The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750–2000 PDF
Preview The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750–2000
THE GREAT SEESAW By the same author THE PEAKS OF LYELL A CENTENARY HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE GOLD AND PAPER MINES IN THE SPINIFEX THE RUSH THAT NEVER ENDED THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE ACROSS A RED WORLD THE RISE OF BROKEN HILL THE STEEL MASTER TRIUMPH OF THE NOMADS THE CAUSES OF WAR A LAND HALF WON THE BLAINEY VIEW OUR SIDE OF THE COUNTRY ALL FOR AUSTRALIA The Great Seesaw A New View of the Western World, 1750-2000 Geoffrey Blainey M MACMILLAN PRESS © Geoffrey Blainey 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 978-0-333-46055-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Blainey, Geoffrey The great seesaw: a new view of the western world, 1750-2000 I. History, Modern 2. Civilization, Occidental I. Title 909' .0981 '207 D299 ISBN 978-1-349-10088-0 ISBN 978-1-349-10086-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10086-6 Contents 1 The Seesaw: A first view 1 The Wilderness Versus the Machine The Swing of Optimism and Pessimism Riders of the Seesaw PART ONE 2 Happy Isle 11 Till Moons Shall Wax and Wane No More Optimism: A Word is Coined A Savage of the Seesaw Paradise at Tahiti The Tranquil Coast Geography of the Noble Savage A Brick-Coloured Butterfly They are Weak but We are Strong! The Romantics The Pattern of the Seesaw 3 The Best is Yet to Be 35 Science as Conqueror Darwin and his Nightmare of Elephants Marx and the Glorious Machines The Gothic and the Skyscraper The Reverend Mr Pessimist A Flood of Grain The Engines of Peace 4 A Pocket Watch for Progress 56 The Decline of the Noble Savage Older than Adam A Cheerful Lesson from Prehistory A Step Ladder for the World's Peoples The Fuegians: Bottom of the Ladder A Parable of the Wild Shores Enemies of Proud Progress A Seed-Bed of Grand Ideas 5 Will the West Decline? 80 Rise of a Prophet A Vision of Europe's Decay The Yellow Peril A Life and Death Question Why Malthus Was Reborn 6 Temple of the Wild 95 The Paint of Leisure New Thinkers: The Mask Snatchers A Diversion: The Long Cord of Pessimism The Boy Scout and Niagara: New Symbols The Flesh of Fashion The Return of the Native A Cat Among Pigeons Australia: One End of the Seesaw The Two Faces of Progress 7 Cold and White: The Role of Climate and Race 121 Climate: A Secret of Greatness The Danger of the Midday Sun Nakedness on the Seesaw Colour and Race The Cult of the Anglo-Saxons A Surge of Anti-Semitism Nationalism- A Heavyweight on the Seesaw 8 The Great War and Other Half-Shocks 139 Why the London Clerk did not Brain his Mother War as a Shock The Wings of Victory The Seesaw is Stuck! Lost Eldorados Three Atomic Bombs PART TWO 9 The Beckoning Moon !59 Visions of 1984 The Surge of Hope The Race to the Moon The Economics of the Prodigal Son Unveiling The Great Society Great Leaps Forward, and Sideways The Return of the Ladder with the Easy Steps 10 The King is Dying: The Swing Against Technology 175 The Swing from Technology to Nature Crusaders Small is Beautiful, Big is a Menace Vietnam and the Noble Peasant The Strange Oscillations of Nuclear Fears The Gods Reshuffled Postscript: The Intellectuals' Enemy II Rise of the Counter-Culture 192 Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Liberation of the Teenager and Young Adult The Rise of the New Left A Competing Culture Hallucinations Woodstock and other Happenings Why Nature was Kind in the West Prophets from the Asylums A Chronology of a Cultural Uprising 12 The Return ofthe Noble Savage 213 Anthropology Comes of Age The Descent from the High Pulpit The Empires Dissolve Turning History on its Head Is Climate Still a Weathercock? 13 Voyage to the 'Ocean of Misery' 226 The Sense of a Shrinking Globe The Doomsters The Seasons Were Silly 'Ocean of Misery' The Club of Rome The Strange Harvest of 1972 14 Oil Crisis: A Turning Point 242 The Contrasting Eras of Coal and Oil The Embargo of 1973 A Revolution in the Oil Lands The Nature Movement and Its Quiet Influence Flashback: A Forgotten Gold Crisis The Slaves Diminish Guilt and Gloom A Luddite Revival No Rabbit in the Economist's Hat Economics Needs a New Home Ground PART THREE 15 The Long Economic Waves 267 A Pattern in Economic Life Inflation, Gold and War Do Economic Events Shape the Cultural Mood? A Rocking-Chair of War and Peace The Death and Resurrection of a Theory 16 The Magic of New-Found Lands 281 The Coral Continent and Other Lands New-Found Lands, 1890-1914 The Moonshot Age The Midget Bible and the Heroic Peasant The End of Faith in the Third World l 7 The Puzzle of The Seesaw 290 The Decline of Christian and Classical Views We are All Canaries, Locked In our Cages Dynamic Pushers of the Seesaw The Gap in Generations The Gap Between Nations Amnesia- A Disease of the Computer Era Forces that Push the Seesaw Will the Seesaw Continue to Swing? Key Words and Definitions 311 Acknowledgements 316 Notes 317 Index 345 1 The Seesaw: A First View In the western world a powerful seesaw is at work but is rarely noticed. The seesaw carries a wide range of beliefs and attitudes, and when the seesaw moves many of those attitudes move too. The seesaw has been tilting up and down since at least the eighteenth century, and at times it reaches an extreme angle. We recently experienced a tilt of the seesaw, so sudden that cultural and economic life temporarily seemed to lose its sense of direction. The seesaw is an indicator of the condition of the western world, and is especially vital during a long period of relative peace between western nations. We are so accustomed to seeing our own era as anxious that we do not realise that the four decades since the Second World War have formed perhaps the most remarkable period of relative peace in the history of the European peoples. During a long peace, ideas tend to compete and clash with even more vigour and subtlety than during a major war. The seesaw helps to explain a clash of ideas and attitudes which otherwise remains a puzzle. The Wilderness Versus the Machine Love of Nature usually sits at one end of the seesaw and love of Technology sits at the other end. Thus the counter-culture of the late 1960s was not only sympathetic towards Nature but was also a rebellion against a civilisation that enthroned machines. In recent centuries Nature and Technology have usually been opponents but they do not have to fight. Occa sionally they co-exist peacefully, but again and again they have occupied the ends of the seesaw, the one rising when the other fell. Those who admire Technology have tended to criticise Nature, and those who admire Nature have tended to criticise Technology. Other cultural attitudes move in time with the seesaw. For example a swing towards Nature is usually accompanied by changes in attitudes to nakedness, a warm climate, clothing styles and other topics which at first sight seem unrelated. 1
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