How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2024
392 pp., illus. 32 col., 113 b/w. Trade, $35.00/£30.00
ISBN: 9780691265452.
How the New World Became Old is a fascinating and extremely well written book that helps understand not only the facts but also the cultural roots and dimensions of the still fascinating mystery of deep time, “the billions of years over which the plan was born and life upon it appeared and evolved” (p. 2). As a mystery for the human brain, whose very structure and function cannot be separated from what it is triggered to know, deep time is at the same time a challenge full of new opportunities and a danger menacing traditional world views and the social and political organization that goes with them.
Deep time is not a specifically American question, although the awareness of deep time and the answers given to it have radically changed America (the “revolution” the title hints at is not an exaggeration). The question has even taken a special meaning in America given the longtime perception, including self-perception, of this continent as the “New World”. Yet the very idea of newness associate with America is a highly Eurocentric one: if America was new, it was only because it was so in European eyes at the moment of the discoveries of the late 15th and early 16th Centuries. Not only had these eyes never seen or even imagined America, but also the concept of deep time was itself unknown to them in these years. The discovery of the New World and some decades later Copernicus’s heliocentric revolution may have shattered European views on spatial boundaries and the place of Earth in the global universe, but the big blows on time still had to come. The later discovery of deep time ruined many elements of the then still universally accepted religious worldview of the Bible which had imposed the twin ideas of a recent godly creation in seven days (6000 years ago, it was believed) and the no less godly finishing touch of this miraculous intervention by the creation of man (and later woman), immediately complete, that is never evolving, in the Garden of Eden, before the Flood and the saving of the tribe of Noah and a selection of animals.
The story narrated by Caroline Winterer is twofold. On the hand, the author addresses the progressive disclosing, in Europe as well as in America (but several American scientists were European immigrants), of a past much older than what the Bible and those controlling the reading and interpretation of it had always expressed. On the other hand, she discusses the equally gradual recognition that in the newly invented framework of deep time America was anything but a latecomer, a watered-down version of original life and the first humans. Instead, America had a history of its own and even one that proved to be not only bigger but older, much older, than that of the “Old World” of Europe.
Chronologically speaking, Winterer’s narrative starts with the independence of America and stretches till today –with a frightening coda on the spread of the Young Earth Creationists movement, a brutal return to pre-deep time thinking and a shallow, allegedly literal interpretation of the Bible in evangelical circles, if not in larger parts of the American population. A painful reminder of the lasting difficulties of coming to terms with something, deep time, that disrupts simple and narcissistic ways of thinking about the world and oneself. The major emphasis of the book is on the 19th Century, though. A gifted storyteller, Winterer presents the life and works of the major actors of America’s deep time, each of them with his and once in a while her own lexicon and emergent discipline (it will not come as a surprise that the input of women went frequently uncredited), clearly explaining the decisive changes of the era: first the shift from amateur collecting of shells and fossils to professional paleontology; second the rapid transition in the post-Civil War years of denominational institutions monitoring and directing the first steps of deep time thinking to value-free inquiry, not only in the new universities but also in the existing aristocratic ones such as Yale, Harvard and Princeton, and third the sudden leap from theologically framed deep time speculations to emerging empirically oriented disciplines.
The history of America’s deep time is neither simple nor linear. In all chapters, Winterer addresses the multiple and very diverse stakes of deep time research, insisting for obvious reasons on the fundamental clash between theology and empiricism. The initial but still very much present answers tried to solve the contradiction between faith and science (the idea of “catastrophism”, that is of a sudden divine intervention after the origin of creation, being a possible solution to the contradictions between empirical evidence and religious beliefs), whereas throughout the 19the Century the opposite position of slow but radical “transformation” of the original creatures will settle the problem by rejecting the theological limitations of deep time thinking (the spread of Darwinism is of course not unrelated to stance). But as shown by the success of Young Earth Creationism and similar reinterpretations of material evidence in light of revealed truths, the conflict between the two divergent poles may in fact turn out to be a never ending story.
What is common to all these struggles, however, is the battle of America, more precisely the ambition to articulate evidence not only of the simultaneity of Europe’s and America’s deep time but also of the separate and thus equivalent development of life on the two continents. Beneath these debates lurks the desire to shake off European patronizing and, in a later phase, to build the superiority of America’s field work, theory, and practical relevance of deep time fieldwork. Yet the competition is not only outbound––that is, with Europe (other geopolitical areas do not enter the arena yet in these years). Deep time is also a scientific background that supports and attacks conflicting political and ideological stances within the United States, offering a fertile ground for the exploitation of black slave labor (the “primitive” race being the only one being capable of surviving in the harsh conditions of an equally “primitive” Southern climate zone) or the extinction of all Indians (who are not seen as the original inhabitants of the continent but as nothing else than just latecomers in America’s deep history, and moreover latecomers having proved incapable, unlike the more recent Anglo-Saxon civilizing colonizers, to “develop”).
Winterer’s book is a jewel, an awesome, jargon free, often witty, perfectly documented and suggestively illustrated synthesis of what remains one of the most powerful enigmas to the human brain. I can only conclude with the citation of her own concluding sentences, which echo for me, although in a much more positive tone, Benjamin’s Angelus Novus: “The nature of time continues to elude us. We wonder whether it lies outside us or within us, a shared language for talking about the most consequential matters of our common humanity. Perhaps we are like the surfer at the edge of [the] deep time spiral […]. Looking backward as billions of years of Earth’s history uncoil in stately majesty, we ride a wave toward the undiscovered horizon.” (p. 273).