Odd Jobs (151 page)

The blasphemous and dwarfing revelation of “deep time” forms the underlying drama of Stephen Jay Gould’s
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
. In the monthly essays with which Gould has been amusing and edifying the readers of
Natural History
magazine, he now and then shows a surprisingly fond acquaintance with the debunked and forgotten theories that litter the history of science: the present book, an expanded version of lectures given at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, considers three early British geologists—Thomas Burnet (1635–1715), James Hutton (1726–1797), and Charles Lyell (1797–1875)—who he feels have been misrepresented in the contemporary textbook version of geology’s progress. In “textbook cardboard,” this progress is represented as the “victory of superior observation finally freed from constraining superstition”—the supplanting, that is, of fanciful, religion-tainted theories by the patient field work and inductive reasoning of true scientists. Yet, Gould argues, “scientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural phenomena.… Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits—from metaphor and analogy to all the flights of fruitful imagination that C. S. Peirce called ‘abduction.’ ”

Among the cultural metaphors that shaped the searching out of deep time are those of time’s arrow and time’s cycle. Did the enigmatic evidence of the rocks show that the earth had a history proceeding from a
beginning to an end, or was its geology a matter of endless cycles of erosion and repair, subsidence and uplift? The truth, Gould says, lies with both: the cycles move along an arrow. And Burnet, the textbook-deplored proponent of the Bible-inspired
Sacred Theory of the Earth
(1680–89) came closer to this double truth than Hutton’s
Theory of the Earth
(first publication 1788) and Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
(first edition 1830–33). “Hutton and Lyell, traditional discoverers of deep time in the British tradition, were motivated as much (or more) by … a vision about time, as by superior knowledge of the rocks in the field.… Their visions stand prior—logically, psychologically, and in the ontogeny of their thoughts—to their attempts at empirical support.” Hutton, to be more precise, was so much under the sway of Newton’s magnificent analysis of heavenly motion as to impose a similarly perpetual and ideal mechanics upon geology, and Lyell was so caught up in his combat with the “catastrophists” on behalf of “uniformitarianism” as to ignore, until late in his life, the fact that earth’s fossils do trace an irreversible history, and that strata of rock can be ordered by them.

If this sounds technical, it somewhat is. But geology has the charm that we all walk upon its raw material, and Gould’s lucid, animated style, rarely slowed by even a touch of the ponderous,
^†
leads us deftly through the labyrinth of faded debates and preconceptions. His own contemporary engagement in the debate with evolutionary “gradualists” opposed to his and Niles Eldredge’s theory of “punctuated equilibrium” lends verve to his exposition of old points of contention. Though gradual change, operating through great tracts of time, is now assumed to be the empirically proven mode of biological and evolutionary change, the evidence, Gould takes some pleasure in reminding us, favored and still favors the catastrophists:

To concede this abruptness, and to try to adopt a theory to fit it more closely than a dogmatic gradualism, does not make Gould a creationist, nor did it make Lyell’s catastrophist opponents, such as Georges Cuvier and Louis Agassiz, any less empirical or scientific than he, and scarcely less right: “We must admit that current views represent a pretty evenly shuffled deck between attitudes held by Lyell and the catastrophists.” Gould, with a passion that approaches the lyrical, argues for a retrospective tolerance in science and against fashions which would make heroes and villains of men equally committed to the cause of truth and equally immersed in the metaphors and presumptions of their culture and time. The situation of cosmology now, as it floridly sprouts suppositions of superheavy “strings” and extra dimensions rolled into tiny tubes and violently “inflationary” or infinitely multiple universes, is perhaps analogous to that of nineteenth-century geology, where much hard evidence and sound reasoning existed intermingled with hypotheses that time would show to be, though no more fantastic than the truth, false. Gould implicitly asks that tolerance be extended to such contemporary guesses as the Alvarez hypothesis of asteroidal or cometary causation of the mass extinctions, and the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which merely proposes that speciation occurs in spurts—that evolution, like most terrain, is lumpy and uneven.

The book ends with a surprising burst of Christian art: cathedral windows and bosses, and James Hampton’s great American folk sculpture,
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly
. With these artworks Gould is saying more than that scientific theory is beautiful; he is emphasizing the Judaeo-Christian arrow of time, which flies from Creation to Apocalypse, from Adam’s Fall to Christ’s Second Coming, from Noah’s Flood to Jesus’s Baptism. The Old and New Testaments are in a sense two cycles, which echo one another and yet register an advance; and this is also the way of the earth, which lifts up mountains and flattens them and raises them up again, and allows species to perish and others to arise and fill the same ecological niche with
similar forms, and yet also has a history, an overall change from a young, violent, oxygenless planet to the oxygen-rich and relatively stable one that supports our present unique chapter in the ongoing saga of life. The universe itself, which as recently as the 1950s could be plausibly imagined to exist in a “steady state” of perpetual atom-by-atom creation, also now seems, on its colossal scale, to be arrowing from a Big Bang fifteen billion years ago to an eventual end in total entropy. The seventeenth-century cleric Thomas Burnet, though without much in the way of facts and with little notion of how truly deep time was, more accurately combined the metaphors of arrow and cycle than his successor geologists Hutton and Lyell, who both, in wishing to lift their science above the “complex contingencies” of “just history,” conceived of cycles without end or aim. Stephen Jay Gould, in his scrupulous explication of their carefully wrought half-truths, abolishes the unnecessary distinction between the humanities and science, and honors the latter as a branch of humanistic thought, fallible and poetic.

Time is tackled from a wider angle, and more pugnaciously, in
Time Wars
. Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, in Washington, D.C., is not the scientist or the writer that Gould is, but he has produced a brisk book that in little more than two hundred pages covers a large territory.
Time Wars
seems at least three books in one. First, it is a survey of how men have considered time, from the hunter-gatherers’ complete submission to the “migratory rhythms of the great herds of animals and the gestation and ripening times of wild herbs and roots,” through the early agricultural societies’ celestial reckonings and their invention of calendars, up to medieval man’s invention of the daily schedule (first perpetrated by the Benedictine monks) and industrial, bourgeois man’s exaltation of the clock and today’s increasing domination by a “computime” measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Second,
Time Wars
launches a cautionary jeremiad against the computer society, which compels men to interface with inhumanly rapid machines and invites them to treat reality merely in terms of proliferating information systems:

In both these aspects,
Time Wars
seems an efficient rehash of other recent works of popular sociology and anthropology; its footnotes draw preponderantly upon books written in the 1980s (
Technostress
, by Craig Brod;
Turing’s Man
, by David Bolter;
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
, by Sherry Turkle;
Silicon Shock: The Menace of the Computer
, by Geoff Simons;
The Discoverers
, by Daniel Boorstin;
The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time
, by Edward T. Hall;
Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life
, by Eviatar Zerubavel;
The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918
, by Stephen Kern;
Clocks and the Cosmos
, by Samuel L. Macey;
The Information Society
, by Yoneji Masuda) and even when an older voice is quoted (Augustine, Swift, the Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym) the notes give the source as an intermediate scholarly work.

A personal and original note sounds only in
Time Wars
’s third aspect, that of a sermon urging us to return to biological time and to dwell empathetically in the global ecosystem. There is on all fronts, we are assured, a surge in this direction; there are “the environmental movement, the animal-rights movement, the Judaeo-Christian stewardship movement, the eco-feministic movement, the holistic health movement, the alternative agriculture movement, the appropriate technology movement, the bio-regionalism movement, the self-sufficiency movement, the economic democracy movement, the alternative education movement, and the disarmament movement.” Without denying that every little movement has a praiseworthy meaning all its own, I find it hard to grasp how all this New Age pietism relates to the concept of time that the computer has allegedly drilled into our heads. I use a word processor, and the appearance on the screen of the letter I just tapped seems no more or less miraculous and sinister than its old-fashioned appearance, after a similar action, upon a sheet of white paper in my typewriter. Has the fact that this electronic machine is designed in terms of nanoseconds affected my consciousness any more deeply than the minute calculations involved in the design of the carburetor that, when I simple-mindedly ask my automobile to go, mixes fuel and air so judiciously that the mixture explodes and the car does go? The capacity of human beings to absorb what they wish to and to ignore the rest seems to me almost limitless. The telephone, for instance, is a still-evolving technological
marvel, and more pervasive than the computer: has it changed what people talk about? Not according to the television commercials urging us to reach out to sweetheart and mother. Television itself came heralded as the reshaper of global culture, and yet its staple content remains the primitive stuff of sporting events, shoot-’em-ups, car chases, and comedies as homely and inane as the plays we used to watch in high-school assemblies in the hoary days of Harry Truman.

Rifkin cites instances of professional “technostress” when computers replace older hardware, and quotes some “computer compulsives” and M.I.T. students who have acquired rather people-unfriendly attitudes, and discusses the spread of the “information” metaphor in such sciences as biology, psychology, and even astronomy. He did not prove, to me, that the computer as a culture-altering device is yet in the same league as the clock, the wheel, or the plow, or that its theorists will have the cultural impact of Newton, Darwin, Einstein, or Freud. A fever of overstatement vitiates many a sentence:

Rifkin’s leaps into the cosmic sometimes leave us behind:

Even on the more solid ground of the past, his prose overreaches: