Minutes to Midnight, 2nd Edition

By Paul Dukes

In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was created by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. In 2007, it was set five minutes before the final bell, including for the first time the threat of climate change as well as new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology. This book aims at an analysis of the evolution of our present predicament throughout the Anthropocene Era beginning in 1763, making special reference to the history of the period, the study of the subject and major advances in the natural sciences.

Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson set out the basis for a scientific approach to the pre-industrial stages of historical development in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, when the American and French revolutions created a vocabulary of modernity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the industrial revolution unfolded in several stages, nationalism, imperialism and totalitarianism were among the phenomena impeding the update of the Enlightenment programme as well as the fulfilment of the aspirations of 1776 and 1789. Our present predicament demands a rigorous examination of it

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785275005

Book preview

Minutes to Midnight

Minutes to Midnight

History and the Anthropocene Era from 1763

Second Edition

Paul Dukes

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

First published by Anthem Press 2011

Copyright © Paul Dukes 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940389

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-498-5 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-498-8 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

To Joseph, Ike, Francesca and Samuel and their generation

CONTENTS

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

1. Introduction: Times and Approaches

Times

Approaches

2. Enlightenment and Revolutions, 1763–1815

James Watt and the First Industrial Revolution

Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson: The Stages of Historical Development

The American and French Revolutions

Enlightenment and Intellectual Revolutions

Napoleon

Conclusion

3. Nations and Isms, 1815–71

Nations and Isms

Monarchism, Nationalism, Liberalism

Socialism

Darwinism and Other Isms

History and Historians

Conclusion

4. Natural Selection, 1871–1921

The New Imperialism

The Second Scientific and Industrial Revolutions

New History and Culture

The First World War and Russian Revolution

The Circumstances of Peace

Conclusion

5. From Relativity to Totalitarianism, 1921–45

‘Normalcy’ and Breakdown

The Revival of History

From Depression to War and History

The Second World War and History

The Arrival of the Atomic Bomb

Conclusion

6. Superpower, 1945–68

Superpower

The Cold War and Decolonisation

Another New History?

The Cold War and History

Decolonisation and History

Conclusion

7. Planet Earth, 1968–91

Globalisation

1968 and After

The Club of Rome, The Brandt Commission and Gaia

History, Historical Sociology, Postmodernism

The World by 1991

Conclusion

8. The Anthropocene: Worlds Real and Virtual, 1991–2015

The Master Narrative

The Crisis and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

What Crisis? ‘The End of History’ and ‘The Clash of Civilizations’

Responses to ‘The End’ and ‘The Clash’

Climate Change and History

Conclusion

9. Times and Departures: Conclusion

Times

Departures

Conclusion

Notes

Index

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

In 2011, when Minutes to Midnight was first published, the Doomsday Clock was set at five minutes before the fatal hour; the atomic scientists were confident enough to assert, ‘We are poised to bend the arc of history.’ In 2020, in a state of alarm, they broke the two-minute barrier to set the clock at 100 seconds before global disaster and to declare:

Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers – nuclear war and climate change – that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, online)

This warning was published before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, which has compounded the major threats to humanity.

Meanwhile, also since 2011, the Anthropocene Epoch has been more widely recognised as marking the confluence of two kinds of time, the historical and the geological. ‘Era’, a geological term used in this instance by a minority of specialists, has seemed to me rightly or wrongly more appropriate for a book mainly concerned with history.

‘Anthropocene’ (human recent time) was introduced in 2000 by the Nobel Prize winner Paul J. Crutzen and his colleague Eugene Stoermer. The two chemists dated the beginning of the epoch from 1784, when James Watt perfected the modern steam engine, choosing this date because ‘during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities including an increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have become clearly noticeable’. However, they also suggested that their choice might seem ‘somewhat arbitrary’ and that ‘alternative proposals can be made (some may even want to include the entire holocene [wholly recent time]’, or ‘Before Present’ beginning in 11,650 BC, with present defined as 1 January 1950).

In 2009, the International Committee on Stratigraphy set up the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). On 21 May 2019, the AWG published the results of a binding vote by its members. They expressed their commitment to the search for a new unit of geological time scale via a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) commonly known as a Golden Spike. Its beginning ‘would be optimally placed in the mid-twentieth century’ and would include the Great Acceleration occurring in the global economy and world population as well as atmospheric pollution. And an ‘array of geological proxy signals’, the sharpest and most globally synchronous of which might form a primary marker, would be made by the artificial radionuclides spread worldwide by the thermonuclear bomb tests from the early 1950s. The search for a Golden Spike was well under way.

In 2018, Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin published a book entitled The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, enlarging on their article in the leading journal Nature in 2015. The two scientists, concerned with global change and earth system respectively, put forward the idea of an Orbis Spike: applied to the whole world; based on a minimal reading of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1610; and including the emergence of the Columbian exchange between the Americas and the rest of the world involving plants, animals and diseases.

Taking into consideration these recent developments in the setting of the Doomsday Clock and in the discussion of the Anthropocene, I believe that the late eighteenth century remains the most appropriate point of departure for the fulfilment of this book’s aims: (1) to note major advances in the natural sciences and their application; (2) to set out an analytical master narrative; (3) to pay particular attention to the development of history as an academic discipline and to illustrate its response to the changing circumstances of successive periods. To reach these aims becomes more elusive the nearer we approach the present, since it is more difficult to analyse than the past. Nevertheless, the major task of this second edition has been to update them.

I need to emphasise that, although my approach might appear to be Eurocentric, it is in fact global. Using its superior force, the West dominated the world from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, while making by far the greatest contribution to climate change. It is only recently that what we used to call the Orient has fully awakened, and even now academic discourse is still conducted mostly in terms first used in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

As before, I have attempted to play the part of ‘the impartial spectator’ as in Adam Smith’s description, witnessing how the interpretation put forward by him and Adam Ferguson in the context of James Watt’s radical improvement of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century was refined in the nineteenth century as the industrial revolution advanced, but was also distorted by several influences, in particular nationalism. The study of history suffered from these influences, but was poised for a new scientific departure at the turn of the century before even stronger nationalist interpretations rendered this departure difficult, even impossible through most of the twentieth century, while new problems arose at the beginning of the twenty-first century. My hope is to add to an understanding of how we have reached our present predicament, and thus perhaps to make a contribution however small to its resolution. Ceasing to be the impartial spectator towards the end of the final chapter of the book, I argue for the necessity of a scientific approach to history merging with all other academic disciplines.

I owe much to Nick Fisher, sometime editor of the British Journal for the History of Science, and to Michael Dey, whose doctoral dissertation concerns Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, both of whom have made most helpful readings of this second edition as well as contributing to my education for many years: many thanks to both of them and to Graeme P. Herd, who has also made me think again about the aims of the book and its contents. I renew my gratitude to Murray Frame, Mark Levene, Marshall Poe and Ian Thatcher for their generous appraisal of the first edition. Many thanks, too, for Megan Greiving and other associates of Anthem Press who have seen the second edition through to publication in an efficient and sympathetic manner.

Joseph, born in 2014, is an addition to the list of dedicatees and sources of inspiration, my grandchildren.

No doubt, Minutes to Midnight still contains errors, misunderstandings and other shortcomings. Acknowledging responsibility for them all, I should like to ask critical readers, what do you think should be the role of history at the present stage of the Anthropocene?

King’s College, Old Aberdeen

28 March 2020

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was created by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. Sixty years on, in 2007, after many readjustments, it was set at five minutes before the final bell. The reasons given by the scientists included – for the first time – new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology, and the threat of climate change. In 2010, with some evidence of movement towards arms and climate control, the Clock was taken back to six minutes to midnight. The scientists declared: ‘For the first time in decades we have an opportunity to free ourselves from the terror of nuclear weapons and to slow drastic changes to our shared global environment.’ They encouraged ‘scientists to continue their engagement with these issues and make their analysis widely known’, and were confident enough to assert, ‘We are poised to bend the arc of history.’ It is unlikely that they would include among ‘scientists’ the custodians of ‘the arc of history’, and even less likely that most historians would want to include themselves. However, this book takes the contrary view, arguing for the necessity of history as a science in a pandisciplinary response to the ongoing crisis.

It begins with the onset of the Anthropocene Era – the geological phase in which a global impact has been made by human activities. The era began in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when available data indicate the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several ‘greenhouse gases’. This period includes James Watt’s fundamental improvement of the steam engine, the event central to the Industrial Revolution that transformed the face of the world and began to pollute it.

Watt’s achievement is the point of departure for this book, which seeks to describe some significant aspects of the coincidence of geological time with historical time. It has three major interlocking aims: (1) to note major advances in the natural sciences and their applications; (2) to set out an analytical narrative of the Anthropocene Era; (3) to pay particular attention to the development of history as an academic discipline in association with other humanities, the social and natural sciences, illustrating its response to the changing circumstances of successive periods.

1. To be clear from the beginning, an author who finds even the workings of the steam engine difficult to grasp should not attempt to do more than recognise the most significant scientific and technical innovations from Watt’s onwards. Therefore, I intend to discuss what has happened more broadly, and what has been written about it, in a manner begun by Watt’s contemporaries, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.

2. I believe that there is one fundamental narrative, although I concede that there can be discussion about its direction from the eighteenth century onwards. Up to 1945, I concentrate on Europe and the United States, where the Industrial Revolution most clearly unfolded, enabling them to dominate other continents. Then, the focus widened, when the A-bomb and then the H-bomb threatened to bring the human story to an end during the worldwide processes of the Cold War and Decolonisation. Development of atomic power for peaceful purposes was deemed a necessity by some experts as the additional problem of climate change emerged and the exhaustion of fossil fuels approached. By the late 1960s, the Chinese detonation of an H-bomb demonstrated that the world dominance of Europe and the United States was coming to an end as ecological problems intensified. Clearly, the fundamental narrative does not indicate exclusively positive progress. Moreover, it is relentless, allowing no ifs or buts, as it approaches a palpable abrupt conclusion.

3. I shall spell out how historians and other investigators have tackled the problem of interpretation, using as a yardstick the comprehensive arguments put forward by Smith and Ferguson in the eighteenth century concerning in particular global stadial development. I shall argue that, after developing these arguments in the nineteenth century, historians and colleagues in other disciplines tended to ignore or distort them in the twentieth. From the late twentieth century onwards, however, with the end of the Cold War, opportunities have opened for the full resumption of the Enlightenment agenda. Indeed, I shall argue that, in view of the still menacing setting of the Doomsday Clock at six minutes to midnight, the resumption of rational, global and evolutionary analysis, taking full cognisance of the differences between the late eighteenth century and the early twenty-first century, has become a necessity for historians uniquely qualified to assess the significance for humankind of the passage of time. The necessity will remain even if the Clock moves back more minutes from the fateful hour, since the complexities of the era will still be with us. To put the point simply, anthropocentric history must increasingly be replaced by anthropocenic – just two letters but a world of difference, placing the study of the past together with other humanities, the social and natural sciences in a pandisciplinary amalgam. To justify this assertion is the ultimate purpose of the book as a whole.

Of course, I accept ultimate responsibility for Minutes to Midnight. But it is not all my own work, and I have relied heavily on the books, articles and works cited in the endnotes. In addition, I thank Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan respectively for permission to include passages from World Order in History, published in 1996, and Paths to a New Europe, published in 2004. Moreover, I could not have completed the book without the generous help of others. I acknowledge with deep gratitude the incisive comments made by my wife Cathryn, a fellow historian with a background in science. Many thanks also to Michael Dey, Murray Frame, Graeme P. Herd, Jean Houbert and Ian Thatcher for their thorough reading and constructive suggestions. I am extremely grateful to Marshall Poe, who first convinced me of the advantages of electronic publication and gave essential advice on how to approach it as well as introducing me to Anthem Press, where Tej Sood, Janka Romero and Robert Reddick have been especially supportive. At the University of Aberdeen, as ever, I have benefitted from the counsel and encouragement of colleagues old and new in the history and other departments. The secretarial support of Gillian Brown and Barbara McGillivray has been vital, as has the advice of associates of the computer HelpDesk and Queen Mother Library. The book is dedicated to my grandchildren, with hopes that the hands of the Doomsday Clock will move far from midnight during their lifetime. It was my first meeting with Samuel that inspired me to put aside other projects to embark on this one that seemed to have more urgency, and the arrival of Francesca and Ike that has helped me to complete it.

Acknowledging again that the errors and misunderstandings in this book are all mine, I should nevertheless like to ask critical readers, what do you think should be the role of the study of history at the present stage of the Anthropocene Era?

King’s College, Old Aberdeen

21 January 2011

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: TIMES AND APPROACHES

The tiny spheroid that we call home hurtles through space as if there were no tomorrow. A thin surface of land and sea, still to be fully understood, covers a molten mass of which we know even less. Surrounding Planet Earth is a cocoon of atmosphere, which we understand rather better.

Times

Recently, we learned that indeed, there may be no tomorrow, since human-made changes are making an impact on the world’s ecosystem that could bring to an end life as we have known it. This, in addition to the continuing possibility of a suicidal nuclear war, and the added threat of mass destruction posed by new technologies.

Time as examined by historians began just a few thousand years ago.¹ Earlier geological ages either predated, or proceeded without, significant interference from our ancestors. Respectful in their own way of nature, ‘primitive’ human beings often worshipped the sun and moon, making sacrifices to appease them or the gods of nature. The emergence of Christianity in the West that was to dominate the world for three centuries or more brought about change in this relationship, introducing the idea that man could, or even should, control nature: ‘Sun and moon bow down before Him [God],’ declared a Church of England hymn composed as British imperial influence neared its peak. Confidence was great among some materialists, too. For example, the Soviet historian M. N. Pokrovsky declared in 1931, ‘It is easy to foresee that in future, when science and technique have attained to a perfection which we are as yet unable to visualise, nature will become soft wax in his [man’s] hands which he will be able to cast into whatever form he chooses.’² Sixty years later, by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, such confidence was all too obviously misplaced.

Nearly a century and a half earlier, in 1785, James Hutton read papers to the Royal Society of Edinburgh arguing that the earth had been in existence for much longer than the 6,000 years that appeared to be allowed by Bible, with ‘no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’.³ A label for the postglacial geological epoch of ten to twelve thousand years was probably suggested by Sir Charles Lyell in 1833: ‘Holocene’, meaning ‘wholly recent’, gradually gained acceptance throughout Europe and beyond. Charles Darwin took Lyell’s Principles of Geology with him on the voyage of the Beagle as he began to formulate the ideas that would find their classic formulation in The Origin of Species, first published in 1859. In 1875, Edward Seuss coined the term ‘biosphere’ in The Face of the Earth.

A book entitled The Biosphere was produced in 1926 by Vladimir Vernadsky, combining Darwinism more closely with ecology in the suggestions that the earth’s surface was the product of biological activity, and that since the eighteenth century human beings had increased greatly the quantity of biogenic gases. Along with others, he suggested that the human race would transform the biosphere into the ‘noosphere’ – the sphere of the mind, while a new world view – cosmism – would involve the reduction of chaos on earth and in space through united human effort.⁴

The use of the atomic bomb in 1945 created an immediate danger. In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was created by a group of elite scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons, with midnight representing ‘catastrophic destruction’.⁵ In 1953, it reached a mere two minutes from the fatal hour after the United States and USSR had both detonated hydrogen bombs. The danger was even greater at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. In 1991, with the fall of the USSR, the clock reached its furthest point from doom – 17 minutes to midnight. Then, in 2002, after 9/11, it was advanced 10 minutes – it now showed 7 minutes to midnight. Sixty years after its first appearance, in 2007, it moved forward again – to five minutes before the final bell would toll for us all. The reasons given by the clock-setting scientists were growing anxieties concerning world terrorism, the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea and – for the first time – ‘new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology that could inflict irrevocable harm’ and the threat of climate change including global warming. ‘The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons,’ the scientists stated, adding, ‘The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.’ This, in addition to the disposition of some thousands of nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia and a further considerable number in possession of other powers, especially China. ‘Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices,’ the scientists declared. These observations were made by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in consultation with its board of sponsors, which included no fewer than 18 Nobel laureates. In 2010, the board pushed the clock back from five to six minutes before midnight, having found ‘signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization – the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change’. It called for further progress from scientists and others, asserting, ‘We are poised to bend