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from architecture to economics express its inner nature as inevitably as
biological form and behavior express a genetic imperative. The classical world
of Greece and Rome was finite and bounded, shrinking back from confronting
infinities of space and time. Its pictures show only foregrounds, avoiding the
challenges of distance and unlimited extent, while its sailors followed the
coastlines, rarely venturing out of sight of land.
Mathematics confined itself to the study of static geometric figures, and the
number system contained nothing that went beyond what was needed to enumerate
finite, tangible objects. Is it mere coincidence that the leading art form was
sculpture finite volumes bounded by surfaces?
That age ended when Rome fell, and in Europe there followed the era of
Christendom in which spiritual concerns took precedence over the material
values that we take as synonymous with progress, and which we consequently
term the Dark Ages. And then came Western Man, who not only took on the
notions of change and infinity, but delighted in them, and whose every
innovation exulted in the newfound freedoms that they symbolized. The calculus
of Newton and Leibnitz was the language that described a universe no longer
static and bounded but dynamic and unlimited, to be explored through
scientific discovery, the testing of limits, and the voyages of the global
navigators. Mastery of perspective, soaring arches and buttresses, and the new
astronomy rejoiced in the experience of boundless, endless space.
And what else was the music of Mozart and Beethoven but flights of woodwind
and strings exploring vast, orchestra-created voids?
From origins in the Renaissance, through the seventeenth eighteenth century
"Age of Enlightenment," the philosophical ideology underpinning the
Euro-American Western culture in whose legacy we live today was a commitment
to scientific rationalism: the belief that the universe would prove
explainable in purely material, mechanistic terms. The hand of God, which an
earlier age had discerned as guiding every facet of existence from the
individual's station and fortune in life to the courses traced by the planets,
was unnecessary. And if that were so, it followed that the God-given right of
hereditary elites to rule, upheld and defended by the authority of traditional
religion, could be challenged. In the idealistic vision of
science, beliefs are arrived at impartially from objective evaluation of the
evidence. But when a deeply rooted predisposition pervades an entire cultural
movement, it is easy for objectivity to give way to ideology, even in those
rarer instances where the conflict registers consciously. I have come to the
conclusion that in some important areas, modern science, far from replacing
old, outmoded ideas with new insights in the way that is presented, has let
principle rule over evidence in ways that actually represent a retreat from
truths that were closer to being understood more than a hundred years ago.
I've written at some length elsewhere1about the Immanuel Velikovsky affair
that was precipitated by the publication of his book
Worlds in Collision in 1950, and continued through to the inquisitorial
exorcizing of his theories under the guise of the AAAS meeting in San
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Francisco in 1974 which has been described as "one of the blackest episodes in
the history of science."2Essentially, Velikovsky proposed that the Solar
System has not always displayed the repeating orderliness that we observe
today. We live in one of a series of quiescent periods occurring between times
of convulsive change, in which the motions of the planets and other bodies are
disturbed before settling down into a new pattern of stable orbits. Such
events have involved the Earth in encounters that have had profound effects on
its geological, climatic, and biological history. The most recent of these
events took place in historic times and are recorded in mythologies and
legends handed down through cultures the world over.
All of this was completely at odds with the reigning scientific views of the
time, which admitted none of the catastrophic influences that are finally
being recognized today (so long as they are kept comfortably remote in the
distant past). But the dominant thinking of the mid twentieth century held
doggedly to notions of a lawful, nonthreatening universe, cycling endlessly
and predictably from the indefinite past to the indefinite future. Despite
diverse evidence that Velikovsky marshaled to support his contentions, and
some dazzlingly successful predictions that would have been applauded as
triumphs had they been noncontroversial and made by an acceptable insider, he
was greeted with a campaign of vilification and misrepresentation of an
intensity seldom seen in professional circles, which remains largely
successful to this day.
Yet his picture of a relatively tranquil Earth being periodically beset by
immense cataclysms that bring on entirely new ages was not something
innovative and revolutionary. Two centuries ago, evidence for the occurrence
of major catastrophes in shaping the Earth as we know it had been considered
self-evident and ubiquitous. The trouble, however, was that to the minds of
many, such notions were inseparable from the doctrines held by the wrong side
of the broad-based religious and political ideological clash that was coming
to a head at the time.
Conflicting views on whether the universe has always existed pretty much as we
find it, or arrived there either convulsively or through steady change go back
to the time of ancient Greece and no doubt further.
Such early accounts were inevitably inspired by religion and mythology,
reflecting more than anything their proponents' predisposition to see the
powers that ruled the cosmos as wrathful and capricious or protective and
dependable. Homer's cosmos was a turbulent affair filled with selfish,
insensitive gods.
Plato saw it as an imperfect and sometimes troubled attempt at imitating
unattainable ideals of form and harmony, while Aristotle, whose version
eventually prevailed as the model for the medieval Scholastics, presented
eternal stability in a system of celestial spheres centered upon the Earth,
moving in perfect circles under the guidance of a Prime Mover who epitomizes
everything good.
By Newton's time the subject was taking on more of the appearance of what we
would consider a science, i.e. conclusions arrived at through study of the
actual world rather than deduced from axiomatic preconceptions of how things
must be. And what the early studies showed unequivocally was a record of the
Earth's being subjected to episodic destruction on a vast scale. The evidence
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