The Penguin History of the World

Science and technology have thus both tended to undermine traditional authority, customary ways and accepted ideology. While they appear to offer material and technical support to the established order, their resources also become available to its critics. Improving communication has pushed new ideas more quickly into mass culture than ever before, though the impact of scientific ideas on élites is easier to trace. In the eighteenth century, Newtonian cosmology had been able to settle down into co-existence with Christian religion and other theocentric modes of thought without much troubling the wide range of social and moral beliefs tied to them. As time passed, however, science has seemed harder and harder to reconcile with any fixed belief at all. It has appeared at times to stress relativism and the pressure of circumstance to the exclusion of any unchallengeable assumption or viewpoint.

A very obvious instance can be seen in one new branch of science – psychology – which evolved in the nineteenth century. After 1900 more began to be heard of it by the lay public, and especially of two of its expressions. One, which eventually took the name ‘psychoanalysis’, can be considered, as an influence on society at large, to begin with the work of Sigmund Freud, which had begun in the clinical observation of mental disorder, a well-established method. His own development of this became, with comparative rapidity, notorious because of its wide influence outside medicine. As well as stimulating a mass of clinical work that claimed to be scientific (though its status was and is contested by many scientists), it undermined many accepted assumptions, above all attitudes to sexuality, education, responsibility and punishment.

Meanwhile, another psychological approach was that pursued by practitioners of ‘behaviourism’ (like ‘Freudian’ and ‘psychoanalytical’, a word often used somewhat loosely). Its roots went back to eighteenth-century ideas, and it appeared to generate a body of experimental data certainly as impressive as (if not more impressive than) the clinical successes claimed by psychoanalysis. The pioneer name associated with behaviourism is still that of the Russian I. P. Pavlov, the discoverer of the ‘conditioned reflex’. This rested on the manipulation of one of a pair of variables in an experiment, in order to produce a predictable result in behaviour through a ‘conditioned stimulus’ (the classical experiment provided for a bell to be sounded before food was given to a dog; after a time, sounding the bell caused the dog to salivate without the actual appearance of food). Refinements and developments of such procedures followed which provided much information and, it was believed, insight into the sources of human behaviour.

Whatever the benefits these psychological studies may have brought with them, what is striking to the historian is the contribution that Freud and Pavlov made to a larger and not easily definable cultural change. The doctrines of both were bound – like more empirical approaches to the medical treatment of mental disorder by chemical, electrical and other physical interference – to suggest flaws in the traditional respect for moral autonomy and personal responsibility that lay at the heart of European-inspired moral culture. In a sharper focus, too, their weight was now added to that of the geologists, biologists and anthropologists in the nineteenth century who contributed to the undermining of religious belief.

At any rate, in western societies the power of the old idea that things mysterious and inexplicable were best managed by magical or religious means now seems to have vanished, except, perhaps, among south-east European peasants and some American evangelical Christians. It may be conceded that where this has happened it has gone along with a new acceptance, even if halting and elementary, that science was now the way to manage most of life. But to speak of such things demands very careful qualification. When people talk about the waning power of religion, they often mean only the formal authority and influence of the Christian Churches; behaviour and belief are quite different matters. No English monarch since Elizabeth I, four and a half centuries ago, has consulted an astrologer about an auspicious day for a coronation. Yet in the 1980s the world was amused (and perhaps a little alarmed) to hear that the wife of the president of the United States liked to seek astrological advice.