Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

14

THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION

Perhaps the greatest intellectual casualty of World War I was the idea of progress. Prior to 1914 there had been no major conflict for a hundred years, life expectancy in the West had increased dramatically, many diseases and child mortality had been conquered, Christianity had spread to vast areas of Africa and Asia. Not everyone agreed this was progress – Joseph Conrad had drawn attention to racism and imperialism, and Emile Zola to squalor. But for most people the nineteenth century had been an era of moral, material, and social progress. World War I overturned that at a stroke.

Or did it? Progress is a notoriously elusive concept. It is one thing to say that mankind has made no moral progress, that our capacity for cruelty and injustice has grown in parallel with our technological advances; but that there has been technological progress, few would doubt. As the war was ending, J. B. Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, embarked on an inquiry into the idea of progress, to see how it had developed, how best it should be understood, and what lessons could be learned. The Idea of Progress was released in 1920, and it contained one very provocative – even subversive – thought.¹ Bury found that the idea of progress had itself progressed. In the first place, it was mainly a French idea, but until the French Revolution it had been pursued only on a casual basis. This was because in a predominantly religious society most people were concerned with their own salvation in a future life and because of this were (relatively speaking) less concerned with their lot in the current world. People had all sorts of ideas about the way the world was organised, for the most part intuitive. For example, Bernard de Fontenelle, the seventeenth-century French writer, did not believe any aesthetic progress was possible, arguing that literature had reached perfection with Cicero and Livy.² Marie Jean de Condorcet (1743–94), the French philosopher and mathematician, had argued that there had been ten periods of civilisation, whereas Auguste Comte (1798–1857) thought there had been three.³ Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) had gone the other way, believing civilisation was actually a degenerate – i.e., retrogressive – process.⁴ Bury unearthed two books published (in French) in the late eighteenth century, The Year 2000 and The Year 2440, which predicted, among other things, that the perfect, progressive society would have no credit, only cash, and where historical and literary records of the past would have all been burned, history being regarded as ‘the disgrace of humanity, every page … crowded with crime and follies.’⁵ Bury’s second period ran from the French Revolution, 1789, to 1859, embracing the era of the first industrial revolution, which he found to be an almost wholly optimistic time when it was believed that science would transform society, easing poverty, reducing inequality, even doing God’s work. Since 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, however, Bury thought that the very notion of progress had become more ambiguous: people were able to read both optimistic and pessimistic outcomes into the evolutionary algorithm.⁶ He viewed the hardening of the idea of progress as the result of the decline of religious feeling, directing people’s minds to the present world, not the next one; to scientific change, giving man greater control over nature, so that more change was possible; and to the growth of democracy, the formal political embodiment of the aim to promote freedom and equality. Sociology he saw as the science of progress, or the science designed to define it and measure the change.⁷ He then added the thought that maybe the very idea of progress itself had something to do with the bloodiness of World War I. Progress implied that material and moral conditions would get better in the future, that there was such a thing as posterity, if sacrifices were made. Progress therefore became something worth dying for.⁸

The last chapter of Bury’s book outlined how ‘progress’ had, in effect, evolved into the idea of evolution.⁹ This was a pertinent philosophical change, as Bury realised, because evolution was nonteleological – had no political, or social, or religious significance. It theorised that there would be progress without specifying in what direction progress would take place. Moreover, the opposite – extinction – was always a possibility. In other words, the idea of progress was now mixed up with all the old concepts of social Darwinism, race theory, and degeneration.¹⁰ It was a seductive idea, and one immediate practical consequence was that a whole range of disciplines – geology, zoology, botany, palaeontology, anthropology, linguistics – took on a historical dimension: all discoveries, whatever value they had in themselves, were henceforth analysed for the way they filled in our understanding of evolution – progress. In the 1920s in particular our understanding of the progress, evolution, of civilisation was pushed back much further.

T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Adolf Hitler, so different in many ways, had one thing in common – a love of the classical world. In 1922, the very year that both Eliot and Joyce published their masterpieces and Hitler was asked to address the National Club in Berlin, which consisted mainly of army officers, senior civil servants, and captains of industry, an expedition was leaving London, bound for Egypt. Its aim was to search for the man who may have been the greatest king of all in classical times.

Before World War I there had been three elaborate excavations in the Valley of the Kings, about 300 miles south of Cairo. In each, the name Tutankhamen kept appearing: it was inscribed on a faience cup, on some gold leaf, and on some clay seals.¹¹ Tutankhamen was therefore believed to have been an important personage, but most Egyptologists never imagined his remains would ever be found. Despite the fact that the Valley of the Kings had already been excavated so often, the British archaeologist Howard Carter and his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, were determined to dig there. They had tried to do so for a number of years, and had been prevented by the war. But neither would give up. Carter, a slim man with dark eyes and a bushy moustache, was a meticulous scientist, patient and thorough, who had been excavating in the Middle East since 1899. After the Armistice, Carnarvon and he finally obtained a licence to excavate across the Nile from Karnak and Luxor.

Carter left London without Carnarvon. Nothing notable occurred until the morning of 4 November.¹² Then, as the sun began to bleach the surrounding slopes, one of his diggers scraped against a stone step cut into the rock. Excavated carefully, twelve steps were revealed, leading to a doorway that was sealed and plastered over.¹³ ‘This seemed too good to be true,’ but, deciphering the seal, Carter was astonished to discover he had unearthed a royal necropolis. He was itching to break down the door, but as he rode his donkey back to camp that evening, having left guards at the site, he realised he must wait. Carnarvon was paying for the dig and should be there when any grand tomb was opened. Next day, Carter sent a telegram giving him the news and inviting him to come.¹⁴

Lord Carnarvon was a romantic figure – a great shot, a famous yachtsman who, at the age of twenty-three, had sailed around the world. He was also a passionate collector and the owner of the third automobile licensed in Britain. It was his love of speed that led, indirectly, to the Valley of the Kings. A car accident had permanently damaged his lungs, making England uncomfortable in wintertime. Exploring Egypt in search of a mild climate, he discovered archaeology.

Carnarvon arrived in Luxor on the twenty-third. Beyond the first door was a small chamber filled with rubble. When this was cleared away, they found a second door. A small hole was made, and everyone retreated, just in case there were any poisonous gases escaping. Then the hole was enlarged, and Carter shone the beam of his torch through the hole to explore the second chamber.

‘Can you see anything?’ Carnarvon was peremptory.

Carter didn’t reply for a moment. When he did, his voice broke. ‘Yes.’ Another pause. ‘Wonderful things.’¹⁵

He did not exaggerate. ‘No archaeologist in history has ever seen by torchlight what Carter saw.’¹⁶ When they finally entered the second chamber, the tomb was found to be packed with luxurious objects – a gilded throne, two golden couches, alabaster vases, exotic animal heads on the walls, and a golden snake.¹⁷ Two royal statues faced each other, ‘like sentinels,’ wearing gold kilts and gold sandals on their feet. There were protective cobras on their heads, and they each held a mace in one hand, a staff in the other. As Carnarvon and Carter took in this amazing splendour, it dawned on them that there was something missing – there was no sarcophagus. Had it been stolen? It was only now that Carter realised there was a third door. Given what they had found already, the inner chamber promised to be even more spectacular. But Carter was a professional. Before the inner chamber could be opened up, he determined to make a proper archaeological study of the outer room, lest precious knowledge be lost. And so the antechamber, as it came to be called, was resealed (and of course heavily guarded) while Carter called in a number of experts from around the world to collaborate on an academic investigation. The inscriptions needed study, as did the seals, and even the remains of plants that had been found.¹⁸

The tomb was not reopened until 16 December. Inside were objects of the most astounding quality.¹⁹ There was a wooden casket decorated with hunting scenes of a kind never yet seen in Egyptian art. There were three animal-sided couches that, Carter realised, had been seen illustrated in other excavations – in other words, this site was famous even in ancient Egypt.²⁰ And there were four chariots, completely covered in gold and so big that the axles had to be broken in two before they could be installed. No fewer than thirty-four heavy packing cases were filled with objects from the antechamber and put on a steam barge on the Nile, where they began the seven-day journey downriver to Cairo. Only when that had been done was the way clear to open the inner room. When Carter had cut a large enough hole, he shone his torch through it as before. ‘He could see nothing but a shining wall. Shifting the flashlight this way and that, he was still unable to find its outer limits. Apparently it blocked off the whole entrance to the chamber beyond the door. Once more, Carter was seeing something never seen before, or since. He was looking at a wall of solid gold.’ The door was dismantled, and it became clear that the gold wall was part of a shrine that occupied – all but filled – the third chamber. Measurements taken later would show that the shrine measured seventeen feet by eleven feet by nine feet high and was completely covered in gold except for inlaid panels of brilliant blue faience, depicting magic symbols to protect the dead.²¹ Carnarvon, Carter, and the workmen were speechless. To complete their astonishment, in the main shrine there was a room within a room. Inside the inner shrine was a third, and inside that a fourth.

Removing these layers took eighty-four days.²² A special tackle had to be devised to lift the lid of the sarcophagus. And here the final drama was enacted. On the lid of the coffin was a golden effigy of the boy-ruler Tutankhamen: ‘The gold glittered as brightly as if it had just come from the foundry.’²³ ‘Never was there such a treasure as the king’s head, his face made of gold, his brows and [eye]lids of lapis lazuli blue glass and the eyes contrasting in obsidian and aragonite.’ Most moving of all were the remains of a small wreath of flowers, ‘the last farewell offering of the widowed girl-queen to her husband.’²⁴ After all that, and perhaps inevitably, the body itself proved a disappointment. The boy-king had been so smothered in ‘unguents and other oils’ that, over the centuries, the chemicals had mixed to form a pitchy deposit and had invaded the swaddling clothes. Layers of jewels had been poured between the wrappings, which had reacted with the pitch, causing a spontaneous combustion that carbonised the remains and surrounding linen. Nonetheless, the age of the king could be fixed at nearer seventeen than eighteen.²⁵

In life Tutankhamen was not an especially important pharaoh. But his treasures and sumptuous tomb stimulated public interest in archaeology as never before, more even than had the discoveries at Machu Picchu. The high drama of the excavation, however, concealed a mystery. If the ancient Egyptians buried a seventeen-year-old monarch with such style, what might they have done for older, more accomplished kings? If such tombs haven’t been found – and they haven’t – does this mean they have been lost to plunderers? And at what cost to knowledge? If they are still there, how might they change our understanding of the way civilisations evolve?

Much of the fascination in Middle Eastern archaeology, however, lay not in finding gold but in teasing out fact from myth. By the 1920s the biblical account of man’s origins had been called into question time and again. While it was clear that some of the Bible was based on fact, it was no less obvious that the Scriptures were wildly inaccurate in many places. A natural area of investigation was the birth of writing, as the earliest record of the past. But here too there was a mystery.

The mystery arose from the complicated nature of cuneiform writing, a system of wedges cut in clay that existed in Mesopotamia, an area between the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates. Cuneiform was believed to have developed out of pictograph script, spreading in time throughout Mesopotamia. The problem arose from the fact that cuneiform was a mixture of pictographic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts which could not have arisen, all by themselves, at one time and in one place. It followed that cuneiform must have evolved from an earlier entity – but what? And belonging to which people? Analysis of the language, the type of words that were common, the business transactions typically recorded, led philologists to the idea that cuneiform had not been invented by the Semitic Babylonians or Assyrians but by another people from the highlands to the east. This was pushing the ‘evidence’ further than it would go, but this theoretical group of ancestors had even been given a name. Because the earliest known rulers in the southern part of Mesopotamia had been called ‘Kings of Sumer and Akkad,’ they were called the Sumerians.²⁶

It was against this background that a Frenchman, Ernest de Sarzec, excavated a mound at Telloh, near Ur and Uruk, north of modern Basra in Iraq, and found a statue of a hitherto unknown type.²⁷ This naturally sparked fresh interest in the ‘Sumerians,’ and other digs soon followed, carried out mainly by Americans and Germans. These unearthed among other things huge ziggurats, which confirmed that the ancient civilisation (then called Lagash) was sophisticated. The dating was provocative too: ‘It seemed almost as if its beginnings coincided with the times described in Genesis. The Sumerians might well be the same people, it was thought, who populated the earth after the punitive deluge that wiped out all humankind but Noah and his kin.’ These excavations revealed not only how early civilisations evolved but also how early man thought, which is why, in 1927, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began to dig in the biblical Ur of Chaldea, the alleged home of Abraham, founder of the Jews.

Woolley, born in 1880, was educated at Oxford. He was a friend and colleague of T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’); together they excavated Carchemish, where the Euphrates flows from modern Turkey into Syria. In World War I Woolley did intelligence work in Egypt but then spent two years as a prisoner of war in Turkey. He made three important discoveries at Ur: first, he found several royal tombs, including the grave of Queen Shub-ad, which contained almost as many gold and silver vessels as the tomb of Tutankhamen; second, he unearthed the so-called mosaic standard of Ur, which featured a cluster of chariots, showing that it was the Sumerians, at the end of the fourth millennium BC, who had introduced this device into warfare; and third, he discovered that the royal corpses in Ur were not alone.²⁸ Alongside the king and queen, in one chamber, lay a company of soldiers (copper helmets and spears were found next to their bones). In another chamber were the skeletons of nine ladies of the court, still wearing elaborate gold headdresses.²⁹ Not only were these very grisly practices, but more significant, no text had ever hinted at this collective sacrifice. Woolley therefore drew the conclusion that the sacrifice had taken place before writing had been invented to record such an event. In this way the sacrifices confirmed the Sumerians, at that stage, as the oldest civilisation in the world.

It was only after these astounding discoveries that Woolley reached the forty-feet level. And here he came upon nothing.³⁰ For more than eight feet there was just clay, completely free from shards and rubbish or artefacts of any kind. Now, for a deposit of clay eight feet thick to be laid down, a tremendous flood must at some time have inundated the land of Sumer. Was this, then, the deluge mentioned in the Bible?³¹ Like all classical archaeologists, Woolley was familiar with the Middle Eastern legend of Gilgamesh, half-man, half-god, who endured many trials and adventures, including a massive flood (‘the waters of death’).³² Were there other correspondences between the Sumerians and the early Bible? When he looked, Woolley found many of them. The most intriguing was the account in Genesis that between Adam and the Deluge there were ten ‘mighty forefathers which were old.’ The Sumerian literature also referred to their ‘primal kings,’ which were eight in number. Moreover, the Israelites boasted improbably long life spans. Adam, for example, who begot his first son at the age of 130, is said to have lived for 800 years. Woolley found that the life spans of the ancient Sumerians were supposed to have been even greater.³³ According to one account, the reigns of eight ancestral kings stretched over 241,200 years, an average of 30,400 years per king.³⁴ The central point was this: the more he looked, the more Woolley found that the Sumerians overlapped with the early biblical account of Genesis, and that Sumer occupied a pivotal point in human development.³⁵ For example, they boasted the first schools and were the first to use gardens to provide shade. The first library was theirs, and they had the concept of the ‘Resurrection’ long before the Bible. Their law was impressive and in some respects surprisingly modern.³⁶ ‘The astounding thing about this legal code from a modern point of view, is the way it is governed by a clear and consistent concept of guilt.’³⁷ The juristic approach was emphasised at all times, with a deliberate suppression of religious considerations. Vendettas, for example, were all but abolished in Sumer, the important point being that the state took over from the individual as the arbiter of justice. This justice was harsh but did its best to be objective. Medicine and mathematics were also highly regarded professions in Sumer, and the Sumerians appeared to have discovered the arch. Like we do, they polished apples before they ate them, and the idea that a black cat is unlucky comes from Sumer, as does the division of the clock face into twelve hours.³⁸ Sumer was, then, a missing link in the evolution of civilisation. From what Woolley was able to deduce, the Sumerians were non-Semitic, a dark-haired people who displaced two other Semitic peoples in the Mesopotamian delta.³⁹

Though Woolley could go no further than this, more light was thrown on Hebrew origins, and on the evolution of writing, by discoveries made at Ras Shamra. Ras Shamra lies in northwestern Syria, near the Mediterranean bay of Alexandretta, at the angle between Syria and Asia Minor. Here, on a hill above a small harbour, was an ancient settlement excavated in 1929 by the French, led by Claude Schaeffer. They were able to construct a full chronology of the site, in which was embedded Ras Shamra’s written records, dating to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. This showed the site to have been named Ugarit, and that it was occupied by a Semitic people of the Amorite-Canaanite class.⁴⁰ According to the Bible, this was the period when the Israelites were entering Palestine from the south and beginning to spread among Canaanites, kinsmen of the inhabitants of Ugarit. The library was discovered in a building that stood between the temples of Baal and Dagon. Belonging to the high priest, it consisted mainly of tablets with writing in a cuneiform style but adapted to an alphabetic script, comprising twenty-nine signs. This made it the earliest known alphabet.⁴¹

The contents of the texts proved to be legal works, price lists, medical and veterinary treatises, and a huge number of religious writings. These showed that Ugarit’s supreme god was El, a very familiar name from the Old Testament as one of the names of the God of Israel. For example, in chapter 33, verse 20, of Genesis, Jacob erects his altar to E1, the God of Israel.’ In the Ras Shamra tablets, E1 is the king, the supreme judge, the father of years’ and ‘He reigns over all the other gods.’⁴² The land of Canaan is referred to as ‘the whole land of El.’ El has a wife, Asherat, with whom he has a son, Baal. El is often represented as a bull, and in one text Crete is described as the abode of El. Thus there are overlaps not only between Ras Shamra and Sumeria, Assyrian and Cretan ideas, but also with Hebrew concepts. Many of the writings describe Baal’s adventures – for example, his fights with Lotan, ‘the sinuous serpent, the mighty one with seven heads,’ which recalls the Hebrew Leviathan, and whose seven heads remind us of the beast with seven heads in Revelation and in Job.⁴³ In another set of writings, El gives Keret command of a huge army, called the ‘army of the Negeb.’ This is recognisable as the Negev Desert area in the extreme south of Palestine. Keret’s orders were to conquer some invaders who are called Terachites, immediately identified as the descendants of Terah, the father of Abraham – in other words the Israelites, who were at that time (according to the then generally accepted chronology) occupying the desert during their forty years’ wanderings.⁴⁴ The Ras Shamra/Ugarit texts contained other parallels with the Old Testament and provide a strong if not entirely clear link between the bull cults dated to circa 2,000–4,000 BC throughout the Middle East, and religions as we recognise them today.

The discoveries at Ras Shamra matter for two reasons. In the first place, in a country in which the existence of Palestine and then Israel highlights the differences between the Arabs and the Jews, Ras Shamra shows how Judaism grew out of – evolved from – Canaanite religion by a natural process that proves the ancient peoples of this small area, Canaanite and Israelite, to have been essentially the same. Second, the existence of writing – and an alphabet – so early, revolutionised thinking about the Bible. Until the excavation of Ugarit, the accepted view was that writing was unknown to the Hebrews before the ninth century BC and that it was unknown to the Greeks until the seventh. This implied that the Bible was handed down orally for several centuries, making its traditions unreliable and subject to embellishment. In fact, writing was half a millennium older than anyone thought.

In classical archaeology, and in palaeontology, the traditional method of dating is stratigraphy. As common sense suggests, deeper layers are older than the layers above them. However, this only gives a relative chronology, helping to distinguish later from earlier. For absolute dates, some independent evidence is needed, like a king list with written dates, or coins with the date stamped on them, or reference in writings to some heavenly event, like an eclipse, the date of which can be calculated back from modern astronomical knowledge. Such information can then be matched to stratigraphie levels. This is of course not entirely satisfactory. Sites can be damaged, deliberately or accidentally, by man or nature. Tombs can be reused. Archaeologists, palaeontologists, and historians are therefore always on the lookout for other dating methods. The twentieth century offered several answers in this area, and the first came in 1929.

In the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci there is a brief paragraph to the effect that dry and wet years can be traced in tree rings. The same observation was repeated in 1837 by Charles Babbage – more famous as the man who designed the first mechanical calculators, ancestors of the computer – but he added the notion that tree rings might also be related to other forms of dating. No one took this up for generations, but then an American physicist and astronomer, Dr Andrew Ellicott Douglass, director of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, made a breakthrough. His research interest was the effect of sunspots on the climate of the earth, and like other astronomers and climatologists he knew that, crudely speaking, every eleven years or so, when sunspot activity is at its height, the earth is racked by storms and rain, one consequence of which is that there is well above average moisture for plants and trees.⁴⁵ In order to prove this link, Douglass needed to show that the pattern had been repeated far back into history. For such a project, the incomplete and occasional details about weather were woefully inadequate. It was then that Douglass remembered something he had noticed as a boy, an observation familiar to everyone brought up in the countryside. When a tree is sawn through and the top part carted away, leaving just the stump, we see row upon row of concentric rings. All woodmen, gardeners, and carpenters know, as part of the lore of their trade, that tree rings are annual rings. But what Douglass observed, which no one else had thought through, was that the rings are not of equal thickness. Some years there are narrow rings, other years the rings are broader. Could it be, Douglass wondered, that the broad rings represent ‘fat years’ (i.e., moist years), and the thin rings represent ‘lean years’ – in other words, dry years?⁴⁶

It was a simple but inspired idea, not least because it could be tested fairly easily. Douglass set about comparing the outer rings of a newly cut tree with weather reports from recent years. To his satisfaction he discovered that his assumption fitted the facts. Next he moved further back. Some trees in Arizona where he lived were three hundred years old; if he followed the rings all the way into the pith of the trunk, he should be able to re-create climate fluctuations for his region in past centuries. Every eleven years, coinciding with sunspot activity, there had been a ‘fat period,’ several years of broad rings. Douglass had proved his point that sunspot activity and weather are related. But now he saw other uses for his new technique. In Arizona, most of the trees were pine and didn’t go back earlier than 1450, just before the European invasion of America.⁴⁷ At first Douglass obtained samples of trees cut by the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century to construct their missions. During his research, Douglass wrote to a number of archaeologists in the American Southwest, asking for core samples of the wood on their sites. Earl Morris, working amid the Aztec ruins fifty miles north of Pueblo Bonito, a prehistoric site in New Mexico, and Neil Judd, excavating Pueblo Bonito itself, both sent samples.⁴⁸ These Aztec ‘great houses’ appeared to have been built at the same time, judging by their style and the objects excavated, but there had been no written calendar in North America, and so no one had been able to place an exact date on the pueblos. Some time after Douglass received his samples from Morris and Judd, he was able to thank them with a bombshell: ‘You might be interested to know,’ he said in a letter, ‘that the latest beam in the ceiling of the Aztec ruins was cut just exactly nine years before the latest beam from Bonito.’⁴⁹

A new science, dendrochronology, had been born, and Pueblo Bonito was the first classical problem it helped solve. Douglass’s research had begun in 1913, but not until 1928–9 did he feel able to announce his findings to the world. At that point, by overlapping trees of different ages felled at different times, he had an unbroken sequence of rings in southwest America going back first to ALL 1300, then to ALL 700.⁵⁰ The sequence revealed that there had been a severe drought, which lasted from ALL 1276 to 1299 and explained why there had been a vast migration at that time by Pueblo Indians, a puzzle which had baffled archaeologists for centuries.

These discoveries placed yet more of man’s history on an evolutionary ladder, with ever more specific time frames. The evolution of writing, of religions, of law, and even of building all began to slot into place in the 1920s, making history and prehistory more and more comprehensible as one linked story. Even the familiar events of the Bible appeared to fit into the emerging sequence of events. Such a view had its dangers, of course. Order could be imposed where there may have been none, and complex processes could be oversimplified. Many people were fascinated by scientific discovery and found the new narrative satisfying, but others were disturbed by what they took to be further ‘disenchantment’ of the world, the removal of mystery. That was one reason why a very short book, published in 1931, had the impact that it did.

Herbert Butterfield was still only twenty-six when, as a young don at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he published The Whig Interpretation of History and made his reputation.⁵¹ Controversial as it was, and although he was not really concerned with evolution as such, his argument concerned ‘the friends and enemies of progress’ and was nonetheless therefore a useful corrective to the emerging consensus. Butterfield exploded the teleological view of history – that it is essentially a straight line leading to the present. To Butterfield, the idea of ‘progress’ was suspect, as was the notion that in any conflict there were always the good guys who won and the bad guys who lost. The particular example he used was the way the Renaissance led to the Reformation and then on to the contemporary world. The prevailing view, what he called the Whig view, was to see a straight line from the essentially Catholic Renaissance to the Protestant Reformation to the modern world with all its freedoms, as a result of which many attributed to Luther the intention of promoting greater liberty.⁵² Butterfield argued that this view assumed ‘a false continuity in events’: the Whig historian ‘likes to imagine religious liberty issuing beautifully out of Protestantism when in reality it emerges painfully and grudgingly out of something quite different, out of the tragedy of the post-Reformation world.’⁵³

The motive for this habit on the part of historians was, said Butterfield, contemporary politics – in its broadest sense. The present-day historian’s enthusiasm for democracy or freedom of thought or the liberal tradition led him to conclude that people in the past were working toward these goals.⁵⁴ One consequence of this tendency, Butterfield thought, was that the Whig historian was overfond of making moral judgements on the past: ‘For him the voice of posterity is the voice of God and the historian is the voice of posterity. And it is typical of him that he tends to regard himself as the judge when by his methods and his equipment he is fitted only to be the detective.’⁵⁵ This fashion for moral judgements leads the Whig historian into another mistake, that more evil is due to conscious sin than to unconscious error.⁵⁶ Butterfield was uneasy with such a stance. He offered the alternative view – that all history could do was approach its subjects in more and more detail, and with less and less abridgement. No moral judgements are necessary for him because it is impossible to get within the minds of people of bygone ages and because the great quarrels of history have not been between two parties of which one was ‘good’ and the other ‘evil’ but between opposing groups (not necessarily two in number) who had rival ideas about where they wanted events, and society, to go. To judge backward from the present imposes a modern mindset on events which cannot be understood in that way.⁵⁷

Butterfield’s ideas acted as a check on the growth of evolutionary thought, but only a check. As time went by, and more results came in, the evidence amassed for one story was overwhelming. Progress was a word less and less used, but evolution went from strength to strength, invading even history itself. The discoveries of the 1920s pushed forward the idea that a complete history of mankind might one day be possible. This expanding vision was further fuelled by parallel developments in physics.