How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (54 page)

And that was what the pope asked Galileo to do. Urban wanted Galileo to acknowledge in his publications that (in John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor’s words) “definitive conclusions could not be reached in the natural sciences. God in his omnipotence could produce a natural phenomenon in any number of ways and it therefore was presumptuous for any philosopher to claim that he had determined a unique solution.”
⁴⁰
That seemed an easy evasion. And given Galileo’s propensity to claim false credit for others’ inventions, such as the telescope, and for empirical research he probably did not perform, such as dropping weights from the Tower of Pisa, it would not seem to have stretched his ethical standards to have gone along with the pope. But to defy the pope in a rather offensive way was quite consistent with Galileo’s ego.

In 1632 Galileo published his awaited
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
. Although the ostensible purpose of the book was to present an explanation of tidal phenomena, the two systems involved were Ptolemy’s, in which the sun circles the earth, and Copernicus’s, wherein the earth circles the sun. The dialogue involved three speakers, two of them philosophers and the third a layman. It was the layman, Simplicio, who presented the traditional views in support of Ptolemy—the name’s resemblance to “simpleton” was obvious to all. This allowed Galileo to exploit the traditional straw-man technique to ridicule his opponents. Although Galileo did include the pope’s suggested disclaimer, he put it in the mouth of Simplicio, thereby disowning it.

The book caused an immense stir and, understandably, the pope felt betrayed—although Galileo never seemed to have grasped that fact and continued to blame the Jesuits and university professors for his troubles.
Despite that, the pope used his power to protect Galileo from any serious punishment. Unfortunately, Galileo’s defiant action stimulated a general crackdown by the Counter-Reformation Church on intellectual freedom.

Ironically, much that Galileo presented in the book as correct science was not; his theory of the tides, for example, was nonsense, as Albert Einstein pointed out in his foreword to a 1953 translation of Galileo’s notorious book. Equally ironic is the fact that the judgment against Galileo was partly motivated by efforts to suppress
astrologers
, as some theologians mistakenly equated the claim that the earth moved with doctrines that fate was ruled by the motion of heavenly bodies.

So what does the case of Galileo reveal? It surely demonstrates that powerful groups and organizations often will abuse their power to impose their beliefs, a shortcoming certainly not limited to religious organizations—the Communist regime in the Soviet Union outlawed Mendelian genetics on grounds that all characteristics are caused by the environment. But it also shows that Galileo was not some naive scholar who fell victim to a bunch of ignorant bigots; these same “bigots” ignored dozens of other prominent scientists—many of them resident in Italy.

In any event, this celebrated case does nothing to alter the fact that the rise of science was rooted in Christian theology. Indeed, for all his posturing, Galileo remained deeply religious. As the historian William Shea noted, “Had Galileo been less devout, he could have refused to go to Rome [when summoned by the Inquisition]; Venice offered him asylum.”
⁴¹
But he did not flee to Venice and often expressed his personal faith to his daughter and friends after his trial was over.

Of course, although Christianity was essential for the development of Western science, that dependency no longer exists. Once properly launched, science has been able to stand on its own, and the conviction that the secrets of nature will yield to prolonged inquiry is now as much a secular article of faith as it originally was Christian. The rise of an independent scientific establishment has given birth to new tensions between theology and science. If the church fathers were leery of the implications of science for theology, there now exists a militant group of atheists, only some of them actually scientists, who attack religion as superstitious non-sense and claim that science refutes the existence of God and the possibility of miracles. Amazingly, several of the most prominent of these are confident that godlike beings have evolved on distant planets.

Progress in Separate Spheres

Some have argued that the scientific enterprise was motivated by and sustained by concerns for practical advances in technology, especially in England.
⁴²
The problem with this view is that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries few if any technological applications developed from the most significant scientific achievements. The lack of scientific applications was true not only of the more theoretical sciences, such as physics and astronomy, but even in more nearly applied sciences such as physiology. For example, it was several more centuries before Gabriel Fallopius’s identification of the tubes leading from the ovary, named after him, was of any medical significance. Nor did it matter, either to physicians or to lovers, that he coined the term
vagina
.

True, this glorious era of scientific achievements also was marked by a great deal of technological progress. But the inventors and the scientists seem to have pretty much inhabited separate worlds. An example involves Denis Papin, one of the scientific stars. Papin claimed to have invented a better pump than the one Thomas Savery designed to drain British mines. To prove his point, Papin urged the Royal Society to test his pump against Savery’s, but the members did not find it a matter of interest.
⁴³
It seems not to have occurred to Papin to take his pump and go demonstrate it to mine owners.

Although there was not a direct linkage between innovations in science and technology, both stemmed from and reflected the aggressive pursuit of progress by a rapidly growing, increasingly educated, and achievement-oriented bourgeoisie.

And, of course, advances in both science and technology occurred not in spite of Christianity but because of it. Contrary to the conventional narrative, science did not suddenly flourish once Europe cast aside religious “superstitions” during the so-called Enlightenment. Science arose in the West—and only in the West—precisely because the Judeo-Christian conception of God encouraged and even demanded this pursuit.

Part V

Modernity (1750– )

16

The Industrial Revolution

T
he most significant changes in the quality of human life were the result of the domestication of some plants and animals during the Stone Age. No longer were humans entirely dependent on whatever food they could find growing wild or on whatever game they could catch and kill. But following these Stone Age discoveries, progress was slow. It is estimated that in terms of the standard of living, things were pretty much the same for the next seven thousand years.
¹
People ate about the same amount, lived about the same lifespan, and buried about the same high percentage of their children. Even in the West, as recently as the seventeenth century life was hard and short.

But then an era of immense and stunningly rapid progress began in Britain, with a wave of inventions and innovations transforming nearly every aspect of life. From 1750 to 1850 the standard of living of the average person in Britain doubled. And that was just the start. What soon became known as the Industrial Revolution continued and spread, so that today the average person in a Western nation enjoys a standard of living sixteen times as high as in 1700,
²
and lives nearly three times as long.
³
In fact, an infant born today in the Republic of the Congo can expect to live twenty-five years longer than a baby born in France in 1800.
⁴
Welcome to modernity.

The reason for this extraordinary increase in the quality of life was simple: suddenly people were able to produce far more goods, including food, for far less labor. This “miracle” took place because machines—
tireless, accurate, and uncomplaining—replaced humans as the primary means of production, resulting in extraordinary gains in speed and performance. To use a simple example, the Scott and Chisholm mechanical pea sheller could equal the output of six hundred workers shelling by hand.
⁵

Unfortunately, with all this progress came new concerns and disenchantments. Machines freed humans from backbreaking labor, but by becoming machine operators, people fell subject to a uniformity and discipline that was often resented and sometimes bitterly condemned (particularly by intellectuals who had never done any physical labor). The first factories were powered by coal and, lacking modern filter systems, they caused severe pollution. Greatly increased life expectancy created problems of supporting an elderly population that places heavy demands on health-care facilities. And so it has gone. But only the ignorant propose turning back to a “simpler time,” when half of those born died in childhood; when large families lived in smoky, one-room huts; and when few people ever journeyed more than ten miles from home.

In any event, the changes in production that took place during the Industrial Revolution make a fascinating tale to which this chapter primarily is devoted.
Why
it occurred at this time and place will be the subject of chapter 17.

The Industrial Revolution occurred so rapidly, and involved so many inventions and innovations in so many different industries, that even many long books cannot do it full justice.
⁶
What follows is a mere sketch intended only to give a valid sense of what took place. Because the most dramatic leap in productivity during the Industrial Revolution occurred in the cotton industry, that is where it is best to begin.

A Revolution in Cotton

In 1760 the British imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton, which was spun into thread and woven into cloth by hand, mostly at home or by a few weavers in master weavers’ shops. By 1787 cotton imports had increased to 22 million pounds of raw cotton per year; machines had begun handling some steps in the manufacturing process, but the bulk of the work still took place in homes and small shops. Then came cotton mills, where people used machines in large plants to produce cotton cloth. Raw cotton imports increased to 366 million pounds by the 1830s.
⁷

The total value of British cotton cloth jumped from about £600,000 in 1770 to £
10.5
million by 1805. In the city of Manchester alone, the number of cotton mills grew from two in 1790 to sixty-six in 1821. By 1830 cotton manufacturing had become Britain’s leading industry in terms of the value of the product and the number of people employed. All this was due to the rapid invention and improvement of technology, which enabled weaving machines to replace hand labor.
⁸

Across the Atlantic, in 1793 the American Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin to quickly remove the seeds from cotton pods, which had been a slow and tedious process when done by hand. Cotton production in the American South expanded from 750,000 bales of cotton in 1830 (each bale weighing five hundred pounds) to 2.85 million bales in 1850.
⁹
This made it possible to meet the British mills’ rapidly growing demand for raw cotton.

As the machines involved in producing cotton cloth became more complex, it was necessary to locate the mills along a stream sufficient to turn waterwheels. But then, in the 1770s, came the invention that was fundamental to everything else: the steam engine.