEncylopediabeginning in 1751, Turgot’s “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind” in 1750. For most of the next two centuries, the texts of the Hermetic corpus would be consigned to the forbidden and derided margins. To take them seriously got you labeled an occultist, a swindler, or a quack. Like a forgotten continent, the Hermetic corpus would not be rediscovered until the middle of the twentieth century, when Italian historians, and later Yates, began to rescue it from the disrepute into which it had been banished for so long.
But perhaps old thrice-great Hermes never really went away. Was not the very idea of progress also dependent on the conviction, shouted throughout the Hermetic corpus, that heaven is here for the taking and that humans, despite our mortal bodies, are in essence godly, capable of understanding all that exists, and even of sharing in the creative powers of the divine? “Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God,” the Hermetic texts advised, and then explained just how to do it: “Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God.” If that wasn’t easy enough, the text went on: “Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being.”
This, even long after Hermes was banished, would remain the very creed underlying modern scientific endeavor: that all things could be known and all of nature mastered, that mankind, or at least some civilized subset thereof, was marching on a path toward perfection. He—and until very recently, it was always onlyhe—could understand the behavior of the farthest stars, the nuclei of cells and the viscera of atoms, the nature of tortoises and finches, and also of the unfortunate savages who could not walk this path unaided. He could construct a society in which justice reigned and human beings lived, like gods, as equals. This vision, or what little spark of it remained, would not only be a cudgel for empire. How can we imagine any revolutionary faith without it—and not just faith but practice?
Redemption Song
For Walter Benjamin at least, refusing to be blinded by the false promises of progress did not mean that hope was lost. It meant that one could begin to see. Even at the very end, Benjamin believed that the past contains within it an orientation toward its own redemption. This is perhaps less mystical than it sounds. He understood the present—what he called the “time of the now”—to be pregnant with all that has come before, each moment containing within it, “in an enormous abridgment,” the entirety of the past. The past is not inert. It calls out, clamoring for redress. It exists in the present as demand. The “time of the now,” he wrote, is “shot through with chips of Messianic time.” If eternity, all the past and every future, flits through every moment, then we can grab it there. In other words, right here.
For Benjamin this could only be a political act. It meant overturning any structures that relied on the exploitation of labor—which is to say not only our sweat and our skills but ourtime, being in all its divinity as it pulses through our veins—or on the “mastery of nature,” which was, he suggested, of a piece with any other form of exploitation. And it meant rejecting the slumbrous fantasy that history will carry us to some better land. It would not. Time had to be “blasted out” and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it, us.
This was not, for Benjamin, a choice. It wasn’t that redemption lay behind some distant gate at the end of a path that we could choose not to walk, or that there were other, smoother and easier roads that we might take with less effort, on which we might nonetheless survive. Then, as now, the only other way led to extinction.
In June of 1940, shortly after Benjamin completed the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” German troops entered Paris. Benjamin fled to Lourdes and then Marseilles. He left a copy of the “Theses” with his friend Hannah Arendt, another German Jewish philosopher who was, like him, hoping to escape to the United States by way of Portugal. That September, Benjamin made it as far as the sleepy town of Port Bou, on the Spanish side of the border with France. He was welcomed with neither hospitality nor mercy. Local police informed him that he would be escorted back to the border the following morning and delivered to the French authorities—and thence, almost certainly, to the Gestapo. Benjamin, ill and exhausted, despaired. Alone in his hotel room, he swallowed an overdose of morphine tablets. His body remains in Port Bou, in a cemetery carved high into a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
Hannah Arendt made it out. She and her husband were allowed to leave France and to pass through Spain into Portugal, where they spent three months stranded in Lisbon. They passed the hours reading Benjamin’s words aloud to one another, and to the small group of refugees who had gathered there, waiting to sail to safety, on the edge of a crumbling world.
The contributions of Marx and Engels to theory were twofold: there was Marx’s theory of surplus value, and there was their joint theory of historical development, called ‘dialectical materialism’. We will consider first the latter, which seems to me both more true and more important than the former.
Let us, in the first place, endeavour to be clear as to what the theory of dialectical materialism is. It is a theory which has various elements. Metaphysically it is materialistic: in method it adopts a form of dialectic suggested by Hegel, but differing from his in many important respects. It takes over from Hegel an outlook which is evolutionary, and in which the stages in evolution can be characterized in clear logical terms. These changes are of the nature of development, not so much in an ethical as in a logical sense—that is to say, they proceed according to a plan which a man of sufficient intellect could, thoeretically, foretell, and which Marx himself professes to have foretold, in its main outlines, up to the moment of the universal establishment of Communism. The materialism of its metaphysics is translated, where human affairs are concerned, into the doctrine that the prime cause of all social phenomena is the method of production and exchange prevailing at any given period. The clearest statements of the theory are to be found in Engels, in his Anti-Dühring, of which the relevant parts have appeared in England under the title: Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. A few extracts will help to provide us with our text:
‘It was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles: that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange—in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridicial and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period.’
The discovery of this principle, according to Marx and Engels, showed that the coming of Socialism was inevitable.
‘From that time forward Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict. But the Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible with this materialistic conception as the conception of Nature of the French materialists was with dialectics and modern natural science. The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitation of the working class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose.’
The same theory which is called Dialectical Materialism is also called the Materialist Conception of History. Engels says: ‘The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders, is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place, with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light, must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.’ dialectical materialism
The conflicts which lead to political upheavals are not primarily mental conflicts in the opinions and passions of human beings. ‘This conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.’
There is a good statement of the materialist theory of history in an early joint work of Marx and Engels (1845–6), called German Ideology. It is there said that the materialist theory starts with the actual process of production of an epoch, and regards as the basis of history the form of economic life connected with this form of production and generated by it. This, they say, shows civil society in its various stages and in its action as the State. Moreover, from the economic basis the materialist theory explains such matters as religion, philosophy, and morals, and the reasons for the course of their development.
These quotations perhaps suffice to show what the theory is. A number of questions arise as soon as it is examined critically. Before going on to economics one is inclined to ask, first, whether materialism is true in philosophy, and second, whether the elements of Hegelian dialectic which are embedded in the Marxist theory of development can be justified apart from a full-fledged Hegelianism. Then comes the further question whether these metaphysical doctrines have any relevance to the historical thesis as regards economic development, and last of all comes the examination of this historical thesis itself. To state in advance what I shall be trying to prove, I hold (1) that materialism, in some sense, may be true, though it cannot be known to be so; (2) that the elements of dialectic which Marx took over from Hegel made him regard history as a more rational process than it has in fact been, convincing him that all changes must be in some sense progressive, and giving him a feeling of certainty in regard to the future, for which there is no scientific warrant; (3) that the whole of his theory of economic development may perfectly well be true if his metaphysic is false, and false if his metaphysic is true, and that but for the influence of Hegel it would never have occurred to him that a matter so purely empirical could depend upon abstract metaphysics;
(4) with regard to the economic interpretation of history, it seems to me very largely true, and a most important contribution to sociology; I cannot, however, regard it as wholly true, or feel any confidence that all great historical changes can be viewed as developments. Let us take these points one by one.
(1) Materialism. Marx’s materialism was of a peculiar kind, by no means identical with that of the eighteenth century. When he speaks of the‘materialist conception of history’, he never emphasizes philosophical materialism, but only the economic causation of social phenomena. His philosophical position is best set forth (though very briefly) in his Eleven Theses on Feuerbach (1845). In these he says:
‘The chief defect of all previous materialism—including that of Feuerbach—is that the object (Gegenstand), the reality, sensibility, is only apprehended under the form of the object (Objekt) or of contemplation (Anschauung), but not as human sensible activity or practice, not subjectively. Hence it came about that the active side was developed by idealism in opposition to materialism....
‘The question whether objective truth belongs to human thinking is not a question of theory, but a practical question. The truth, i.e. the reality and power, of thought must be demonstrated in practice. The contest as to the reality or non-reality of a thought which is isolated from practice, is a purely scholastic question....
‘The highest point that can be reached by contemplative materialism, i.e. by materialism which does not regard sensibility as a practical activity, is the contemplation of isolated individuals in “bourgeois society”.
‘The standpoint of the old materialism is “bourgeois” society; the standpoint of the new is human society or socialized (vergesellschaftete) humanity.
‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the real task is to alter it.’
The philosophy advocated in the earlier part of these theses is that which has since become familiar to the philosophical world through the writings of Dr Dewey, under the name of pragmatism or instrumentalism. Whether Dr Dewey is aware of having been anticipated by Marx, I do not know, but undoubtedly their opinions as to the metaphysical status of matter are virtually identical. In view of the importance attached by Marx to his theory of matter, it may be worth while to set forth his view rather more fully.
The conception of ‘matter’, in old-fashioned materialism, was bound up with the conception of ‘sensation’. Matter was regarded as the cause of sensation, and originally also as its object, at least in the case of sight and touch. Sensation was regarded as something in which a man is passive, and merely receives impressions from the outer world. This conception of sensation as passive is, however—so the instrumentalists contend—an unreal abstraction, to which nothing actual corresponds. Watch an animal receiving impressions connected with another animal: its nostrils dilate, its ears twitch, its eyes are directed to the right point, its muscles become taut in preparation for appropriate movements. All this is action, mainly of a sort to improve the informative quality of impressions, partly such as to lead to fresh action in relation to the object. A cat seeing a mouse is by no means a passive recipient of purely contemplative impressions. And as a cat with a mouse, so is a textile dialectical materialism manufacturer with a bale of cotton. The bale of cotton is an opportunity for action, it is something to be transformed. The machinery by which it is to be transformed is explicitly and obviously a product of human activity. Roughly speaking, all matter, according to Marx, is to be thought of as we naturally think of machinery: it has a raw material giving opportunity for action, but in its completed form it is a human product.
Philosophy has taken over from the Greeks a conception of passive contemplation, and has supposed that knowledge is obtained by means of contemplation. Marx maintains that we are always active, even when we come nearest to pure ‘sensation’: we are never merely apprehending our environment, but always at the same time altering it. This necessarily makes the older conception of knowledge inapplicable to our actual relations with the outer world. In place of knowing an object in the sense of passively receiving an impression of it, we can only know it in the sense of being able to act upon it successfully. That is why the test of all truth is practical. And since we change the object when we act upon it, truth ceases to be static, and becomes something which is continually changing and developing. That is why Marx calls his materialism ‘dialectical’, because it contains within itself, like Hegel’s dialectic, an essential principle of progressive change.
I think it may be doubted whether Engels quite understood Marx’s views on the nature of matter and on the pragmatic character of truth; no doubt he thought he agreed with Marx, but in fact he came nearer to orthodox materialism.1 Engels explains ‘historical materialism’, as he understands it, in an Introduction, written in 1892, to his Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Here, the part assigned to action seems to be reduced to the conventional task of scientific verification. He says: ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perceptions. . . . Not in one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perceptions, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.’
There is no trace, here, of Marx’s pragmatism, or of the doctrine that sensible objects are largely the products of our own activity. But there is also no sign of any consciousness of disagreement with Marx. It may be that Marx modified his views in later life, but it seems more probable that, on this subject as on some others, he held two different views simultaneously, and applied the one or the other as suited the purpose of his argument. He certainly held that some propositions were ‘true’ in a more than pragmatic sense. When, in Capital, he sets forth the cruelties of the industrial system as reported by Royal Commissions, he certainly holds that these cruelties really took place, and not only that successful action will result from supposing that they took place. Similarly, when he prophesies the Communist revolution, he believes that there will be such an event, not merely that it is convenient to think so. His pragmatism must, therefore, have been only occasional—in fact when, on pragmatic grounds, it was justified by being convenient.
It is worth nothing that Lenin, who does not admit any divergence between Marx and Engels, adopts in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism a view which is more nearly that of Engels than that of Marx.
For my part, while I do not think that materialism can be proved, I think Lenin is right in saying that it is not disproved by modern physics. Since his time, and largely as a reaction against his success, respectable physicists have moved further and further from materialism, and it is naturally supposed, by themselves and by the general public, that it is physics which has caused this movement. I agree with Lenin that no substantially new argument has emerged since the time of Berkeley, with one exception. This one exception, oddly enough, is the argument set forth by Marx in his theses on Feuerbach, and completely ignored by Lenin. If there is no such thing as sensation, if matter as something which we passively apprehend is a delusion, and if ‘truth’ is a practical rather than a theoretical conception, then old-fashioned materialism, such as Lenin’s, becomes untenable. And Berkeley’s view becomes equally untenable, since it removes the object in relation to which we are active. Marx’s instrumentalist theory, though he calls it materialistic, is really not so. As against materialism, its arguments have indubitably much force. Whether it is ultimately valid is a difficult question, as to which I have deliberately refrained from expressing an opinion, since I could not do so without writing a complete philosophical treatise.
(2) Dialectic in history. The Hegelian dialectic was a full-blooded affair. If you started with any partial concept and meditated on it, it would presently turn into its opposite; it and its opposite would combine into a synthesis, which would, in turn, become the starting point of a similar movement, and so on until you reached the Absolute Idea, on which you could reflect as long as you liked without discovering any new contradictions. The historical development of the world in time was merely an objectification of this process of thought. This view appeared possible to Hegel, because for him mind was the ultimate reality; for Marx, on the contrary, matter is the ultimate reality. Nevertheless he continues to think that the world develops according to a logical formula. To Hegel, the development of history is as logical as a game of chess. Marx and Engels keep the rules of chess, while supposing that the chessmen move themselves in accordance with the laws of physics, without the intervention of a player. In one of the quotations from Engels which I gave earlier, he says: ‘The means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light, must also be present, in a more or less developed dialectical materialism condition, within the changed modes of production themselves.’ This ‘must’ betrays a relic of the Hegelian belief that logic rules the world. Why should the outcome of a conflict in politics always be the establishment of some more developed system? This has not, in fact, been the case in innumerable instances. The barbarian invasion of Rome did not give rise to more developed economic forms, nor did the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, or the destruction of the Albigenses in the South of France. Before the time of Homer the Mycenaean civilization had been destroyed, and it was many centuries before a developed civilization again emerged in Greece. The examples of decay and retrogression are at least as numerous and as important in history as the examples of development. The opposite view, which appears in the works of Marx and Engels, is nothing but nineteenth-century optimism.
This is a matter of practical as well as theoretical importance. Communists always assume that conflicts between Communism and capitalism, while they may for a time result in partial victories for capitalism, must in the end lead to the establishment of Communism. They do not envisage another possible result, quite as probable, namely, a return to barbarism. We all know that modern war is a somewhat serious matter, and that in the next world war it is likely that large populations will be virtually exterminated by poison gases and bacteria. Can it be seriously supposed that after a war in which the great centres of population and most important industrial plant had been wiped out, the remaining population would be in a mood to establish scientific Communism? Is it not practically certain that the survivors would be in a mood of gibbering and superstitious brutality, fighting all against all for the last turnip or the last mangel-wurzel? Marx used to do his work in the British Museum, but after the Great War the British Government placed a tank just outside the museum, presumably to teach the intellectuals their place. Communism is a highly intellectual, highly civilized doctrine, which can, it is true, be established, as it was in Russia, after a slight preliminary skirmish, such as that of 1914–18, but hardly after a really serious war. I am afraid the dogmatic optimism of the Communist doctrine must be regarded as a relic of Victorianism.
There is another curious point about the Communist interpretation of the dialectic. Hegel, as everyone knows, concluded his dialectical account of history with the Prussian State, which, according to him, was the perfect embodiment of the Absolute Idea. Marx, who had no affection for the Prussian State, regarded this as a lame and impotent conclusion. He said that the dialectic should be essentially revolutionary, and seemed to suggest that it could not reach any final static resting-place. Nevertheless we hear nothing about the further revolutions that are to happen after the establishment of Communism. In the last paragraph of La Misère de la Philosophie he says:
‘It is only in an order of things in which there will no longer be classes or class-antagonism that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.’
What these social evolutions are to be, or how they are to be brought about without the motive power of class conflict, Marx does not say. Indeed, it is hard to see how, on his theory, any further evolution would be possible. Except from the point of view of present-day politics, Marx’s dialectic is no more revolutionary than that of Hegel. Moreover, since all human development has, according to Marx, been governed by conflicts of classes, and since under Communism there is to be only one class, it follows that there can be no further development, and that mankind must go on for ever and ever in a state of Byzantine immobility. This does not seem plausible, and it suggests that there must be other possible causes of political events besides those of which Marx has taken account.
(3) Irrelevance of Metaphysics. The belief that metaphysics has any bearing upon practical affairs is, to my mind, a proof of logical incapacity. One finds physicists with all kinds of opinions: some follow Hume, some Berkeley, some are conventional Christians, some are materialists, some are sensationalists, some even are solipsists. This makes no difference whatever to their physics. They do not take different views as to when eclipses will occur, or what are the conditions of the stability of a bridge. That is because, in physics, there is some genuine knowledge, and whatever metaphysical beliefs a physicist may hold must adapt themselves to this knowledge. In so far as there is any genuine knowledge in the social sciences, the same thing is true. Whenever metaphysics is really useful in reaching a conclusion, that is because the conclusion cannot be reached by scientific means, i.e. because there is no good reason to suppose it true. What can be known can be known without metaphysics, and whatever needs metaphysics for its proof cannot be proved. In actual fact Marx advances in his books much detailed historical argument, in the main perfectly sound, but none of this in any way depends upon materialism. Take, for example, the fact that free competition tends to end in monopoly. This is an empirical fact, the evidence for which is equally patent whatever one’s metaphysic may happen to be. Marx’s metaphysic comes in in two ways: on the one hand, by making things more cut and dried and precise than they are in real life; on the other hand, in giving him a certainty about the future which goes beyond what a scientific attitude would warrant. But in so far as his doctrines of historical development can be shown to be true, his metaphysic is irrelevant. The question whether Communism is going to become universal is quite independent of metaphysics. It may be that a metaphysic is helpful in the fight: early Mohammedan conquests were much facilitated by the belief that the faithful who died in battle went straight to Paradise, and similarly the efforts of Communists may be stimulated by the belief that there is a God called Dialectical Materialism who is fighting on dialectical materialism 485 their side, and will, in His own good time, give them the victory. On the other hand, there are many people to whom it is repugnant to have to profess belief in propositions for which they see no evidence, and the loss of such people must be reckoned as a disadvantage resulting from the Communist metaphysic.
(4) Economic Causation in History. In the main I agree with Marx that economic causes are at the bottom of most of the great movements in history, not only political movements, but also those in such departments as religion, art, and morals. There are, however, important qualifications to be made. In the first place, Marx does not allow nearly enough for the time-lag. Christianity, for example, arose in the Roman Empire, and in many respects bears the stamp of the social system of that time, but Christianity has survived through many changes. Marx treats it as moribund. ‘When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death-battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie.’ (Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and F. Engels.) Nevertheless, in his own country it remained the most powerful obstacle to the realization of his own ideas,2 and throughout the Western world its political influence is still enormous. I think it may be conceded that new doctrines that have any success must bear some relation to the economic circumstances of their age, but old doctrines can persist for many centuries without any such relation of any vital kind.
Another point where I think Marx’s theory of history is too definite is that he does not allow for the fact that a small force may tip the balance when two great forces are in approximate equilibrium. Admitting that the great forces are generated by economic causes, it often depends upon quite trivial and fortuitous events which of the great forces gets the victory. In reading Trotsky’s account of the Russian Revolution, it is difficult to believe that Lenin made no difference, but it was touch and go whether the German Government allowed him to get to Russia. If the minister concerned had happened to be suffering from dyspepsia on a certain morning, he might have said ‘No’ when in fact he said ‘Yes’, and I do not think it can be rationally maintained that without Lenin the Russian Revolution would have achieved what it did. To take another instance: if the Prussians had happened to have a good general at the battle of Valmy, they might have wiped out the French Revolution. To take an even more fantastic example, it may be maintained quite plausibly that if Henry VIII had not fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, the United States would not now exist. For it was owing to this event that England broke with the Papacy, and therefore did not acknowledge the Pope’s gift of the Americas to Spain and Portugal. If England had remained Catholic, it is probable that what is now the United States would have been part of Spanish America.
This brings me to another point in which Marx’s philosophy of history was faulty. He regards economic conflicts as always conflicts between classes, whereas the majority of them have been between races or nations. English industrialism of the early nineteenth century was internationalist, because it expected to retain its monopoly of industry. It seemed to Marx, as it did to Cobden, that the world was going to be increasingly cosmopolitan. Bismarck, however, gave a different turn to events, and industrialism ever since has grown more and more nationalistic. Even the conflict between capitalism and Communism takes increasingly the form of a conflict between nations. It is true, of course, that the conflicts between nations are very largely economic, but the grouping of the world by nations is itself determined by causes which are in the main not economic.
Another set of causes which have had considerable importance in history are those which may be called medical. The Black Death, for example, was an event of whose importance Marx was well aware, but the causes of the Black Death were only in part economic. Undoubtedly it would not have occurred among populations at a higher economic level, but Europe had been quite as poor for many centuries as it was in 1348, so that the proximate cause of the epidemic cannot have been poverty. Take again such a matter as the prevalence of malaria and yellow fever in the tropics, and the fact that these diseases have now become preventable. This is a matter which has very important economic effects, though not itself of an economic nature.
Much the most necessary correction in Marx’s theory is as to the causes of changes in methods of production. Methods of production appear in Marx as prime causes, and the reasons for which they change from time to time are left completely unexplained. As a matter of fact, methods of production change, in the main, owing to intellectual causes, owing, that is to say, to scientific discoveries and inventions. Marx thinks that discoveries and inventions are made when the economic situation calls for them. This, however, is a quite unhistorical view. Why was there practically no experimental science from the time of Archimedes to the time of Leonardo? For six centuries after Archimedes the economic conditions were such as should have made scientific work easy. It was the growth of science after the Renaissance that led to modern industry. This intellectual causation of economic processes is not adequately recognized by Marx.
History can be viewed in many ways, and many general formulae can be invented which cover enough of the ground to seem adequate if the facts are carefully selected. I suggest, without undue solemnity, the following alternative theory of the causation of the industrial revolution: industrialism is due to modern science, modern science is due to Galileo, Galileo is due to Copernicus, Copernicus is due to the Renaissance, the Renaissance is due to the fall of Constantinople, the fall of Constantinople is due to the migration of the Turks, the migration of the Turks is due to the desiccation of Central Asia. Therefore the fundamental study in searching for historical causes is hydrography. (Freedom and Organization, London: Allen & Unwin; Freedom Versus Organization, New York: W. W. Norton, 1934.) Notes 1. Cf. Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, p. 32. 2 ‘For Germany’, wrote Marx in 1844, ‘the critique of religion is essentially completed.’
