Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (116 page)

He identified ‘three mysteries,’ which, he said, remained, and would always remain. These were the mysteries of creation, of freedom, and of sin. Science might push back the moment of creation further and further, he said, but there would always be a mystery beyond any point science could reach. Freedom and sin were linked. ‘The mystery of the evil in man does not easily yield to rational explanations because the evil is the corruption of a good, namely, man’s freedom.’
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He did not hold out the hope of revelation in regard to any of these mysteries. He thought that America’s obsession with business was actually a curtailment of freedom, and that true freedom, the true triumph over evil, came from social and political engagement with one’s fellow men, in a religious spirit. Niebuhr’s analysis was an early sign of the greater engagement with sociopolitical matters that would overtake the church in the following decades, though Niebuhr, as his calm prose demonstrated, was no radical.
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Catholics were – in theory at least – moved by the same spirit. On 11 October 1962, 2,381 cardinals, bishops and abbots gathered in Rome for a huge conference designed to reinvigorate the Catholic Church, involve it in the great social issues of the day, and stimulate a religious revival. The conference, the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, had been called back in 1959 by the then-new pope, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who had taken the name John XXIII. Elected only on the eleventh ballot, when he was within a month of his seventy-seventh birthday, Roncalli was seen as a stopgap pope. But this short, dumpy man surprised everyone. His natural, down-to-earth manner was perfectly attuned to the mood of the times, and as the first pope of the television age, he quickly achieved a world-wide popularity no pope had had before.

Great things were expected from Vatican II, as it was called, though in more traditional quarters there was surprise that the council had been called in the first place: Vatican I had been held ninety-two years before, when its most important decision was that the pope was infallible on theological matters – for such purists there was no need of another council. Questionnaires were sent out to all the bishops and abbots of the church, inviting them to Rome and soliciting their early views on a number of matters that it was proposed to discuss. By the time the council began, one thousand aides had been added, at least a hundred official observers from other religions, and several hundred press. It was by far the largest gathering of its kind in the twentieth century.
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As part of the preparations, the pope’s staff in Rome prepared an agenda of sixty-nine items, later boiled down to nineteen, and then thirteen. For each of these a schema was drafted, a discussion document setting out the ideas of the pope and his immediate aides. Shortly before the council began, on 15 May 1961, the pope issued an encyclical,
Mater et Magistra,
outlining how the church could become more involved in the social problems facing mankind. As more than one observer noted, neither the encyclical nor the council came too soon; as the French Dominican Yves Congar wrote, in 1961 ‘one man out of every four is Chinese, two men out of every three are starving, one man out of every
three lives under Communism, and one Christian out of every two is not Catholic.’
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In practice, the council was far from being an unqualified success. The first session, which began on II October 1962, lasted until 8 December the same year, the bishops spending two to three hours in discussion every morning. The pope issued a second encyclical,
Pacem in Terris,
the following April, which specifically addressed issues of peace in the Cold War. Sadly, Pope John died on 3 June that year, but his successor,
Giovanni Battista Montini,
Paul VI, kept to the same schedule, and three more sessions of the council took place in the autumn of 1963, 1964, and 1965.

During that time, for close observers (and the world
was
watching), the Catholic Church attempted to modernise itself. But although Catholicism emerged stronger in many ways, Rome revealed itself as virtually incapable of change. Depending on the observer, the church had dragged itself out of the Middle Ages and moved ahead either to the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth century. But no one thought it had modernised itself. One problem was the style of debate.
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On most issues there was a ‘progressive’ wing and a ‘reactionary’ wing. This was only to be expected, but too often open discussion, and dissension, was cut short by papal fiat, with matters referred to a small papal commission that would meet later, behind closed doors. Teaching was kept firmly in the hands of the bishops, with the laity specifically excluded, and in discussions of ecumenism with Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox forms of Christianity, it was made clear that Catholicism was primary. The liturgy
was
allowed to shift from Latin to the vernacular, and some historical mistakes were admitted, but against that the church’s implacable opposition to birth control was, in the words of Paul Blanshard, who attended all four sessions of the council as an observer, ‘the greatest single defeat for intelligence.’
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On such matters as biblical scholarship, the status of Mary, and women within the church, Catholicism showed itself as unwilling to change and as driven by Rome. Perhaps expectations had been raised too high by calling a council in the first place: in itself that seemed to promise greater democracy. America was now a much greater power in the world, and in the church, and Rome’s way of conducting itself did not sit well with attitudes on the other side of the Atlantic.
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Quite what effect Vatican II had on the
numbers
of Catholics around the world is unclear; but in the years that followed the rates for divorce continued to rise, even in Catholic countries, and women took their own decisions, in private, so far as birth control was concerned. In that sense, Vatican II was a missed opportunity.

For many people, the most beautiful image of the twentieth century was not produced by Picasso, or Jackson Pollock, or the architects of the Bauhaus, or the cameramen of Hollywood. It was a photograph, a simple piece of reportage, but one that was nevertheless wholly original. It was a photograph of Earth itself, taken from space. This picture, showing the planet to be slightly blue, owing to the amount of water in the atmosphere, was affecting because it showed the world as others might see us – as one place, relatively small and, above all, finite. It was that latter fact that so many found moving. Our arrival
on the Moon marked the point when we realised that the world’s population could not go on expanding for ever, that Earth’s resources are limited. It was no accident that the ecology movement developed in parallel with the space race, or that it culminated at the time when space travel became a fact.

The ecological movement began in the middle of the nineteenth century. The original word,
oekologie,
was coined by the German Ernst Haeckel, and was deliberately related to
oekonomie,
using as a root the Greek
oekos,
‘household unit.’ There has always been a close link between ecology and economy, and much of the enthusiasm for ecology was shown by German economic thinkers in the early part of the century (it formed a plank of National Socialist thinking).
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But whether that thinking was in Germany, Britain, or the United States (the three countries where it received most attention), before the 1960s it was more a branch of thought that set the countryside – nature, peasant life – against urbanity. This was reflected in the writings of not only Haeckel but the British planners (Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities and the Fabians), the Woodcraft Folk, and such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Williamson, and J. R. Tolkien.
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In Germany Heinrich Himmler experimented, grotesquely, with organic farms, but it was not until the 1960s that the modern worries came together, and when they did, they had three roots. One was the population boom stimulated by World War II and only now becoming visible; a second was the wasteful and inhuman planning processes created in many instances by the welfare state, which involved the wholesale destruction of towns and cities; and third, the space race, after which it became common to refer to the planet as ‘spaceship Earth.’

When President Johnson made his Great Society speech in Michigan in the spring of 1964, he referred to the impoverished environment as one of his reasons for acting. Partly, he had in mind the destruction of the cities, and the ‘Great Blight of Dullness’ that Jane Jacobs had railed against. But he was also provoked by the writings of another woman who did much to stir the world’s conscience with a passionate exposé of the pesticide industry and the damage commercial greed was doing to the countryside – plants, animals, and humans. The exposé was called
Silent Spring,
and its author was Rachel Carson.
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Rachel Carson was not unknown to the American public in 1962, when her book appeared. A biologist by training, she had worked for many years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which had been created in 1940. As early as 1951 she published
The Sea Around Us,
which had been serialised in the
New Yorker,
a Book-of-the-Month Club alternative choice and top of the
New York Times
best-seller list for months. But that book was not so much a polemic as a straightforward account of the oceans, showing how one form of life was dependent on others, to produce a balance in nature that was all-important to both its continued existence and its beauty.
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Silent Spring
was very different. As Linda Lear, her biographer, reminds us, it was an angry book, though the anger was kept in check. As the 1950s passed, Carson, as a scientist, had gradually amassed evidence – from journals and from colleagues – about the damage pesticides were doing to the environment. The 1950s were years of economic expansion, when many of the scientific advances
of wartime were put to peaceful use. It was also a period when the Cold War was growing in intensity, and would culminate at the very time
Silent Spring
appeared. There was a tragic personal dimension behind the book. At about the time
The Sea around Us
appeared, Carson had been operated on for breast cancer. While she was researching and writing
Silent Spring
, she was suffering from a duodenal ulcer and rheumatoid arthritis (she was fifty-three in 1960), and her cancer had reappeared, requiring another operation and radiotherapy. Large chunks of the book were written in bed.
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By the late 1950s, it was clear to those who wished to hear the evidence that with the passage of time, many pollutants that formed part of daily life had toxic side effects. The most worrying, because it directly affects humans, was tobacco. Tobacco had been smoked in the West for three hundred years, but the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer was not fully aired until 1950, when two reports, one in the
British Medical Journal
and the other in the
Journal of the American Medical Association,
both showed that ‘smoking is a factor, and an important factor, in the production of carcinoma of the lung.’
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This result was surprising: the British doctors doing the experiment thought that other environmental factors – automobile exhaust and/or the tarring of roads – were responsible for the rise in lung cancer cases that had been seen in the twentieth century. But no sooner had the British and American results appeared than they were confirmed in the same year in Germany and Holland.

From the evidence that Carson was collecting, it was becoming clear to her that some pesticides were far more toxic than tobacco. The most notorious was DDT, introduced to great effect in 1945 but now, after more than a decade, implicated not just in the deaths of birds, insects, and plants but also in cancerous deaths in humans. An especially vivid example explored by Carson was Clear Lake in California.
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Here DDD, a variant of DDT, had been introduced in 1949 to rid the lake of a certain species of gnat that plagued fishermen and holidaymakers. It was administered carefully, as was thought: the concentration was 1 part in 70 million. Five years later, however, the gnat was back, and the concentration increased to 1 in 50 million. Birds began to die. The association wasn’t understood at first, however, and in 1957 more DDD was used on the lake. When more birds and then fish began to die, an investigation was begun – which showed that certain species of grebe had concentrations of 1,600 parts in a million, and the fish as much as 2,500 in a million. Only then was it realised that some animals accumulate concentrations of chemicals, to lethal limits.
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But it wasn’t just the unanticipated build-up of chemicals that so alarmed Carson; each case was different, and often human agency was involved. In the case of aminotriazole, a herbicide, it had been officially sanctioned for use on cranberry bogs, but only
after
the berries had been harvested. This particular sequence mattered because laboratory studies had shown that aminotriazole caused cancer of the thyroid in rats. When it emerged that some growers sprayed the cranberries before they were harvested, the herbicide could not be blamed direcdy.
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This is why, when
Silent Spring
appeared in 1962, again serialised in the
New Yorker,
the book created such a furore. For Carson not only explored the science of pesticides, showing that they were far more toxic
than most people realised, but that industry guidelines, sometimes woefully inadequate in the first place, were often flouted indiscriminately. She revealed when and where specific individuals had died, and named companies whose pesticides were responsible, in some cases accusing them of greed, of putting profit before adequate care for wildlife and humans.
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Like
The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring
shot to the top of the best-seller lists, helped by the thalidomide scandal, which erupted at that time, when it was shown that certain chemicals taken (for sedation or sleeplessness) by mothers in the early stages of pregnancy could result in deformed offspring.
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Carson had the satisfaction of seeing President Kennedy call a special meeting of his scientific advisory committee to discuss the implications of her book before she died, in April 1964.
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But her true legacy came five years later. In 1969, the U.S. Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which required an environmental impact statement for each governmental decision. In the same year the use of DDT as a pesticide was effectively banned, and in 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was established in the United States, and the Clean Air Amendment Act was passed. In 1972 the United States passed the Water Pollution Control Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the Noise Control Act, with the Endangered Species Act approved in 1973.