Science of Discworld III

the Victorians built, especially when it comes to sewerage and water supplies.
    The resulting changes in thinking fuelled further changes. The combination of cause and consequence is an example of what we have elsewhere called complicity . 1 This phenomenon arises when two conceptually distinct systems interact recursively, each repeatedly changing the other, so that they co-evolve. A typical outcome is thattogether they work their way into territory that would have been inaccessible to either alone. Complicity is not mere ‘interaction’, where the systems join forces to achieve some joint outcome, but are not themselves greatly affected as a result. It is far more drastic, and it changes everything. It can even erase its own origins, so that neither of the original separate systems remains.
    The social innovations that were (arguably but not solely) triggered by Victorian ingenuity and drive are just like that. Because there was selection, and because the best growth often occurs in the best run and best designed parts of growing systems, there was recursion. The next generation was inspired by the previous generation’s successes, and their noble mistakes, and built a better world. What we might call the Channel Tunnel Syndrome occurs quite often in capitalist, democratic societies, but not in totalitarian states or even in nations like, say, today’s Arab states or twentieth-century India. And particularly not in nineteenth-century Russia or China: both were rich, but they had no respectable middle class.
    The Victorian middle class was respected both by the workers whose lives they exploited – and opened up – and by the aristocrats, whose increasingly international outlook was progressively integrated with trade. Russia and China had political systems without an economically powerful, shareholding middle class, which could start or follow fashions, and support romantic, visionary ventures. Today, the British will still support a Channel Tunnel venture or a Beagle-2 Mars lander, because such things are romantic and possibly heroic, even though they are unlikely to be very profitable. A lengthy historical record shows very clearly that the first attempt at any major tunnel usually collapses financially – though after the tunnel is successfully built – often after a long series of attempts to shore up a failing enterprise. Then the ruins are bought for a song, occasionally nationalised or considerably financed by government or some other major capital source, and the resulting business can stand on the shoulders of the first. Only some rather strained economics has sofar kept the original companies involved in the Channel Tunnel in business, at least on the British side of the Channel where everything was done by private enterprise.
    Some projects are so romantic, so attractive in concept but so very difficult in execution, that three or four attempts are needed for them to acquire momentum. It is recursive structure of the complicit kind that keeps them afloat. 2 Telford’s bridges are famous, as are so many of his other engineering works; his ability to capitalise on his successes was the result, and the cause, of his fame, which was achieved by what would now be called ‘networking’ among aristocrats, government ministers, and pickle manufacturers. He was, as they said, famous for being famous. In America similar enterprises were measured more by the anticipated financial return, the ‘bottom line’. So John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and their ilk were worth supporting because your investment was guaranteed to multiply, rather than because the enterprise was exciting ‘for Queen and Country’. Early twentieth-century America had gigantic, monolithic Ford … while England had a variety of small engineering concerns like Morris Garages (MG).
    The other major reason why societies like Victorian England can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fly is one we’ve discussed earlier. They lift themselves out of the old constraints, and into a new set of rules. In The Science of Discworld and The Science of Discworld II we explained why the space bolas, a kind of enormous Ferris wheel in orbit, is capable of carrying people into space far cheaper than rockets – in fact, requiring less energy than anyone would calculate using Newton’s laws of motion and gravity. We took onefurther step, and invoked the space elevator, a very strong cable hung from geostationary orbit, which would be