NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, WINTER2000
PAGE 16
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY
FROM FRONT PAGE
The story of the 20th Century is a stark account of the
decline of the material natural world, its descendancy the direct
result of human ascendancy and ensuing population bloat.
Wildlands and forests disappeared, coral dying in every ocean,
swelling ozone holes in the upper sky, frogs declining Closer
up the foodchain the great wild mammals were vanishing or
being exterminated, displaced by endless incursions into their
habitat to accommodate sprawling civilization or hunted as
predators of great docile herds of food animals or fowl; or like
the Asian snow tiger (all tigers actually), the great apes, wolves,
v/iales poached out of existence for profitable potions or beauty
aids, or their furry skins draped over other flesh.
For most of history humanity has lived on its home
planet without much concern for its natural state, and the 20th
Century in particular wreaked immense havoc by avaricious
ravagera who have done as they pleased with little concern for
consequences only immediate profit and comfort — polluting
sky, oceans and land with chemicals by indirect or direct
applications through waste, warfare or with pesticides and
biocides, despoiling and leaving the mess to be dealt with by
future generations vtfiose probable antipathy toward their 20th
Centuriy predecessors will be obviously justified
Ironically, the very civilization agriculture created is
eradicating it, ever more farmland plowed under by implacable
urban sprawi as humans overcrowd the soil that was once so
bountiful to them. The century ended in mortal combat between
'Rape & Pillage Developers' and 'Kamikaze Environmentalists'
— between those who wauld bulldoze wildlife and regulate the
planet as a battered docile plantation, with genetic mutation
and agronomics: and those v4io savor wilderness and natural
diversity, aware human hubris is too tragically shortsighted to
improve on natural selection.
Aquaculture was being explored as a food surrogate at
the end of the century. Expen ments were started to turn acces
sible parts of lakes and oceans into undersea farms, also the
rapid development of fish ranches that will eventually decimate
wild stocks; domesticated fish and sea veggies will be genetic
ally altered, and probably cloned.
The tragic fate of Pacific Northwest salmon serves as
an archetype for the recurrent ravages of human civilization and
technology on Earth's natural environment. Dams that were
built for hydroelectric power, irrigation and flood control had the
not entirely unexpected effect of eliminating the great salmon
spawning migrations back up the Columbia River. Civilization
destroyed salmon habitat. Nuclear, industnal and urban pollution
poisoned the riverwater Overfishing of already weakened stocks
reduced them more By fin de siècle it was almost also fin de
salmon
Any memoir of the 20th Century would essentially
be devoted to the phenomenal rise of science and associated
technologies The natural balance of power changed irrevocably
with the release of nuclear energy; 'Atomic Man' was suddenly
a superhuman who cracked the core of Gaia — yet a few years,
later humanity's nonhuman brainchildren rewired its own brain
Technology is ultra Darwinian — it spreads, it evolves,
it adapts It replicates ever more swiftly and diversely, recom
bines and recreates like mutant cells adjusting to ever more
immediate and altering environments. In the end it seems to
matter less who should control technology than who is able to
William Jennings Bryan, infamous to the modem mind
for his objection to Darwinian evolution and what he said were
its implications that "no spiritual force has touched the life
of man and shaped the destiny of nations," was particularly
disturbed that "Darwinian theory represents man as reaching
his present perfection by the operation of hate — the merciless
law by wiiich the strong crowd out and kill off the weak."
The core question, asked incessantly and in proportion
to human adaptation to the mechanical dependence it created,
is whether humans have proxied their biology to machines they
invented but wdich now robotically replicate? Or has humanity
always done so since chipping rocks and throwing sticks at large
animals and each other? Homo sapiens (sapiens) is a singularly
adaptive creature with no fixed skills, with large evolved brains,
dependent for its survival individually and as a species in manip
ulating rather than adjusting to its environment Perhaps we are
so far along, so adapted to our machines that it seems grossly
naive to ask.
The 20th Century started with the new industrial marvels
of mass produced automobiles, machine powered aircraft, huge
all metal steam powered and electronically operated battleships
(which started the century's first military arms race) as well
as submarines, telephones, phonographs, radio and movies
The century ended with rockets carrying humans beyond Earth's
atmosphere and onto its moon, and jet airliners spread layers of
multi-ethnic/races all over the world’s surface, making every
place emigratable and immediately accessible Various designer
satellites orbited the planet The half-century threat of worldwide
nuclear obliteration diminished temporarily although local
nuclear war remained probable; and nuclear power plants were
being dismantled and abandoned as the major alternative to
declining oil A worldwide electronic neural system was formed
by computers which redesigned themselves and civilization at
incomprehensible speeds and data capacity. The bewildering
rapidity of cybemizing civilization raised apprehensions that
it might transform the planet beyond human cognizance or
incinerate the wireless world like meteors streaking into the
planet's atmosphere.
Though hardly noticed at the time and barely remem
bered afterward, one of the most significant milestones in history
and certainly the 20th Century occurred in July 1969, known as
'Watershed Week' The same month that humanity first walked
on the moon, the information handling capacity of all the world's
computers exceeded the processing capacity of all the human
brains in the world. Computers were able to receive and store
more data than the 3.5 billion humans then occupying the
planet And although human brains have multiplied enormously,
almost doubling in number since then, computers race far ahead
in data volume and complexity — perhaps as much as a million
to one or greater; which only a computer can compute.
(By the end of the 20th Century it was prophesied that
a computer would be developed to unravel the billions of cells
and hundreds of billions of interconnectors in the human brain
— ironically, 'Artificial Intelligence’ will be the mapmaker)
Science was most obviously the Pied Piper of the 20th
Century, the modem religion that inexorably swept away old
beliefs and upset tradition, confounding also the so-called
common sense principles of causality, observation and the long
cherished concept of a mechanistic universe. Science advanced
past popular grasp simultaneous to becoming the most powerful
influence and shaper of the century.
Yet the great breakthroughs in scientific thought aside
— the everyday tinkering by anonymous drones working singly
in garages or basements but most often in large corporate facili
ties continually produced, improved and evolved a bewildering
array of consumer products, astronomical calculations and
discoveries, superb medical advances, bizarre and frightening
new chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; and more
recently organic cloning and genetic manipulation which created
the new field of biotechnology and intense controversy at the
end of the century
Science and its handmaiden Technology modernized
civilization by continually ripping away its fabric without taking
time to replace it in a kaleidoscopic surge into an incomprehen
sible future. This is the point at winch history is declared dead,
without significant meaning except as memory and nostalgia
because it is claimed to no longer have any beanng or effect on
present or future: the race is to the swift; the present is patently
obsolete as it careens into the past
BASCOVE
(During the 20th Century a new planet was added to
Sol's society, Pluto in 1930, though its planetary status is in
dispute, and it was established by century's end that other
stars also have planets. An ancient mythological origin of the
universe was revived in the resurrected, extravagantly enlarged
'Big Bang' theory wiiich theoretically explained the concept of an
expanding universe, wrfiich itself created dilemmas as to whether
the expansion is forever or will contract onto itself into an event
ual impossibly dense 'black hole'.)
The final analysis was human rights, that no matter
what else occurred in the 20th Century everything reverted
back to the most ancient struggles of rich against poor; whatever
masks or complexities surrounded ideologies, their design was
to either protect privilege and power or establish and extend
rights and liberties of the powerless. 'The test of our progress
is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have
much," Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to perk up the Great
Depression. "It is whether we provide enough to those vtfio have
too little."
Calling the 20th Century the "American Century" is an
exaggeration, yet at century's end the USA was the world's only
superpower, the same as old Rome which was the world's first
superpower after it won a long contest with Carthage The USA
helped Communist Russia crush the Nazis and finished the
century victor of its 74 year long rivalry with the Reds. Econom
ically the USA was undergoing the longest boom of its history
at the beginning of 2000, but for a nation devoted to classless
equality its sharing of wealth was grossly unequal; a small
percentage had almost all of it and the rest were in various
credit card debt. Welfare to the poor was practically abolished
simultaneous to huge job losses to offshore labor while bound
less corporate welfare was wrapped in Old Glory. If this fin de
siècle era were to have a shibboleth it might well have been
'Socialism for the Rich. Capitalism for the Poor"
Slicing the 20th Century into decade-sized snacks
might be roughly labeled like this: 1900-09, Last Hurrah For
The Royals: 1910-19, Modern World Begins With Modem
Horror, 1920-29. Getting Over The War, 1930-39, Snapshot of
a Tripartite World: Nazis, Reds & The New Deal, 1940-49, The
Mushroom Cloud Advents A New Millennium: 1950-59, Father
Knows Best: Iron Curtain & Cold War, 1960-69, War & Peace
niks, 1970-79, Ozz/e <S Harriet Redux, 1980-89, Showtime for
Bonzo: 1990-99, Shaking Out the Dustbin of History.
The book on the 20th Century won't be closed until its
influence becomes indirect and ultimately indistinct. That means
as well the demise of everyone wiio breathed the century's dirty
air. It might also be that if 20th Century human beings not only
trod upon ground underneath which earlier bodies were buried,
but their visceral selves also warped into invisible beings occu
pying the same geography at an earlier time, perhaps survivors
of the just dead century might ghost around the infernal world
and harass their descendants as ancestors always do.
The 20th Century ended in paranoid hyperbole that a
fluke contrived within the worldwide cybernetic network would
paralyze civilization because the year 2000 had too many zeros
for computers to comprehend. If collapse did not occur it was at
least speculated that the internal calendars of most computers
would revert back to 1900, wXiich might not have been a bad
idea if indeed time could be so twisted: an opportunity to redo
the 20th Century and leave out the bad parts like the influenza
epidemic, the Great Depression, the two World Wars — the
Holocaust! — and development of nuclear power as a weapon
of mass destruction
For all of the rapid advances in technology, medicine
and science, with considerably slower and uneven progress in
human rights, humanity yet seemed at the end of the 20th
Century to peer as apprehensively through the portal between
centuries as they did at its beginning 'There was a sense...of
the familiar world passing away, of old landmarks disappearing,
or change proceeding too fast to be controlled or fully compre
hended," Asa Briggs wrote of "the men of 1900 "
Carrie A Nation started the 20th Century in the year
1900 swinging an ax in her famous antisaloon crusade that left
many chopped up bars and indignant as well as frightened
saloon owners and patrons Her battle against booze (two
husbands died of alcoholism) helped lead to Prohibition in the
1920s, the century's first failed drug war, and precipitated the
later more inept and savage half-century campaign of 'Just Say
No To Drugs'
In the year 1900 Chinese Boxers' presaged the 20th
Century movement to throw off colonialism in the 3rd world.
U.S President McKinley was shot a year later and the
first Roosevelt carried his Big Stick' of dynamic imperialism into
the new'American Century’
And a few years afterward, in 1905, Albert Einstein,
w4io later alerted the second Roosevelt to the "possibilities"
of an atomic bomb (1939), changed everything about time and
space with two simple questions: "Where am I? How am I
moving?"
The rest is E=mc2