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OWEN: Hi, and welcome to Authors at Google.
This is my first event that I've organized.
So I'm very proud to have a good turn out,
and have everything going smoothly.
Rosalind Williams has been teaching at MIT since 1980
starting in the writing program and now
with the program in Science, Technology, and Society,
eventually becoming its head.
In the '90s she served as dean of student life
in undergraduate education.
At the same time she managed to raise
a future DBA, and an astrophysicist, and a Swede.
Her previous book, "Retooling," emerged
from her experience of seeing technology launched
by an institution come back later to change it.
And many of her other works she uses literature
to get a phone call during the [INAUDIBLE].
She uses literature to study the history of technology.
And that's what she's done with "Triumph of the Human Empire."
I'm happy to present Rosalind Williams.
ROSALIND: Thank you very much Owen.
This is like a classroom.
Everybody's at the back.
You can creep up if you care to.
But even though I spend time in the classroom
I like to be a historian who's talking
not only to other historians.
So I really appreciate your coming,
spending the time and attention, and I'll be very interested
in your feedback.
So the beginning is always a good place to start.
And the beginning here is the title
of this book, ie. what I've been thinking about for the last 10
years.
So I want to start by explaining the key words in that title,
especially "human empire," but also
what do we mean by its "triumph."
What's with the "end of the world" and why these three
guys, Verne, Morris, and Stevenson?
So I'm going to start with the phrase "human empire"
because it's the key to the rest.
And this sentence, this one sentence,
is the key to Western history as we know it,
to the modern world.
So I'm going to spend some time on this sentence,
and explain first of all that Francis Bacon, Sir Francis
Bacon, who wrote it, is a Renaissance man in the sense
that he was a mover and shaker.
He was the equivalent of Attorney General in Britain
in his day, and a fabulously good writer and speaker.
But of course he's also a real Renaissance man.
This is the Renaissance.
And so it's important that he's writing
at this time in the early 1600's because this
is the pivotal moment when Westerners are beginning
to imagine history being different from history
as the human race had known it ever before.
This is the pivot point of defining a new kind of history,
a history of what we now call progress.
I mean it's a time when Europeans have discovered what
for them is a new world.
They're busy settling it.
You notice the date.
This is when Jamestown was settled,
Plymouth is just getting started.
The Catholic Church has ceased to be a monopoly.
There's now a choice of religion after the Protestant
Reformation.
Copernicus has opened up the idea of a whole new world
system.
Just 15 years earlier, give or take,
Galileo has assembled a telescope, turned it
to the heavens, has seen the phases on Venus
and the craters on the moon.
This is a time when the world is breaking
open from the closed medieval world,
and everything is happening, and all sorts of new possibilities
are out there.
And Bacon is best known for articulating what we now
call the scientific method.
He is the guy, when you say the Baconian method, this is Bacon,
and what you mean is a method of experimentation of a purisicm.
And so this sentence comes from not one of his essays.
It comes from a fantasy novel that he
wrote called "The New Atlantis."
And in this fantasy a group of Europeans
are shipwrecked somewhere in the South Pacific.
They wash up on an uncharted island
and they discover a lost civilization.
And it's a civilization of some lost Atlantis run by Solomon,
the ruler, who has started a foundation, a sort of research
university on the island.
And most of the story is telling about the research
they do on that island in great detail.
It's quite fascinating.
This is one sentence at the beginning of the book,
towards the beginning, where Solomon
is telling the shipwrecked sailors what that foundation is
all about.
And you can read it. "The end," that is the purpose,
"of our foundation is the knowledge of causes,
and secret motions of things; and the enlarging
of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting
of all things possible."
This is the agenda for the modern world.
That's it.
That's what we're trying to do.
And it's not an empire in a territorial sense,
like the British empire.
This is an empire in the sense of a vast expansion
of human knowledge, leading to more power,
leading to a better world for humans.
It's the dream of progress.
So my question in this book is did the dream come true?
And did this great experiment in changing history work?
And, if so, how would we know it?
How do you tell if it's been successful?
It's a macro history question.
This is big history.
But I answer it through micro history,
because while there is all sorts of material evidence
you can point to that humans have
come to dominate the planet I would argue that there's
no single piece of material evidence
that nails the case that ultimately it's
an event of consciousness for human beings
to conclude that we dominate the planet,
and to conclude what the meaning of that event is.
And I'll talk more about this, but I really
want to focus on people's consciousness.
When did human beings become aware
of our domination of the planet?
And my answer is it's the late 19th century.
And my answer is the best way to look for this event is
through very thoughtful, articulate, smart people,
and they happen to be writers.
Because I think if you look at literature
you're getting consciousness.
That's where you go.
Those are the archives of consciousness.
It's in literature.
So I'm not using these guys as case studies.
I'm using them as kind of allegories.
Well, maybe they're more like-- I'm not using them
as biographies, but I'm pulling out evidence
from their lives and work to make my point
about the rise of and triumph of human empire.
Now note the dates.
They're all born in the second quarter of the 19th century
give or take.
The earliest to be born, Verne, is the last to die,
and he lives into the 20th century.
Morris and Stevenson live until the 1890's.
The point though is they're all most active as writers
in the last quarter of the 19th century.
So they overlap.
Their lives aren't quite overlap as much as their works do.
So they are writing at the time when
I'm claiming that the triumph of human empire
is becoming evident, and they are really aware of this,
and they're really interested in how it's happening
and what the meaning is.
So I'm just going to give a little background sketch
of what is happening in the greater world at that time,
later 19th century.
And I'm trying to remind you that it's
an age of globalization as much as ours is.
We are new but we're not that new.
So let me give some examples.
Actually the best is given by Verne himself.
He was interviewed in 1891, so he was kind of 60-ish,
by an editor of a Boston based kids
magazine, "The Youth's Companion."
So this editor contacted Verne and said
give me some reminiscences of your youth,
because Verne grew up in Nantes, in France.
So Verne wrote back.
He said, "I have seen the birth of phosphorus matches,
stamps, the metric system, steamboats
on the water, omni-buses, railways, trams, gas,
electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph.
I am of the generation between these two geniuses, Stevenson,
and Edison!"
Stevenson is the inventor of the railway, effective inventor.
And Edison, we all know Edison.
So between the railway and the dynamo
Verne says that's my generation, and that's
a really good way of defining it.
Another way though is just to look at the map of world.
This is a map from 1878.
It's from a British publisher.
I don't know how well you can see it,
but it's really-- I wish you could because it's
a very useful map to make my point.
In fact, when I saw this atlas containing this map in the map
room of the Oxford library, the Bodleian library,
I said that's it, I'm seeing human empire.
I see it.
And one thing I saw was the fact that up here
at the top of Greenland it's still unfinished.
They don't quite know what the Arctic geography is.
But most of all I notice-- See these lines
show steamship lines and some of them are submarine cable lines.
And they are connecting the old world with the new world,
and where they hit the new world you can get on a railway
and go across the United States.
This is 1878.
You can do this in three weeks or under.
And actually Robert Louis Stevenson
did it, because he was chasing his American girlfriend who
lived out in Monterrey.
So three weeks from Glasgow to the beaches of Monterrey,
which I have to say you will hear in "Treasure Island."
"Treasure Island" is California.
It's not the Caribbean, Johnny Depp aside.
OK?
But you can see the wiring of the world then.
And I'll remind you what this means.
It means, first of all, people are moving,
and not just writers.
Between 1870 and 1925 one seventh
of the world's working age population changed countries.
That's a huge amount of migration.
In the same era there's much lower cost for transport.
And it's not just wheat opening up,
say the American West to the European market.
It's also stuff like petroleum, and rubber, and frozen foods
pretty soon.
And finally, there are a lot of financial connections
that you don't see but are implied by this.
There's the gold standard.
Investments overseas are at a much higher rate
than they are now.
Before World War I more than half
of the British investments in everything were overseas.
They weren't in Britain.
So for these writers that I'm talking about,
they love this world.
They're excited by it.
These are people who are really interested in science
and technology as we would now say.
And so this world of human empire is to them thrilling.
This is Verne in his old age.
Even if you haven't read him you know him,
because you know "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,"
and "Around the World in 80 Days,"
and "Journey to the Center of the Earth," and the moon
novels.
You know him.
He was not a scientist himself.
He never claimed to be.
He never used the term science fiction, didn't like it,
but he read everything he could in science journalism,
as we would now say.
And so he took note cards and many of his books
feel sort of spliced together from these notes
that he took from this voracious reading.
But in the moon novels it's not only what he read,
but he also talked a lot with his cousin who
was a physics teacher in one of [INAUDIBLE] in Paris.
So some of the chapters of the moon novel
were just kind of like your physics textbook cause
he's telling you what the trajectories are,
and how this works, and how that works.
William Morris is not so familiar a name
in the United States.
He's very familiar in Britain mainly
as a writer, a poet, and a folklorist, but he is also,
we would now say, an entrepreneur, an innovator,
and a maker, because his great thrill
was to manufacture household goods for a large market.
He's a lay engineer, running factories
to make household products that are versatile, durable,
and beautiful.
To this day this is my study at home.
This is a Morris chair with a very nifty adjustable,
reclining back.
You see you just move the pole, and you can lean back.
So Morris is, as I say, an entrepreneur par excellence.
And finally, Robert Louis Stevenson.
Now this is a portrait of him in middle age.
He's living in Britain now in the south of England.
And this is his wife, that American wife he chased after,
finally got her to divorce her husband, marry him.
It was quite a story.
She's on the sofa with this kind of Indian shawl [INAUDIBLE].
He is pacing talking.
He is an intense person.
Now you know again that he wrote "Treasure Island."
This is the map that started the book, another uncharted island.
You also know that he wrote "Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
I love this cover, the transformation,
great god, can it be.
But in the background is this lighthouse.
And that's a reminder Robert Louis Stevenson
is of the family of the lighthouse Stevensons,
as they've been called.
This is a family of Civil Engineers
who've built most if not all of the lighthouses
that to this day stand around the northern tier of Great
Britain.
His great grandfather, no his grandfather, sorry, also
Robert, designed and built the Bell Rock Lighthouse,
which is off to the east of Edinburgh to this day.
Stevenson got a degree from Edinburgh in engineering.
He wrote a thesis with honors.
The family expected to be an engineer.
He wanted to be a writer, but he always
kept his respect for engineers, and to be very interestingly,
talks about writing as design problems,
as engineering design problems.
Anyway, so he is a professional engineer.
The other two are just lovers of science and technology.
I want to just stress, these guys love this new world,
but they are also deeply disturbed by it, troubled
by it.
And this is a paradox that I'm going
to be talking a little about.
They are uncompromising in saying
it may be an interesting world but it's not for me.
Verne's mouth piece is Captain Nemo.
We know this from letters that Verne was writing to his editor
when he was writing that book.
"I am not what you call a civilized man."
This is Nemo, who was a terrorist by the way,
seeking ships without provocation.
He wasn't civilized.
Verne is saying this about himself.
Morris is so disaffected that he is a revolutionary socialist
who spent a lot of time advocating for revolution
in Britain at a time when Marx had died
but Engels is still there.
And this is an astounding statement of disaffection.
"Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things,
the leading passion in my life has been
and is hatred of modern civilization."
And he means it.
He really means it.
And Stevenson is a little gentler,
but still he goes into exile essentially.
He takes a trip to the south seas
that ends up that he settles there.
First he's going to spend his winters there,
and then he decides to move there permanently,
and essentially throws in his lot
with the native Polynesians, especially the Samoans.
And here he is writing to his best friend back
home, Henry James, trying to explain
why he's decided to spend his life in Samoa.
"I was never fond of towns, houses, society,
or -it seems- civilization."
They're all using this word.
What is the problem with these guys?
They are well-to-do, bourgeois, white, male Westerners.
The world is organized around their benefit.
And yet that is the feeling that they have.
What is their problem?
One way to answer it is to go back to the maps.
This is the same atlas that I showed you before.
OK, same atlas that had 50 maps in all.
This is Africa in 1878.
So for Verne one way to answer the question what
is his problem is that he sees that he's running out
of room in the world to write about.
You notice he wants to map the globe in words,
but just as he and others map the globe you lose the unknown.
It becomes all known.
There's no more mystery.
I love this map because, look, you
can see places that have been mapped and claimed.
Different colors are different countries.
This is the scramble for Africa that's going on.
But then there are these empty areas that haven't been mapped.
Verne's first novel is "Five Weeks in a Balloon,"
and it's the story of a journey across this part of Africa,
trying to put together some of the earlier maps
to make a coherent picture.
The balloon is exciting, but once you keep mapping Africa
you're sort of losing the adventure
of having the unknown.
Verne's second novel is the story
of Captain Hatteras who was an Arctic explorer.
And this captain is going up here
trying to understand the geography of the Arctic.
And again from the map and the atlas, you can see,
it almost got it.
There are the names of the expeditions here
that are listed, that Verne listed in his novel.
So it's exciting to think that we're
going to have the answers soon.
But once you have the answer-- Verne
has a sense of running out of free space.
And he's an anarchist.
He doesn't want to have to live under somebody's command.
And there's not a lot of that space left.
This map, same atlas, of outer London,
OK, this is outer London.
This is inner London that you're familiar with,
the houses of parliament and so forth, Big Ben.
But this is what's growing in Morris' lifetime,
and this is what bothers him most about this world,
the expansion of urban settlements, which he considers
crowded, ugly, constraining.
He was born and raised near Epping Forest
just outside this area.
Actually he was raised in the area where the London
Olympics took place a couple years ago, which
was sort of a wasteland even then that Morris felt still
had the beauty of the marshland, and the rivers,
and the streams, and the little baby Thames there,
forests, the old medieval fortress in Epping.
He loved this.
He saw this disappearing as the city just overflew,
like overflowed its banks.
Maybe another analogy would be like a volcano, just kind
of throwing lava all in this area.
So that's what bothered Morris.
And as for Stevenson, his move to the south seas
was intended to be helping him find better physical health,
to get some interesting writing out of it.
It turned out to be a lesson, he very quickly
learned, in extinction.
He saw the Polynesians literally being extinguished as a race
by an enormously high death rate,
especially on some islands.
It varied a lot, and he was interested why.
But within a few days of his landing in the Marquesas,
that was his first stop, this island world he saw
was a dying world because of the Western invasion.
And he felt that, he said they are being destroyed inevitably
by our shabby civilization.
Shabby.
And this is one of his early journal entries
about his landing.
This is like two days after he landed in the Marquesas,
and he's realizing these are dying people.
And what's so interesting is he says it's not just
they're dying, we're going to die too.
We're in this together.
Their case will be as ours, "death coming in like a tide."
So all three of these writers have real fundamental, not just
quarrels, but arguments with civilization
as it's being defined by the expansion
of human empire in their time.
So what I'd like to do now is describe, briefly,
how they dealt with this, and how
they came to terms living in this kind of a world.
And the answer is romance.
And by that I don't mean "Fifty Shades of Grey."
I don't mean *** romance, though there's an element.
Or I don't even mean chick lit kind of you
know adult romance, softer stuff.
What I mean is a much broader, deeper understanding
of what romance has been in world literature.
It's basically the oldest kind of literature that humans have,
telling stories about heroes that aren't quite superhuman
but are more than normally human.
Stories that are not entirely fantastic,
but are not constrained by every day reality.
In the words of Henry James, Stevenson's friend,
romance is experienced liberally,
experienced liberally.
So not unreal but free.
So the Ur example are the legends of King Arthur.
King Arthur was nice.
Those are romance stories.
There are Norse sagas that so entranced Morris and that
make the basis of Wagnerian opera.
Those are other examples.
They consider Atlantis as a romance, shipwreck,
undiscovered island.
Now romance lost some prestige with the rise
of the novel, which is much more focused on every day realism,
both social and material, but romance
endures even if it doesn't have the respect
that the novel typically has.
There are graphic novels that lead to Stephen King.
There is historical novels that start with Sir Walter
Scott, lead to Hillary [INAUDIBLE].
There's just creepy stories like Edgar Allan Poe wrote.
These are all examples of romance,
and that's what I'm talking about when
I talk about these three writers all wrote romance, and not
only wrote it, they found their salvation
in reading and writing romance.
They all set out to do this, but they all
changed the kind of romance that they
wrote to fit their interests in what we would now
call science and technology.
So Verne, here he is.
I showed you the old Verne.
I want to show you the young Verne, just to remind you.
Yes, he was young once.
This is when he first arrives in Paris.
He's in his early 20's.
He's going to conquer the world.
He's going to be a great playwright.
Well, that didn't work out, but 20 years later
what he did do was invent the geographical romance.
That's what he called his stories.
He said collectively they are extraordinary voyages,
extraordinary journeys.
That's what intrigued him.
And that formula was enormously successful.
He wrote 80 odd of these novels.
Many of them were staged.
Made a lot of money for him.
But he has this attitude of defiance
that he's going to go where he wants to go and not
be constrained by Western Europe.
He doesn't write about Western Europe.
That's home.
That's boring.
He writes about other people and other events.
This is an illustration from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,"
the original edition, and if you just read the words of Verne
you're missing the illustrations that
go in these early editions here are fabulous.
This is Nemo on the deck of the Nautilus, arms crossed.
He's also defiant, looking at that British frigate
that he's going to sink very soon.
And this is terrorism but it's thrilling.
And Nemo, of course, has just become an icon of modern world,
I suggest because that world feels pretty constraining,
and romance gives us a hero who defies it.
James Mason who was the Disney version, or just
these endless mash-ups of Captain Nemo
doing whatever that defies the rest of civilization.
So Morris also, I'm going back to
the young, vulnerable Morris.
This is a self portrait just to remind you.
He was not always an old man.
This is when he married a gorgeous but difficult woman.
But all these guys have marriage stories worth going into,
but we'll skip that for now.
I remind you that Morris started as a medievalist.
He was starting with the King Arthur stories.
But when he discovered the Norse language and Norse sagas
the land of Iceland became for him
another land where real stories could
be told that could no longer be told
in London, in outer London.
So he went to Iceland on a couple of trips in the early
1870's.
These are pony trek trips that he
took as a sort of Bourgeois adventure,
and he began to think about stories
that were set in places like Iceland
but aren't in any real place.
It was a place that offered him an imaginative alternative.
And so out of this Morris invented
a new kind of romance, which we now call fantasy.
He invented secondary worlds.
That's Tolkein's phrase.
Tolkien, like Morris, studied Icelandic, taught it.
The two of them are very similar,
and Tolkien is really a disciple of Morris'.
So if you haven't heard of Morris you should.
This is his first fantasy novel, "The Story the Glittering Plain
or the Land of the Living Men."
The one that's best known and longest,
"The Well at the World's End."
This chapter reminds us there is always eroticism there.
"The Chamber of Love in the Wilderness."
That's the story of that.
That's the title of that illustration there.
These books he produced with a press that he started
called Kelmscott Press, because he
felt that ordinary printing was unworthy of these stories.
He wanted a sort of magical feel to them.
So Morris is just extraordinary for just
leaving the world behind and inventing
a whole new kind of romance famously.
Robert Louis Stevenson-- This is the defiant Stevenson.
When he was entering university to study engineering
he has a velvet jacket on and long hair,
and he's no engineer.
Or he's going to at least show that to others.
But Stevenson really expanded and reconfigured
his own understanding of romance through 20 years
of difficulties, some of them health, some of them related
to his exile.
As I say you know him from "Treasure Island,"
and from stories like "Jeckel and Hyde," or "Kidnapped."
But when he got to the south seas
he started writing much grittier romances.
I mean maybe this is an image of what
you would think the south seas is.
This is Stevenson on the right fanning his wife who is just
below the palm tree, two Polynesians.
They look like hippies on the lawn here,
but this is an interlude in a much tougher world,
particularly when Stevenson got to Samoa.
It was in the midst of colonial wars
involving Germany, Britain, and America.
So one of the first things he wrote in Samoa
is what we would now call new journalism.
And he wrote about these words in a little pamphlet
titled "A Footnote to History."
And he meant that ironically.
In other words it now looks like a footnote to history,
but these dirty little wars are going to be history.
That's the message.
And that's why this book is well worth reading.
But he also, in lots of conversations with Polynesians,
picked up some of their tails and retold them in English
for both the Polynesian and a Western audience.
This is Stevenson on the front deck
of the house he lived in in Samoa, his wife ***.
Her daughter is down here.
Son here, son in-law.
And Stevenson's mother, who is there from Scotland.
She came all the way from Edinburgh to live with her son
after her husband's death.
So there she is in her widow's cap.
I mean I just think this image is just really something,
but as a writer Stevenson found all sorts of new material
and ways of looking at the world in Samoa.
And he wrote, as I say, some from legends,
but he also wrote some very tough, gritty stories
of criminality, greed, and *** exploitation
in the south seas.
The best of them is "The Ebb-Tide."
It's a book about the length of "Heart of Darkness."
It's better.
You should read it, and this is the first sentence.
"Throughout the island world of the Pacific,
scattered men of many European races
and from almost every grade of society
carry activity and disseminate disease."
Now if I were in a lit class I would
go over every word, every word, because it's meaningful.
Here's another sentence like Bacon's that just says so much,
and that's just the first sentence.
Read that story.
Those writings of Stevenson in his day
were either ignored or ridiculed.
Nobody took them seriously.
People wanted more "Treasure Island" kind of.
And Stevenson, no, that's not what he was interested in.
He said, I have a romance of destiny, romance of destiny,
it has led me here, and this is what I'm writing.
So I just want to wrap up by kind
of following up on that statement of Stevenson's,
and talking about the way these three writers help
us think about human empire both as progress
and the end of the world.
It's both, at least that's their conclusion.
For one thing they all remind us that what
we're going through today in the sense of a highly
constrained and human dominated world, it's new
but it's not completely new.
They felt they were living in such a world,
and they were trying to figure out how to live best in it.
And I don't want to turn them into self help writers.
They are not.
But there are some examples that they
set that I think are worth pointing out.
The first one is that they are realistic.
They understand, want to understand
how the world is and not invade the facts of life.
In fact, CS Lewis, another famous writer, very fond
of Morris, wrote about Morris.
He said Morris has faced the facts.
So facing the facts is-- These are realists.
They also love romance.
And the argument I'm trying to make
is in some ways romance helps us face facts more than just kind
of brutal enumeration of material conditions,
because it takes into account humans needing stories
and symbols to understand the world.
Second thing is they all have a lot of courage.
This is the defiance.
They're going to do what they want to do,
and it doesn't matter if they lose.
It doesn't matter if their book sales don't go up.
It doesn't matter if people don't appreciate them.
If there's something they want to do,
and they just say this is my adventure, I'm going to do it,
and I don't have to win to be successful.
And third, and this is very interesting in a world
where so many people want to save the world, right?
Yeah, they want to save the world,
they want the revolution, they are out there actively trying
to make it a better place, but they also
believe they have a duty and a right to happiness,
and that it's a beautiful world, and part of the human duty
is to enjoy it, and to think about this
and actively seek ways of enjoying the world.
So they realize the live in human empire,
but they are trying to liberate their experience,
and to create a human world that's
livable and beautiful within human empire.
Thank you.
Questions?
AUDIENCE: What I think empire in the usual sense of
say a society within humanity having
territory and power there are two aspects, one of them
is spread, scope, and the other one is control.
When we think of human empire I see
that as how much of the population of creatures,
whether it be humans or whatever, spreads and takes
over the food supply, takes over the water
supply, and so on, possibly slamming
into the wall with population growth,
versus understanding and ability to make the setting
work for it?
So we have both of those with humanity.
We're clearly in disagreement with some people about
whether we're crashing head long into a wall or not,
but I see these as both important factors
but very different factors in the growth of human empire.
And those who believe we've only extend the empire to space
soon enough to avoid greater overcrowding problems,
[INAUDIBLE] much greater problems on Earth,
have fantasies or romances in that direction.
It seems to me there's still a large space
that you didn't cover in this talk, I guess the initial talk.
Do your writings cover those dimensions as well?
ROSALIND: So tell-- There's a lot
to respond-- No this is a great comment.
But tell me what space you're asking about.
AUDIENCE: Oh, at least once when I
used the word space I meant expanding
to space stations, or the moon, or some such,
but also the topic area of human empire.
It seems to me there are those two very different dimensions
of it.
ROSALIND: Yeah, at least two and maybe more, but certainly
in human empire and also just in more normal empires,
the sense of the British empire, whatever, there's
control of territory, but then there's
control of what goes on within the territory.
That's very different.
And some empires are famously loose.
It's like whatever can go on, and there's
a lot of local autonomy, and others are much more
controlling.
So there's that distinction, and it's not clear.
I don't think it's clear yet sort of how human empire fits
into that spectrum.
I think what is obvious is that domination is not control.
I would say that humans dominate what happens on the planet.
You name a topic, the human influence is paramount.
It doesn't mean we control what goes on.
So that's the problem in fact, or one of the problems
is the domination without the control.
In terms of going to outer space,
and that is just I think a way of saying,
yeah there's a lot more to the cosmos than the Earth,
but realistically speaking the numbers of people on the Earth,
the expense of-- I mean imaginatively it's
very important.
Realistically, pragmatically I have not booked my ticket yet.
AUDIENCE: So I was just interested actually
in your choice to focus on British writers.
I think the time period they're kind of writing in, living in,
I see a lot of the same things happening
in like the expansion of the West, transcontinental
railroad, obviously Africa kind of came up,
and their view I think could probably
be expanded to look at a few other regions that
were going through very similar transformations
if not more dramatic at that time period.
I wasn't sure if it was just for the sake of [INAUDIBLE] if you
started to see this happening in writers that were writing out
the West or explorers that were in Africa at some
of the same time?
ROSALIND: Well, I work with a lot
of people who only write about the United
States or the Americans.
So part of it was a little rebelliousness on my part.
It's like you know, there are other people
who are-- You could write an American version of this,
but to some extent Leo Marx already
has in "The Machine in the Garden."
So I would point you there to look
at this theme with American writers.
I think you could take any part of the world in this time
period, any literary tradition.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written about it
in the "Hundred Years of Solitude."
This is his theme.
I could go through sort of--
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I guess I was just
wondering if you see it as a war of like the consciousness
of the time or [INAUDIBLE] a product of there.
Because it is such a global phenomenon during this time
period, which is sometimes uncanny in literature,
where you have so many different writers who never have met
or read each others' works writing in such similar themes.
ROSALIND: Exactly.
Yes, I would say that.
And taking these three guys is in part
because I wanted to focus on this paradox
that they are the winners, or that they are the people you
would expect to be most satisfied.
I mean you can see why somebody writing from Polynesia
is not going to be real happy about what's going on,
but you would think-- So it's the kind
of counter intuitive nature of their dissatisfaction
that interested me, and just the fact it's a big world,
many too many people to write about.
But I really regard the book as opening a door,
and I would love other people to start thinking about this
and thinking of other ways of thinking about human empire,
thinking about writing.
There's a whole age of the anthropocene discussion going
on that I think this really relates to.
I think that's just another terminology
for similar analysis.
So I don't at all mean for this to be, OK, read the book
and that's the end of it.
It's door opening books that I like,
and I would like this to be one of them.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
Is there some general things you could say about the way
that the three of them articulated
what was being lost?
Was there any kind of generality?
I mean, you talked about their dissatisfaction.
Was there some other themes that they
shared about what was actually being
lost in that transformation?
ROSALIND: Most generally that when
you live in a human condition of human domination
you lose so much.
It's the sense of loss of ways of life, ways of thinking,
experiences that humans need to make us human.
And once you displace the non-human
you become less human.
And each of them could name somewhat different
what those experiences are.
It's like humanity works fine if you
have other things in the world, but the moment
that you essentially have a monoculture then it's
harder to be human because there's
nothing else, no other scale of reference or mode of reference.
All right.
That's a really great question.
AUDIENCE: I was curious about the use of the word
civilization.
It seems to me that would have meant something substantially
different than now.
When What trying to think of what
they might have meant by it, civilizing influence
is basically the collective pressure
on people to behave less like their nature
in order to get along.
And it seems to me, the more crowded
we get the more organizations dominate rather
than individuals or families dominate
behavior in a town square.
If it's a village it's a few families getting along.
If it's a big city there are enormous city rule impositions
controlling how things go in that little place
where a few people live around because of all the other people
who live within a mile or two.
Do you see it as that kind of, you could call it
governmental pressure on people's behavior, that's
part of the problem?
ROSALIND: I would just say organized,
because the organizations can be non-governmental.
They can be commercial or whatever.
Again, I think you really put your finger on a major theme
here.
The word civilization, thanks to Google,
now we can go back and find it everywhere in the past,
and scholars are greatly aided by having search engines that
allow us to pull out that word, and see where it is,
and see patterns, and so forth.
There's also, I will say, the Oxford English Dictionary,
which gives contextual usages.
So we can study that word.
But you're right that it, for them,
is pointing to what is generally a plus thing, because there's
non-civilized or uncivilized.
That's bad.
I mean that's a word that's used a lot in this era and even now,
I mean uncivilized.
So civilization is good.
So for them to be saying I am having trouble
with it is somewhat rebellious.
I would say that beginning in the early 1900's there is just
a fundamental disconnect in Western civilization
between a real emphasis on the individual as having rights,
and liberties, and a future, and a story that's worth telling.
This you find in romanticism, you find in democracy,
you find in the invention of the word individualism by de
Tocqueville in the 1830's.
The whole romantic movement in that large sense
says you matter, you matter a lot,
and you should follow your bliss, and write your poetry.
And these romance writers believed that and follow it.
But it's the same era when the increasing powers of humanity
are creating more and more systems, right,
that constrain individuals, and that,
yes, bring progress of certain types that are undeniable.
But these two things are happening together.
And I think we still live in a world
where that tension is very real, and each of us
struggles with it.
The sociologist Manuel Castells has brought this idea up
to date by saying there are two things going on in the world.
This is in his trilogy on the information age.
One thing is the development of networks which are, especially
financial, but also technological
of all sorts, networks that connect us.
And there's also a quest for identity, for self, who am I,
and where do I fit, who do I belong to, what matters to me.
So Castells says network and self.
I would say romanticism, or romance, and civilization.
These are two variations on the theme of a fundamental tension,
and tensions make the world interesting but not easy.
AUDIENCE: I think there may be another aspect
to the reaction, their reaction, to civilization.
I'm thinking particularly [INAUDIBLE] but may well
[INAUDIBLE], and that is that this
was during the real growth of the industrial revolution,
and civilization as it expanded involved a lot of pollution,
a lot of noise, and certainly from Morris' viewpoint
it was just plain ugly and disgusting.
And also in terms of romance and romanticism looking back
this is not too long after large numbers, maybe a majority
of the English farmers were forcefully expelled
from their lands to force them to be
wage slaves in the factories.
And so again he was looking back to that and those aspects.
ROSALIND: You know more British history than the average bear.
This is all very pertinent to Morris particularly.
Similar things were going on in France,
but Morris does something like he takes a paddle on the rive,
and he's fishing, and he notices that some agency, it's
like the equivalent of the MDC, has trimmed the bushes
to make them less obtrusive.
But it's so ugly he says.
He writes letters to the newspaper.
Just how can it be so ugly, and then
the ducks can't swim among the branches that you've trimmed.
It's not even just pollution.
It's the management.
Because he looks at the bush.
He doesn't see a bush.
He sees an agency, I mean in the literal sense.
So that's really-- It doesn't have to be destruction.
It can just be the sense-- Well, again,
one of my favorite quotes is from "Buckaroo Banzai."
Right? "No matter where you go, there you are."
And that's one way of describing what makes him so angry.
It's I can never get away from people.
I'm always seeing evidence.
You know.
Any other questions?
Well, you know systems can be very good at times
and they bring you lunch.
So I think maybe we'll enjoy that together.
Thank you again for taking the time and attention.
I really, really appreciate it.
Thanks.