1 00:00:00,080 --> 00:00:01,720 Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. 2 00:00:03,060 --> 00:00:04,600 I'm Anne Strainchamps. 3 00:00:04,860 --> 00:00:05,800 And I'm Steve Paulson. 4 00:00:06,300 --> 00:00:11,840 Imagine hiking in one of those red rock deserts in Utah on a scorching afternoon. 5 00:00:12,400 --> 00:00:15,720 So hot and dry, there's nothing moving for miles. 6 00:00:16,320 --> 00:00:23,000 Once this was lush green land, flowing with water, and once a giant sauropod walked right here. 7 00:00:23,300 --> 00:00:28,860 Its feet sank into the mud, its footprints dried and baked into rocks. 8 00:00:28,860 --> 00:00:33,760 And today, 150 million years later, they're still here. 9 00:00:34,040 --> 00:00:34,860 Yeah, they're huge. 10 00:00:35,280 --> 00:00:40,560 You can go off into the scrubby desert, and for literally millions of years, 11 00:00:41,140 --> 00:00:47,080 the tracks of not just one dinosaur, but multiple dinosaurs have been kept intact. 12 00:00:47,560 --> 00:00:52,020 And those footprints are really, really, really big. 13 00:00:52,020 --> 00:00:59,120 Caroline Winterer is one of millions of people who've made the trek to marvel at dinosaur tracks 14 00:00:59,120 --> 00:01:03,120 in places like Utah and Texas and Wyoming and Colorado, 15 00:01:03,800 --> 00:01:07,320 places where you can feel the wonder of deep time. 16 00:01:07,580 --> 00:01:09,960 Which is such an American experience. 17 00:01:10,240 --> 00:01:14,100 I mean, we've stood and looked out at the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Valley, 18 00:01:14,580 --> 00:01:17,760 and you're looking at hundreds of millions of years of geology. 19 00:01:17,760 --> 00:01:21,880 But Caroline Winterer has a special perspective on all that wonder. 20 00:01:22,300 --> 00:01:27,300 She's a historian at Stanford, and she wrote a book that is one of the best things I read this year. 21 00:01:27,700 --> 00:01:32,980 It's called How the New World Became Old, The Deep Time Revolution in America. 22 00:01:33,640 --> 00:01:40,240 So it links dinosaurs and the geological strata and time itself to American identity. 23 00:01:40,780 --> 00:01:46,400 The story begins in the late 1800s, when people in the U.S. first began digging up dinosaur bones. 24 00:01:46,400 --> 00:01:49,980 They didn't even have names for them yet, but they fell in love with them. 25 00:01:50,360 --> 00:01:51,860 And we're still in love with them, right? 26 00:01:51,980 --> 00:01:52,380 Absolutely. 27 00:01:52,940 --> 00:01:55,560 Dinosaurs are like our national mascots. 28 00:01:55,920 --> 00:01:58,540 We give them nicknames and cartoon identities. 29 00:01:58,880 --> 00:02:02,400 We make theme parks out of them and put them on lunchboxes. 30 00:02:03,160 --> 00:02:05,240 But to understand where Caroline is going to take us, 31 00:02:05,760 --> 00:02:09,440 you have to know that when people first began digging up all those fossilized bones, 32 00:02:09,640 --> 00:02:11,940 they didn't realize how old they were. 33 00:02:12,040 --> 00:02:15,500 Right, because people still thought the Earth was only 6,000 years old. 34 00:02:15,500 --> 00:02:18,620 Yeah, and they also thought this continent was the last one to emerge 35 00:02:18,620 --> 00:02:21,300 after God drowned the Earth in an epic flood. 36 00:02:21,460 --> 00:02:22,740 The one Noah survived. 37 00:02:22,940 --> 00:02:27,060 So this new world was just a baby on the world stage, 38 00:02:27,480 --> 00:02:33,400 a bratty, inferior, younger sibling compared to the older civilizations in Europe and Asia. 39 00:02:33,580 --> 00:02:36,180 But then, looking at that geological strata, 40 00:02:36,280 --> 00:02:39,960 they began to realize that this continent was actually billions of years old. 41 00:02:40,360 --> 00:02:42,760 That's the deep time revolution Caroline refers to, 42 00:02:42,760 --> 00:02:45,940 and it becomes a real source of national pride. 43 00:02:45,940 --> 00:02:47,920 Yeah, but here's what I think is key. 44 00:02:48,500 --> 00:02:50,100 The way Caroline tells it, 45 00:02:50,500 --> 00:02:56,300 this deep time revolution is like the missing piece in the story of American exceptionalism, 46 00:02:56,380 --> 00:03:00,760 because it was used not just to bolster America's standing in the world, 47 00:03:01,140 --> 00:03:06,140 but also to justify manifest destiny, Christian nationalism, even genocide. 48 00:03:06,140 --> 00:03:10,520 And so the lesson here is that we need to examine wonder and awe, 49 00:03:10,720 --> 00:03:15,660 to think about where those emotions take us and the uses to which they're put. 50 00:03:16,220 --> 00:03:18,600 And in America, it all begins with dinosaurs. 51 00:03:19,080 --> 00:03:19,680 It does. 52 00:03:20,140 --> 00:03:22,300 So I wanted to start by talking about dinosaurs. 53 00:03:23,000 --> 00:03:26,380 You wrote that this book began with dinosaurs, 54 00:03:26,500 --> 00:03:28,560 that you've loved them ever since you were little. 55 00:03:28,560 --> 00:03:34,280 Yeah, in part because I grew up in the West, in the United States, 56 00:03:34,280 --> 00:03:38,280 where unlike the East, whatever dinosaurs there are, 57 00:03:38,280 --> 00:03:41,360 are often very visible on the surface, right? 58 00:03:41,400 --> 00:03:44,360 In places like Utah and Colorado. 59 00:03:44,860 --> 00:03:50,500 But I also was lucky to grow up in a house with parents who seemed to like picture books, 60 00:03:50,500 --> 00:03:59,320 and they had a wonderful two-volume edition of dinosaur paintings from the 1950s. 61 00:03:59,720 --> 00:04:02,980 And my favorite was Pachycephalosaurus, 62 00:04:03,400 --> 00:04:08,360 which has this crazy big bulbous head with lots of knobs on it. 63 00:04:08,360 --> 00:04:14,440 So to a four-year-old, this seemed like the best kind of dinosaur to be the really weird looking one. 64 00:04:14,620 --> 00:04:18,440 But yeah, it catapults you into this world of imagination. 65 00:04:18,440 --> 00:04:23,240 And, you know, unlike many people, I did not outgrow my childhood adoration. 66 00:04:23,920 --> 00:04:27,620 It's funny how dinosaurs and childhood go together, right? 67 00:04:27,900 --> 00:04:30,780 Like you, I loved those picture books about dinosaurs. 68 00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:34,760 I loved going to natural history museums, seeing dinosaur skeletons. 69 00:04:35,240 --> 00:04:39,140 But there were probably, I don't know, 20, 30 years there as an adult 70 00:04:39,140 --> 00:04:41,240 when I didn't have dinosaurs in my life. 71 00:04:41,560 --> 00:04:44,860 And then I had kids, and there were the dinosaurs again. 72 00:04:44,860 --> 00:04:51,380 And I was thinking about, well, reading your book got me to think about how that is a bedrock experience, 73 00:04:51,560 --> 00:04:57,580 bedrock American experience, and about how dinosaurs are embedded in our personal childhoods, 74 00:04:57,580 --> 00:05:00,040 but also in the childhood of the nation. 75 00:05:00,500 --> 00:05:05,020 So why and how did dinosaurs become part of our national identity? 76 00:05:05,020 --> 00:05:11,420 Yeah, so it turns out that this idea of deep time, which is the container for the dinosaurs, 77 00:05:12,040 --> 00:05:14,440 unfolds over the course of a single century. 78 00:05:14,620 --> 00:05:17,820 So that's why I dare to call this a revolution, a deep time revolution, 79 00:05:17,820 --> 00:05:22,680 because by historical standards, this is a very rapid changing of people's minds. 80 00:05:22,940 --> 00:05:24,160 Yeah, 100 years is nothing. 81 00:05:24,660 --> 00:05:27,180 It's nothing in the drop of time. 82 00:05:27,180 --> 00:05:33,140 And so if you had interviewed, let's say, the founding fathers in the American Revolution, 83 00:05:33,520 --> 00:05:39,220 all of them would have given you a version of this answer to the question, how old is the earth? 84 00:05:39,320 --> 00:05:41,700 They would have said, well, it's about 6,000 years old. 85 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:43,080 How do we know this? 86 00:05:43,160 --> 00:05:48,580 Because if you run the numbers in the Bible, that's kind of what you roughly come up with, 87 00:05:48,600 --> 00:05:51,180 a creation date of around 4,000 BC. 88 00:05:51,180 --> 00:05:59,100 And somehow over the course of the next century, the bottom drops out of that chronology. 89 00:05:59,700 --> 00:06:07,220 And through a variety of new projects, for example, the desire to find what are called 90 00:06:07,220 --> 00:06:14,060 fossil fuels to power the Industrial Revolution, the desire for white people to expand into Western 91 00:06:14,060 --> 00:06:19,500 lands beyond the Mississippi, projects that we have simply thought of as the building of 92 00:06:19,500 --> 00:06:25,120 the national infrastructure, in fact, required the building of a new national chronology. 93 00:06:25,580 --> 00:06:32,520 They were digging into strata, for example, in upstate New York, where they found really weird 94 00:06:32,520 --> 00:06:39,300 early life forms like the famous trilobites, which are about as big as, you know, if you were to wear 95 00:06:39,300 --> 00:06:44,280 a pendant on a necklace, it's about that big, like a big silver dollar size little creatures 96 00:06:44,280 --> 00:06:45,100 that crawl around. 97 00:06:45,860 --> 00:06:48,700 And this was very haunting to Americans. 98 00:06:48,700 --> 00:06:53,320 There were layers of rocks, and then suddenly there were trilobites. 99 00:06:53,580 --> 00:06:55,260 And how had this happened? 100 00:06:55,660 --> 00:07:01,880 They started to wrestle with this in the 1820s, you know, during the John Quincy Adams administration. 101 00:07:02,600 --> 00:07:09,940 So I love this image of ordinary Americans out there digging for the transcontinental railroads 102 00:07:09,940 --> 00:07:16,560 and pulling up not just trilobites, but also dinosaur bones, these things that are larger 103 00:07:16,560 --> 00:07:18,680 than any living creature today. 104 00:07:19,320 --> 00:07:25,740 I'm trying to sort of think my way back into how incredibly knocked out people must have 105 00:07:25,740 --> 00:07:28,080 been and just disbelieving. 106 00:07:28,080 --> 00:07:31,940 Yeah, these things are huge, and they like to pose with them. 107 00:07:32,120 --> 00:07:33,960 Like, look at this giant femur. 108 00:07:34,160 --> 00:07:36,740 It's as tall as an adult human. 109 00:07:36,840 --> 00:07:42,780 And they love especially to ship these things to Europe to show that Europe might have Roman 110 00:07:42,780 --> 00:07:48,600 ruins, but Americans have something not only older, but bigger. 111 00:07:48,600 --> 00:07:56,000 And that's really striking, because Pompeii had just been uncovered the previous century. 112 00:07:56,200 --> 00:08:01,240 And the reason Pompeii was so exciting was because there were actual human bodies there. 113 00:08:01,580 --> 00:08:04,700 But Brontosaurus is way bigger than that. 114 00:08:04,780 --> 00:08:08,260 So we too have bodies in America, and our bodies are bigger than your bodies. 115 00:08:08,260 --> 00:08:11,980 So there's, you know, this is very much about the creation of American nationalism. 116 00:08:13,120 --> 00:08:19,800 So you said at a certain point that you started writing a book about dinosaurs, and then realized 117 00:08:19,800 --> 00:08:21,780 eventually that you were writing a book about God. 118 00:08:21,960 --> 00:08:28,240 And you've got this lovely line, deep time caresses the divine. 119 00:08:28,860 --> 00:08:34,620 Can you try to bring that alive a little bit in terms of how it must have felt to people? 120 00:08:34,620 --> 00:08:41,100 The reason that, you know, normal people could get on board with this is because the deep 121 00:08:41,100 --> 00:08:49,320 chronology of time makes God even more amazing, because it says he operated over much larger 122 00:08:49,320 --> 00:08:52,160 spans of time than we had thought. 123 00:08:52,300 --> 00:09:01,760 Oh, the mere six days of Genesis is just child's play in comparison to the billions of years over 124 00:09:01,760 --> 00:09:08,480 which God continually lavished the greatest expression of his love, which is his creative 125 00:09:08,480 --> 00:09:09,120 energies. 126 00:09:09,800 --> 00:09:11,520 And they talk about that constantly. 127 00:09:12,000 --> 00:09:15,040 Look, look at God, look at him. 128 00:09:15,260 --> 00:09:21,460 He's implanting the trilobites, and then he's implanting the coal forests that are now giving 129 00:09:21,460 --> 00:09:25,580 life, illuminating energies to us. 130 00:09:25,580 --> 00:09:27,300 And then he goes again. 131 00:09:27,300 --> 00:09:34,120 He gives us these enormous brontosauruses that we are now uncovering. 132 00:09:34,300 --> 00:09:38,080 And then he does it again and brings us the animals of the Ice Age. 133 00:09:38,300 --> 00:09:45,200 And then finally, his crowning creation, man, again, using the Victorian terminology, man. 134 00:09:45,760 --> 00:09:52,220 And this enables this even more majestic conception of God. 135 00:09:52,220 --> 00:09:55,940 And so, a lot of people say, yes, the dinosaurs are for me. 136 00:09:56,080 --> 00:09:57,500 They are a sign of God's love. 137 00:09:58,440 --> 00:10:00,960 God gave us Adam and Eve and also the dinosaurs. 138 00:10:01,280 --> 00:10:05,500 But surely, there were debates about how the hell do you put these things together? 139 00:10:05,940 --> 00:10:09,100 Were there dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden or not? 140 00:10:09,660 --> 00:10:09,900 Yeah. 141 00:10:10,760 --> 00:10:18,500 The problems really don't start until the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. 142 00:10:18,500 --> 00:10:28,700 And the reason that problems begin is because Darwin posits a way to imagine the changing 143 00:10:28,700 --> 00:10:32,760 of the guard in the life forms, you know, from trilobites to dinosaurs and all that. 144 00:10:33,120 --> 00:10:40,060 Without any godly agency, he says that it's not God necessarily. 145 00:10:40,060 --> 00:10:47,440 It is nature, natural selection that weeds out life forms that aren't working. 146 00:10:47,600 --> 00:10:51,460 So, something must have been wrong with the trilobites because eventually they went away. 147 00:10:51,620 --> 00:10:56,060 But that wasn't God deciding one day, oh, I can't stand these trilobites. 148 00:10:56,780 --> 00:10:57,300 They were fine. 149 00:10:57,420 --> 00:10:58,840 But now I just know more. 150 00:10:58,940 --> 00:11:00,300 Enough with the trilobites. 151 00:11:00,640 --> 00:11:01,600 No more trilobites. 152 00:11:01,920 --> 00:11:04,900 Like someone cleaning out their closet, you know, spring cleaning. 153 00:11:05,000 --> 00:11:06,640 And now we shall have the brontosaurus. 154 00:11:06,640 --> 00:11:13,440 And that was how actually the most famous scientist in America, Louis Agassiz, promoted things. 155 00:11:13,460 --> 00:11:16,340 And he went out on the lecture circuit and said all these things. 156 00:11:16,400 --> 00:11:18,540 He was the great rival to Charles Darwin. 157 00:11:18,940 --> 00:11:23,980 And he said God had these repeated creations and destructions, creations and destructions. 158 00:11:24,120 --> 00:11:28,780 And this is very exciting as a story of the United States. 159 00:11:28,780 --> 00:11:40,080 Darwin requires natural selection over long periods of time and very few exciting destructive moments. 160 00:11:40,460 --> 00:11:50,180 No, in fact, it's a whole series of tiny, tiny little moments, you know, minute changes in, I don't know, the shape of a trilobite tail that might lead to them dying out. 161 00:11:50,180 --> 00:11:57,860 Yeah, it's almost like he's the policeman on the side of the road saying nothing to see here, nothing to see here is so boring. 162 00:11:58,200 --> 00:12:01,900 And it is also non-teleological. 163 00:12:02,320 --> 00:12:05,460 It is not necessarily leading to anywhere. 164 00:12:05,740 --> 00:12:06,660 You don't need a God. 165 00:12:07,480 --> 00:12:08,380 You don't need a God. 166 00:12:08,760 --> 00:12:11,940 And Darwin worries very much about this because he's a believer. 167 00:12:11,940 --> 00:12:17,760 And he sort of like a kind of Frankenstein's monster thing, like, what did I do? 168 00:12:18,100 --> 00:12:27,700 But the combination of not needing a God and non-teleology is extremely problematic for many people. 169 00:12:28,200 --> 00:12:40,240 And in response to that, a new sort of branch of Protestantism unfolds in the wake of the Civil War, which we know today as fundamentalism. 170 00:12:40,240 --> 00:12:57,260 And they return to the comforts of the short chronology in order to rescue a teleological active God in the story of life on Earth and in the story of the United States. 171 00:12:57,260 --> 00:13:17,660 They really get going in the early 20th century as the young Earth creationists and their numbers continue to grow today, precisely for the reasons that I have mentioned, that there is something existentially terrifying about the scenario that Darwin presents to us. 172 00:13:18,060 --> 00:13:24,360 God is unnecessary, and whatever force is operating out there, it is not necessarily leading to us. 173 00:13:24,460 --> 00:13:25,600 We are incidental. 174 00:13:25,600 --> 00:13:37,520 Yeah, and I think for a lot of Americans who grew up secular, completely adopted a scientific viewpoint, that whole argument seems just arcane. 175 00:13:37,920 --> 00:13:43,800 But I think, in fact, this argument about, well, do we live in a landscape that's saturated with meaning? 176 00:13:43,960 --> 00:13:45,840 Do we have a place here or not? 177 00:13:46,540 --> 00:13:52,520 Is this planet special or just adrift in an ocean of dark space? 178 00:13:52,520 --> 00:13:55,800 Yes, I think these are questions that still occupy us. 179 00:13:56,540 --> 00:13:57,360 They certainly are. 180 00:13:57,460 --> 00:14:02,020 They are the most profound questions of our existence as humans. 181 00:14:02,400 --> 00:14:09,220 And they are simultaneously inspiring and also deeply disturbing. 182 00:14:09,720 --> 00:14:10,720 Who are we? 183 00:14:11,040 --> 00:14:12,320 Why are we here? 184 00:14:12,460 --> 00:14:13,260 Where are we going? 185 00:14:14,100 --> 00:14:15,840 What does it all mean? 186 00:14:15,840 --> 00:14:24,520 This is why we create philosophy, and it is why we create gods, to try to wrestle with those questions. 187 00:14:24,680 --> 00:14:26,440 Where do people go when they die? 188 00:14:27,120 --> 00:14:35,160 It's all very, very troubling and inspiring at the same time. 189 00:14:35,160 --> 00:14:47,180 And I was very excited to realize that dinosaurs were helpful for thinking about that. 190 00:14:47,840 --> 00:14:49,880 Helpful and also dangerous. 191 00:14:50,540 --> 00:14:59,220 America's discovery of dinosaurs and deep time would also lay the groundwork for Christian nationalism, manifest destiny, and genocide. 192 00:14:59,720 --> 00:15:00,660 More in a sec. 193 00:15:00,660 --> 00:15:25,380 Thank you. 194 00:15:25,560 --> 00:15:26,760 Hey, it's Steve. 195 00:15:27,080 --> 00:15:30,140 I want to invite you to visit our Wonder Cabinet website, 196 00:15:30,740 --> 00:15:34,040 where you will find more information about the show and Anne and me. 197 00:15:34,440 --> 00:15:36,840 And I really hope you'll subscribe to our newsletter. 198 00:15:37,340 --> 00:15:39,880 We'll tell you the story behind the name of this podcast 199 00:15:39,880 --> 00:15:43,940 and some of the amazing guests we'll be talking with in future episodes. 200 00:15:44,540 --> 00:15:47,800 You can find us at wondercabinetproductions.com. 201 00:15:48,120 --> 00:15:50,520 And please, tell your friends about Wonder Cabinet. 202 00:15:50,700 --> 00:15:55,080 This is a brand new podcast, and we'd love your help in getting the word out. 203 00:15:55,380 --> 00:15:56,380 Thank you. 204 00:15:56,380 --> 00:16:05,260 This is Wonder Cabinet, and I'm talking with Stanford historian Caroline Winterer 205 00:16:05,260 --> 00:16:10,640 about her book, How the New World Became Old, The Deep Time Revolution in America. 206 00:16:11,140 --> 00:16:14,560 So let's get into the shadow side of wonder and awe. 207 00:16:15,220 --> 00:16:18,420 Going back to the theological implications of deep time, 208 00:16:19,140 --> 00:16:25,320 America's national identity gets linked to this idea of God's divine favor. 209 00:16:25,320 --> 00:16:27,820 This is the most favored land. 210 00:16:27,980 --> 00:16:32,100 Not only do we get all these amazing fossils, we get the fossil fuels. 211 00:16:32,700 --> 00:16:41,560 We're standing atop a treasure trove of wealth that God has created and given to us, Americans, to use. 212 00:16:41,680 --> 00:16:47,640 So, I mean, you can just watch Manifest Destiny and Christian nationalism hold hands, 213 00:16:47,800 --> 00:16:49,680 and terrible things came from that. 214 00:16:49,680 --> 00:16:58,180 Indeed, and to the people who were finding deep time, they did not realize that. 215 00:16:58,540 --> 00:17:00,740 They did not realize what they were doing. 216 00:17:01,000 --> 00:17:02,060 A few of them did. 217 00:17:02,200 --> 00:17:09,120 A few of them commented on what it meant to extirpate the Native peoples from the Cotton South 218 00:17:09,120 --> 00:17:18,040 to make room for the slave-worked cotton fields that were packaged as good 219 00:17:18,040 --> 00:17:25,600 because God had given us the Cretaceous, which creates very rich limestone soils. 220 00:17:26,180 --> 00:17:29,200 So a few of them comment on this. 221 00:17:29,760 --> 00:17:30,440 What were they saying? 222 00:17:30,440 --> 00:17:34,220 I mean, it's sort of like AI today, right? 223 00:17:34,380 --> 00:17:40,540 There's a few naysayers in the corner, or I guess I would say the sort of the tech revolution 224 00:17:40,540 --> 00:17:46,960 in general, that there's a kind of techno-utopianism at work. 225 00:17:47,380 --> 00:17:52,040 And there's a deep time utopianism in the 19th century. 226 00:17:52,260 --> 00:17:53,020 It's new. 227 00:17:53,280 --> 00:17:54,300 It's exciting. 228 00:17:54,560 --> 00:17:56,760 Who knows where it will lead? 229 00:17:56,760 --> 00:18:01,540 And we can't stop the forces of God's progress. 230 00:18:01,780 --> 00:18:04,300 God is taking us forward. 231 00:18:04,600 --> 00:18:09,460 I mean, this is a feature of deep time that maybe is worth mentioning, that it moves forward 232 00:18:09,460 --> 00:18:10,980 in a linear way. 233 00:18:11,640 --> 00:18:19,760 And it displaces the ways that Americans and others in the 18th century thought about time, 234 00:18:19,820 --> 00:18:21,700 which is that it's often cyclical. 235 00:18:21,960 --> 00:18:23,940 You know, we will return to events. 236 00:18:23,940 --> 00:18:29,400 But deep time requires a forward movement of time from the past to the present. 237 00:18:29,560 --> 00:18:30,240 You don't repeat. 238 00:18:30,740 --> 00:18:32,580 You know, strata don't, like, repeat themselves. 239 00:18:33,800 --> 00:18:37,500 This is seen to be an objective fact of nature. 240 00:18:37,760 --> 00:18:38,800 Time moves forward. 241 00:18:39,480 --> 00:18:41,600 So they say, well, how could I stop that? 242 00:18:41,660 --> 00:18:50,620 We have to replace the Choctaw forests of Georgia with cotton fields, because that's what 243 00:18:50,620 --> 00:18:53,880 the strata tell us to do. 244 00:18:54,760 --> 00:19:01,360 So they think that they are doing God's work, as so many people always think they're doing, 245 00:19:01,440 --> 00:19:01,560 right? 246 00:19:01,580 --> 00:19:03,300 We are the heroes of our own narratives. 247 00:19:04,400 --> 00:19:10,920 Did deep time provide a rationale for the removal of Native Americans? 248 00:19:11,200 --> 00:19:15,600 Because, I mean, I partly sort of thought, well, here they're falling in love with this ancient 249 00:19:15,600 --> 00:19:21,460 land, why aren't they also falling in love with the original inhabitants, you know, the 250 00:19:21,460 --> 00:19:22,700 Native Americans who are here? 251 00:19:23,240 --> 00:19:28,860 Was there any part of deep time that provided a kind of rationale or underpinning for that 252 00:19:28,860 --> 00:19:29,180 movement? 253 00:19:29,780 --> 00:19:30,120 Absolutely. 254 00:19:30,540 --> 00:19:35,080 With the building of the railroads after the Civil War, a lot of the railroads are being 255 00:19:35,080 --> 00:19:40,680 built in what was then Lakota Sioux, and is today Lakota Sioux land in the Nebraska 256 00:19:40,680 --> 00:19:48,680 territory, et cetera, and essentially what they decide upon digging down into the fossil 257 00:19:48,680 --> 00:19:56,200 remains first, into the 50 million year old extinct mammals, like the paleocamels, et 258 00:19:56,200 --> 00:20:00,140 cetera, and then below them, the dinosaurs themselves. 259 00:20:00,640 --> 00:20:03,920 They say, oh, no, these were the first Americans. 260 00:20:04,860 --> 00:20:07,580 Native peoples, they came late. 261 00:20:07,580 --> 00:20:11,780 They're immigrants like we are, but God is not behind them, by the way. 262 00:20:12,240 --> 00:20:18,280 So the first Americans are dinosaurs and then furry rhinoceroses. 263 00:20:18,980 --> 00:20:26,980 And moreover, the horse and the camel, which are native to the Americas, went and populated 264 00:20:26,980 --> 00:20:27,940 the rest of the world. 265 00:20:28,120 --> 00:20:30,160 So you're welcome, rest of world. 266 00:20:30,420 --> 00:20:34,300 We gave you the horse, starting with little Eohippus, the dawn horse. 267 00:20:34,300 --> 00:20:41,480 It grew and became the great engine of civilization for Asia and Europe and then was returned to 268 00:20:41,480 --> 00:20:50,120 its rightful home of America by the Spaniards during their God-defended invasion of America 269 00:20:50,120 --> 00:20:53,660 in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. 270 00:20:54,140 --> 00:20:58,660 So that was the new narrative that they locked into place. 271 00:20:58,660 --> 00:21:04,020 The 50 million year old mammals were the first Americans, not the Native Americans. 272 00:21:04,460 --> 00:21:04,840 That's right. 273 00:21:05,080 --> 00:21:07,500 Yeah, the Native Americans are not the Native Americans. 274 00:21:08,180 --> 00:21:12,480 And furthermore, and they go one step further because they love to talk about psychology. 275 00:21:13,240 --> 00:21:18,040 What was more, Native peoples are incapable of comprehending deep time. 276 00:21:18,260 --> 00:21:19,320 This is them talking, right? 277 00:21:19,320 --> 00:21:19,840 Not me. 278 00:21:20,080 --> 00:21:20,500 Of course. 279 00:21:20,500 --> 00:21:28,320 And so they start actually sending anthropologists into the field in the 1870s, and they collect 280 00:21:28,320 --> 00:21:33,560 what are called Indian calendars, which today are called winter counts. 281 00:21:33,900 --> 00:21:41,380 And these are records every year of, like, let's say this was the year of the stars fell. 282 00:21:41,460 --> 00:21:46,640 There was an asteroid, sorry, a meteor shower, and this would be recorded on a cowhide, for 283 00:21:46,640 --> 00:21:47,100 example. 284 00:21:47,740 --> 00:21:50,100 These only went back about 100 years. 285 00:21:50,100 --> 00:21:55,580 And so the anthropologists returned to the Smithsonian and Yale and other places and said, 286 00:21:55,660 --> 00:21:59,460 look, we have evidence that the Native peoples cannot comprehend deep time because, look, 287 00:21:59,520 --> 00:22:02,100 they're just creating these 100-year-old records. 288 00:22:02,560 --> 00:22:08,760 So, you know, this is all justification for Native removal or extinction. 289 00:22:09,340 --> 00:22:17,380 And then the kind of the pièce de résistance of this way of thinking is when they realized 290 00:22:17,380 --> 00:22:24,080 that a lot of the Ice Age megafauna, so the Ice Age in North America ended around 10,000 or 291 00:22:24,080 --> 00:22:29,740 11,000 years ago when there were already Native peoples in the Americas. 292 00:22:30,740 --> 00:22:38,600 And the woolly mammoth, for example, the mastodon, the woolly rhinoceros, the giant sloth, they 293 00:22:38,600 --> 00:22:43,900 were finding the bones, but they were not finding living examples of those creatures. 294 00:22:44,380 --> 00:22:51,100 And so they said, these scientists, ah, the Native Americans committed a massive genocide 295 00:22:51,100 --> 00:22:55,160 of the Pleistocene megafauna, the Ice Age megafauna. 296 00:22:55,160 --> 00:23:04,080 And so having been genocidal themselves, our own genocide against the Native peoples is justified. 297 00:23:06,240 --> 00:23:07,020 So, yeah. 298 00:23:07,800 --> 00:23:09,600 It's hard to hear this stuff. 299 00:23:10,580 --> 00:23:11,260 It is. 300 00:23:11,720 --> 00:23:18,800 The train of thinking is extremely disturbing, but it's a reminder that the stakes of deep 301 00:23:18,800 --> 00:23:20,500 time are massive. 302 00:23:20,500 --> 00:23:24,440 They were massive in the 19th century, and they are massive today. 303 00:23:25,400 --> 00:23:30,960 We locate in deep time some of the questions that are most important to us. 304 00:23:30,980 --> 00:23:32,240 Who deserves to be here? 305 00:23:32,320 --> 00:23:33,380 Who gets to be here? 306 00:23:33,520 --> 00:23:35,820 And on what basis do they get to be here? 307 00:23:35,900 --> 00:23:39,480 On what grounds do they participate in the civic polity? 308 00:23:39,900 --> 00:23:41,320 And on and on and on. 309 00:23:41,780 --> 00:23:41,960 Yeah. 310 00:23:42,100 --> 00:23:44,660 And that is obviously still with us. 311 00:23:44,660 --> 00:23:52,900 The Civil War happens in the middle of all of this, and I'm just wondering if it interrupts 312 00:23:52,900 --> 00:23:56,440 the deep time narrative at all, or how the deep time narrative shifts with it, because 313 00:23:56,440 --> 00:24:01,920 you would think it might interrupt this triumphalist narrative, because America suddenly does not 314 00:24:01,920 --> 00:24:03,300 look like this glorious nation. 315 00:24:03,400 --> 00:24:05,200 It looks like blood-soaked battlefields. 316 00:24:05,200 --> 00:24:05,880 Yeah. 317 00:24:06,440 --> 00:24:11,780 The Civil War coincides with the publication of The Origin of Species. 318 00:24:12,120 --> 00:24:17,620 It arrives in the United States in November of 1859, and it hits the national press where 319 00:24:17,620 --> 00:24:19,480 it's reviewed during the Civil War. 320 00:24:20,480 --> 00:24:23,440 The mechanism of natural selection is mass death. 321 00:24:23,800 --> 00:24:27,080 It's not the death of you or the death of me. 322 00:24:27,080 --> 00:24:36,620 It's the death of hundreds of thousands of people, roughly 750,000 people dying as a direct 323 00:24:36,620 --> 00:24:38,000 cause of battle. 324 00:24:38,480 --> 00:24:41,080 I mean, that has to dwarf any other American war. 325 00:24:41,280 --> 00:24:43,680 It did at the time, and it does still today. 326 00:24:44,480 --> 00:24:52,740 This is a doorway to modernity in the sense that we begin as humans to cope with mass death, 327 00:24:53,380 --> 00:24:56,520 mass everything, the mass society, mass transportation. 328 00:24:56,520 --> 00:24:59,440 Mass war, a mass death. 329 00:25:00,100 --> 00:25:07,040 And if anything, the mass death of the Civil War sort of helps to jolly along the idea of 330 00:25:07,040 --> 00:25:18,440 deep time, because people can imagine that underneath their fallen son in an Antietam grave, there 331 00:25:18,440 --> 00:25:24,180 lies another noble being who also gave its life to God's cause. 332 00:25:24,180 --> 00:25:28,300 You know, the trilobites they're sending around are dead trilobites. 333 00:25:28,540 --> 00:25:33,900 The brontosaurus bones they're shipping to the King of England saying, ours are bigger than 334 00:25:33,900 --> 00:25:34,340 yours. 335 00:25:34,600 --> 00:25:37,880 Literally, they are saying that these are dead dinosaurs. 336 00:25:37,880 --> 00:25:48,720 So there is a renewed presence of death in everyday life because the Civil War puts it there, but 337 00:25:48,720 --> 00:25:58,300 also breathes meaning, majesty, and martyrdom and all kinds of, you know, Christian qualities 338 00:25:58,300 --> 00:25:59,220 into this death. 339 00:25:59,220 --> 00:26:06,900 And also, because afterward there's a need for a national reconciliation, a re-sewing of the 340 00:26:06,900 --> 00:26:10,480 Confederacy into the rest of the nation. 341 00:26:10,980 --> 00:26:15,500 And that's how you can think of the transcontinental railroads as a giant zipper, you know, zipping 342 00:26:15,500 --> 00:26:19,240 up the United States and ending over here at Stanford. 343 00:26:19,240 --> 00:26:27,000 That's what then leads to the discoveries in Nebraska, et cetera, of these very, very ancient 344 00:26:27,000 --> 00:26:27,600 animals. 345 00:26:28,020 --> 00:26:30,920 So it's all bound up together. 346 00:26:32,000 --> 00:26:37,280 What happens much later as we move into the 20th century and post-World War II? 347 00:26:37,360 --> 00:26:41,880 I know this isn't what you wrote about in the book, but we've been talking about mass death. 348 00:26:41,880 --> 00:26:45,420 People continue to be interested in dinosaurs. 349 00:26:45,860 --> 00:26:53,500 All of the time-related sciences take off in the atomic age and are connected intimately 350 00:26:53,500 --> 00:26:56,100 to mass death and the nuclear project. 351 00:26:56,440 --> 00:27:01,260 How does all this deep time dinosaurs get woven together in the atomic age? 352 00:27:01,620 --> 00:27:01,820 Yeah. 353 00:27:02,040 --> 00:27:09,740 Well, one of the interesting things that happens in 1980 is that now that the general public 354 00:27:09,740 --> 00:27:14,440 has been habituated to the idea that apocalypse comes from the skies, you know, we've had 355 00:27:14,440 --> 00:27:20,740 the nuclear, you know, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the asteroid theory of dinosaur 356 00:27:20,740 --> 00:27:28,200 extinction, you know, is first proposed in an article in 1981 by Luis Alvarez and his son 357 00:27:28,200 --> 00:27:30,020 Walter Alvarez at UC Berkeley. 358 00:27:30,600 --> 00:27:35,180 And they say that, you know, the dinosaurs didn't die out gradually as people in high school 359 00:27:35,180 --> 00:27:38,360 at the time had been learning for the last century. 360 00:27:38,360 --> 00:27:44,100 But instead by Armageddon coming from the sky that this asteroid came in, you know. 361 00:27:44,360 --> 00:27:46,880 And kind of precipitating a kind of nuclear winter. 362 00:27:47,280 --> 00:27:50,500 Just the thing that, you know, in the Cold War we were all so terrified of. 363 00:27:51,180 --> 00:27:51,420 Yeah. 364 00:27:51,500 --> 00:27:52,940 So we're ready to accept it. 365 00:27:52,980 --> 00:27:55,660 And this is not to say that the scientific theory is wrong. 366 00:27:55,740 --> 00:27:59,820 It's just to say that the public is primed to accept certain things. 367 00:27:59,840 --> 00:28:03,280 It's primed to accept deep time in the 19th century because of the Civil War. 368 00:28:03,280 --> 00:28:08,620 It's primed to accept the asteroid theory of what is essentially neocatastrophism. 369 00:28:08,840 --> 00:28:11,780 The problem with Darwin was always that gradualism is boring. 370 00:28:12,160 --> 00:28:13,840 But look, an asteroid. 371 00:28:14,580 --> 00:28:15,860 Super exciting. 372 00:28:16,080 --> 00:28:16,660 Much more exciting. 373 00:28:16,660 --> 00:28:25,620 And furthermore, it is discovered, you know, 10 years later that the asteroid fell in the New World, you know, off the coast of Mexico. 374 00:28:25,620 --> 00:28:36,340 And its most exquisite and detailed and amazing remains can be found in dot, dot, dot, the United States. 375 00:28:36,340 --> 00:28:42,040 In the dinosaur lands of Nebraska, et cetera, you know, in the Badlands. 376 00:28:42,380 --> 00:28:45,340 I keep hearing echoes of Donald Trump, you know. 377 00:28:45,480 --> 00:28:50,460 We have the best of the biggest dinosaurs, the biggest coal seams, the biggest asteroids. 378 00:28:52,640 --> 00:28:53,120 Yeah. 379 00:28:53,380 --> 00:28:54,980 It can go there, right? 380 00:28:55,100 --> 00:28:56,380 We have the deepest time. 381 00:28:56,760 --> 00:28:58,220 We have the biggest asteroid. 382 00:28:59,160 --> 00:29:01,300 And, you know, come to Nebraska. 383 00:29:01,300 --> 00:29:06,540 Well, so let's take this story up to the present. 384 00:29:07,260 --> 00:29:24,480 If those 19th and 20th century Americans saw this land as a God-given Garden of Eden, here in the 21st century we have a very different narrative, right, of a post-lapsarian America in which those, all that fossil fuel consumption turned out to be the original environmental sin. 385 00:29:24,480 --> 00:29:35,500 And so in the span of 100 years, which, you know, we began by talking about what a short period of time that is, we have irrevocably altered what took eons of time to build. 386 00:29:36,160 --> 00:29:42,340 So going back to that existential terror of deep time, it seems like we're now living with a nightmare version of it. 387 00:29:42,340 --> 00:29:51,040 Deep time is the gift that keeps on giving, but you don't know if it's, you know, the gift that you didn't want or the gift that you did want. 388 00:29:52,100 --> 00:29:56,620 In the 19th century, yeah, it has this lovely God-give-us-this-and-that aspect. 389 00:29:56,620 --> 00:30:07,000 But now the idea of the Anthropocene is a way of, once again, deploying deep time to come to terms with our greatest existential questions. 390 00:30:07,400 --> 00:30:08,960 In this case, what have we done? 391 00:30:09,320 --> 00:30:11,480 Which is very biblical in some ways. 392 00:30:11,760 --> 00:30:13,220 You know, what have I done here? 393 00:30:13,260 --> 00:30:13,960 I did not know. 394 00:30:14,000 --> 00:30:15,260 Or maybe it's a Greek tragedy. 395 00:30:15,840 --> 00:30:24,560 But the idea of the Anthropocene is the ultimate projection of humanity into the space of deep time. 396 00:30:24,560 --> 00:30:33,240 And it gives us a way to frame and to cope with what to us seems extremely frightening. 397 00:30:33,760 --> 00:30:38,980 That said, there are a number of people who say, you know, yeah, but don't worry. 398 00:30:39,100 --> 00:30:47,180 Because deep time has a kind of soothing gift, which is that, yeah, we may knock ourselves off the earth in, let's say, a thousand years. 399 00:30:47,180 --> 00:30:48,820 We'll fill the skies with garbage. 400 00:30:49,220 --> 00:30:51,940 And most of the current animals will die off. 401 00:30:51,940 --> 00:30:53,660 But the earth will keep going. 402 00:30:53,660 --> 00:30:55,280 You know, we're gone. 403 00:30:55,440 --> 00:30:57,520 But let's stop being so self-centered. 404 00:30:57,720 --> 00:30:59,200 There will be new life forms. 405 00:30:59,920 --> 00:31:12,860 And like sort of weird gods, we will be the midwives of life forms that would not have appeared had it not been for our massive destruction of the earth. 406 00:31:12,940 --> 00:31:20,760 So that's how deep time can really cut both ways as tragedy and as a kind of weird benevolence. 407 00:31:20,760 --> 00:31:29,060 And could deep time, do you think, offer, I don't know, a different, more hopeful narrative in any way? 408 00:31:29,180 --> 00:31:41,660 I mean, is there a way to kind of go back and revive any of that sense of wonder and awe that folks had back in the 19th and 20th century, perhaps re-sacralize the natural world? 409 00:31:41,660 --> 00:31:53,840 It certainly did in the 19th century, the realization that what you are looking at is just the most recent representative of a story, a never-ending story. 410 00:31:53,840 --> 00:32:02,500 I mean, that's when we got the national parks, which, you know, how they were created is also a scar on our past. 411 00:32:03,120 --> 00:32:07,740 But they are one of the greatest things to have come out of America. 412 00:32:07,740 --> 00:32:10,680 Yeah, they are the national cathedrals. 413 00:32:10,860 --> 00:32:13,060 They're the secular cathedrals of the United States. 414 00:32:13,200 --> 00:32:16,000 No other nation had them at the time. 415 00:32:16,100 --> 00:32:23,180 And you're right that there was a violence to their creation, the eradication of the native peoples who lived there, you know. 416 00:32:23,580 --> 00:32:26,280 But they also are born of deep time. 417 00:32:26,280 --> 00:32:38,180 The first national parks, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, are born of this idea that in the strata is God. 418 00:32:38,180 --> 00:32:58,680 And we need to allow people into this national cathedral to see the face of a past so deep that it brings you in contact with your maker and that the only appropriate response is silence and wonder. 419 00:32:59,220 --> 00:33:03,020 You know, that sounds like a Puritan sermon from 1630. 420 00:33:03,020 --> 00:33:11,860 There's a captivity narrative from the 17th century that ends, stand still and see the wonder of the Lord. 421 00:33:12,920 --> 00:33:15,500 That is absolutely the national parks. 422 00:33:16,020 --> 00:33:24,400 So can we create a wonder at the natural world that also incorporates the wonder of all peoples who inhabit the earth? 423 00:33:24,960 --> 00:33:28,220 You know, we're getting there, but we're not there yet. 424 00:33:28,840 --> 00:33:28,860 Yeah. 425 00:33:29,620 --> 00:33:32,680 So just I have a couple of questions just about time itself. 426 00:33:33,020 --> 00:33:37,420 Today, it seems to me, we have the opposite problem of deep time. 427 00:33:37,500 --> 00:33:39,680 Our modern time frames are so short. 428 00:33:39,880 --> 00:33:44,880 We're inundated on just a daily, hourly basis with news of now. 429 00:33:45,560 --> 00:33:52,420 And I'm just curious how different our sense of time is today from that earlier generation you've been describing. 430 00:33:52,960 --> 00:33:54,380 Not much, actually. 431 00:33:54,660 --> 00:33:54,880 Really? 432 00:33:54,880 --> 00:33:59,440 But yeah, deep time emerges at the same time as rushing. 433 00:33:59,440 --> 00:34:06,240 And there's actually, there's a wonderful book called The Railway Journey by a guy named, his last name is Schivelbusch. 434 00:34:06,240 --> 00:34:16,700 And he talks about how the first railway journeys undertaken in the 1840s and 1850s, people feel like we do on our smartphones, like ping, ping, ping, you know, everything is happening. 435 00:34:16,700 --> 00:34:22,420 Because they were going 30 miles an hour, which is faster than anything but a ship would have gone at the time. 436 00:34:22,420 --> 00:34:23,920 But this is over land. 437 00:34:24,440 --> 00:34:29,340 And they have a sense of sensorily overwhelming qualities. 438 00:34:29,340 --> 00:34:31,740 Like here's an image, here's an image, here's a village, here's a village. 439 00:34:31,840 --> 00:34:32,860 Oh, it's all going so fast. 440 00:34:32,900 --> 00:34:40,160 And they had all kinds of diseases, railway spine from the acceleration and the deceleration of the train. 441 00:34:40,160 --> 00:34:45,380 And deep time emerges as the opposite of that. 442 00:34:46,200 --> 00:34:49,160 So the faster we go, the deeper the time. 443 00:34:49,320 --> 00:34:56,540 And, you know, we're back to now to the Big Bang, you know, like, I don't know how old the universe is, is like 13 billion years old. 444 00:34:56,780 --> 00:35:04,020 And it's absolutely no coincidence at all that that goes along with our sense that we are all going too quickly. 445 00:35:04,400 --> 00:35:07,380 And I think that our brains love to play with this. 446 00:35:07,380 --> 00:35:14,980 It is in some senses a manufacturer, not manufactured in the sense that corporations are kind of sinisterly giving this to us, 447 00:35:15,040 --> 00:35:23,000 but that we delight in rolling around these things in our minds and coping with, on the one hand, deep time. 448 00:35:23,120 --> 00:35:26,000 And then on the other hand, my phone is pinging me again. 449 00:35:27,200 --> 00:35:30,320 This is delicious for us. 450 00:35:30,700 --> 00:35:31,420 It's entertaining. 451 00:35:32,220 --> 00:35:34,620 I love that way of thinking about it. 452 00:35:34,620 --> 00:35:38,580 I mean, as opposed to really kind of breaks my usual catastrophizing. 453 00:35:38,680 --> 00:35:41,220 Oh, my God, everything's getting too fast, too fast. 454 00:35:41,280 --> 00:35:42,000 I can't breathe. 455 00:35:42,160 --> 00:35:43,260 This is bad for us. 456 00:35:43,600 --> 00:35:45,700 That's a much better way of framing it. 457 00:35:46,220 --> 00:35:47,900 I don't know if it's scientifically correct. 458 00:35:48,240 --> 00:35:49,680 This is the view from Caroline. 459 00:35:51,180 --> 00:35:57,580 Caroline Winterer is the William Robertson Coe Professor of history and American studies at Stanford University 460 00:35:57,580 --> 00:36:03,380 and the author of How the New World Became Old, The Deep Time Revolution in America. 461 00:36:03,920 --> 00:36:07,560 Well, I have to say, you two gave us a lot to think about there. 462 00:36:08,140 --> 00:36:13,060 And you know, in an odd way, this kind of dovetails with the episode that I'm working on for next week. 463 00:36:13,140 --> 00:36:18,140 I'm going to be talking with the economist Rebecca Henderson about how to reimagine capitalism. 464 00:36:18,140 --> 00:36:21,500 And she has a perspective I really haven't heard before. 465 00:36:22,180 --> 00:36:23,080 I'm Anne Strainchamps. 466 00:36:23,280 --> 00:36:24,280 And I'm Steve Paulson. 467 00:36:24,860 --> 00:36:28,420 Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont. 468 00:36:28,780 --> 00:36:30,840 Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher. 469 00:36:30,980 --> 00:36:32,940 Our digital producer is Mark Riechers. 470 00:36:33,320 --> 00:36:37,640 And if you haven't yet, sign up for our newsletter so you can get updates on new episodes. 471 00:36:38,120 --> 00:36:41,420 You'll find it at wondercabinetproductions.com. 472 00:36:41,420 --> 00:36:43,860 As you may know, this is a brand new podcast. 473 00:36:43,860 --> 00:36:49,000 And so anything you can do to help spread the word would be truly lovely. 474 00:36:49,560 --> 00:36:51,280 And thanks so much for joining us today. 475 00:36:51,520 --> 00:36:52,460 Until next week.