The end of mankind

Lord Kelvin

In an earlier post in this blog I spoke about the myth of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to the theory of indefinite progress and the forecast of enormous advances for humankind that would be within our reach in the not too distant future. Although the first half of the eighteenth century was a brake on almost all the cultural activities of our civilization, including science, they were delighted with themselves. Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm (1723-1807), expressed it with unequaled candor, in these words [1]:

The eighteenth century has surpassed all the others in the praises it has lavished on itself.

One of the ideas in vogue by that time was the assumption that scientific advances would let man reach immortality, not too far in time. Although the idea, as a distant possibility, goes back to Roger Bacon, it seemed much closer in the late eighteenth century. Hence the anecdote told of the octogenarian wife of marshal Villeroi, who exclaimed, while looking at Professor Charles’s ascent in a hydrogen balloon:

Yes, it is true! They’ll discover the secret of not dying, after I’ll be dead!

The optimistic ideas of the eighteenth century suffered a sudden, impressive turn in the nineteenth, when came to dominate a pessimistic vision of the future of mankind, based mainly on two scientific discoveries:

The myth of the Dark Ages

Bertrand Russell

Echoing the myth of the Dark Ages, a name for the European Middle Ages invented by the writers of the Enlightenment, Bertrand Russell wrote these words in his book Wisdom of the West (1959):

As the central authority of Rome decayed, the lands of the Western Empire began to sink into an era of barbarism during which Europe suffered a general cultural decline. The Dark Ages… It is not inappropriate to call these centuries dark, especially if they are set against what came before and what came after.

What came before was the Roman Empire; what came after the Renaissance.

The myth of the Dark Ages was invented by the writers of the first half of the eighteenth century to enforce another myth they had created, according to which at that time we were entering a new era of reason and knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, which they called by the name of the Enlightenment.

In the Espasa Dictionary, 1000 great scientists (1996) I proposed an objective procedure to quantify the relative importance of the various practitioners of science, using measurements such as the number of lines assigned to each scientist in encyclopedias of different countries (to avoid the bias in favor of countrymen). Later, in an as yet unpublished work (The quantification of history and the future of the West), I applied the same procedure to several branches of human creativity: science, philosophy, literature, the plastic arts and music. The next figure represents the resulting evolution of the Greco-Roman and Western science until the end of the Middle Ages. It can be seen that: