Why the marching band refused to yield

[alice wellintown]

“Any history is a reflection of at least two periods—when the events
happened and when one is writing—and also of the writer’s personal
experience.”

Elijah Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009).


In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the
microbes that troubled him, or even his helplessness before the
forces. To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in its new
relation staggered his new education by its evidence of growing
complexity, and multiplicity, and even contradiction, in life. He
could not escape it; politics or science, the lesson was the same, and
at every step it blocked his path whichever way he turned. He found it
in politics; he ran against it in science; he struck it in everyday
life, as though he were still Adam in the Garden of Eden between God
who was unity, and Satan who was complexity, with no means of deciding
which was truth. The problem was the same for McKinley as for Adam,
and for the Senate as for Satan. Hay was going to wreck on it, like
King and Adams.

All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had always won.
The National Government and the national unity had overcome every
resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were triumphant over all
the curates; yet the greater the unity and the momentum, the worse
became the complexity and the friction. One had in vain bowed one's
neck to railways, banks, corporations, trusts, and even to the popular
will as far as one could understand it -- or even further; the
multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was increasing, and
threatened to increase beyond reason. He had surrendered all his
favorite prejudices, and foresworn even the forms of criticism --
except for his pet amusement, the Senate, which was a tonic or
stimulant necessary to healthy life; he had accepted uniformity and
Pteraspis and ice age and tramways and telephones; and now -- just
when he was ready to hang the crowning garland on the brow of a
completed education -- science itself warned him to begin it again
from the beginning.

Maundering among the magnets he bethought himself that once, a full
generation earlier, he had begun active life by writing a confession
of geological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles Lyell, and that it
might be worth looking at if only to steady his vision. He read it
again, and thought it better than he could do at sixty-three; but
elderly minds always work loose. He saw his doubts grown larger, and
became curious to know what had been said about them since 1870. The
Geological Survey supplied stacks of volumes, and reading for steady
months; while, the longer he read, the more he wondered, pondered,
doubted what his delightful old friend Sir Charles Lyell would have
said about it.

Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught young.
Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to
see. The older the mind, the older its complexities, and the further
it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars resolve themselves
into multiples; yet the child will always see but one. Adams asked
whether geology since 1867 had drifted towards unity or multiplicity,
and he felt that the drift would depend on the age of the man who
drifted.

Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see what had
happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid fish, the
Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had sported when
geological life was young; as though they had all remained together in
time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow Castle, and repeat "how
charming is divine philosophy!" He felt almost aggrieved to find
Walcott so vigorously acting the part of Comus as to have flung the
ganoid all the way off to Colorado and far back into the Lower Trenton
limestone, making the Pteraspis as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by
spawning an ancestry for him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of
known organic life. A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone
were the liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the
uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not for
all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet historian dare to
hazard even in secret an opinion about the value of Natural Selection
by Minute Changes under Uniform Conditions, for he could know no more
about it than most of his neighbors who knew nothing; but natural
selection that did not select -- evolution finished before it began --
minute changes that refused to change anything during the whole
geological record - survival of the highest order in a fauna which had
no origin -- uniformity under conditions which had disturbed
everything else in creation -- to an honest-meaning though ignorant
student who needed to prove Natural Selection and not assume it, such
sequence brought no peace. He wished to be shown that changes in form
caused evolution in force; that chemical or mechanical energy had by
natural selection and minute changes, under uniform conditions,
converted itself into thought. The ganoid fish seemed to prove -- to
him -- that it had selected neither new form nor new force, but that
the curates were right in thinking that force could be increased in
volume or raised in intensity only by help of outside force. To him,
the ganoid was a huge perplexity, none the less because neither he nor
the ganoid troubled Darwinians, but the more because it helped to
reveal that Darwinism seemed to survive only in England. In vain he
asked what sort of evolution had taken its place. Almost any doctrine
seemed orthodox. Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force
acting on its own lines quite beyond mechanical explanation, had
cropped up again. A little more, and he would be driven back on the
old independence of species.

What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like the
theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to them;
but to the historian who sought only the direction of thought and had
begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell in 1867, the matter
of direction seemed vital. Then he had entered gaily the door of the
glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of unities and
uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the
old roads ran about in every direction, overrunning, dividing,
subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths that
led nowhere, and sequences that could not be proved. The active
geologists had mostly become specialists dealing with complexities far
too technical for an amateur, but the old formulas still seemed to
serve for beginners, as they had served when new.

So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of Lyell and
Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into half-a-dozen
intermittent chills in recent geology and in the northern hemisphere
alone, while no geologist had ventured to assert that the glaciation
of the southern hemisphere could possibly be referred to a horizon
more remote. Continents still rose wildly and wildly sank, though
Professor Suess of Vienna had written an epoch-making work, showing
that continents were anchored like crystals, and only oceans rose and
sank. Lyell's genial uniformity seemed genial still, for nothing had
taken its place, though, in the interval, granite had grown young,
nothing had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge
overthrusts had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even
to discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing that
progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.

Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science than the
gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness in no way
concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or
discuss the principles of any science; but the history of the mind
concerned the historian alone, and the historian had no vital concern
in anything else, for he found no change to record in the body. In
thought the Schools, like the Church, raised ignorance to a faith and
degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution survived like the trilobites
without evolving, and yet the evolutionists held the whole field, and
had even plucked up courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord
Kelvin forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their
experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly to
this last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff of
Physical Religion in the effort to force unification of the universe;
they had protested with mild conviction that they could not state the
geological record in terms of time; they had murmured Ignoramus under
their breath; but they had never dared to assert the Ignorabimus that
lay on the tips of their tongues.

Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming change
of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by attractions
affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times by sheer
violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual, electrolytic -- who
knew what? -- defying science, if not denying known law; and the
wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a "larger
synthesis" to unify the anarchy again. Historians have got into far
too much trouble by following schools of theology in their efforts to
enlarge their synthesis, that they should willingly repeat the process
in science. For human purposes a point must always be soon reached
where larger synthesis is suicide.

Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of rapidly
increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that the change
might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing. Any student, of
any age, thinking only of a thought and not of his thought, should
delight in turning about and trying the opposite motion, as he
delights in the spring which brings even to a tired and irritated
statesman the larger synthesis of peach-blooms, cherry-blossoms, and
dogwood, to prove the folly of fret. Every schoolboy knows that this
sum of all knowledge never saved him from whipping; mere years help
nothing; King and Hay and Adams could neither of them escape
floundering through the corridors of chaos that opened as they passed
to the end; but they could at least float with the stream if they only
knew which way the current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh
with the Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by
side with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged and
unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it serve? A
seeker of truth -- or illusion -- would be none the less restless,
though a shark!