A sudden obsolescence

The most momentous event of the twentieth century, as seen from the standpoint of human history, seems to have gone mostly unnoticed.

Our writer is also a voracious reader.  He claims no particular literary insight, especially into modern fiction (however that is defined), but he does enjoy reading material from many eras.  And he has long noted that something basic in the background of stories changed, about the beginning of the twentieth century: the horse disappeared.

The partnership of humans and horses is prehistoric: when the first history was written it was taken for granted.  As a beast of burden and a mode of war it’s already there in the first records, a different animal from its wild predecessors.  And it’s socially divisive: the distinction between the nobles and the peasants is that the former own and ride them, the latter (at best) use them to do work.  In Romance languages he words for “knight,” the lowest rank of nobility, denote a horse-rider (caballero, chevalier).  Even cultures that had never seen a horse, natives of the North American plains when the Europeans arrived, took to riding as if born to it.  (One couldn’t say, “born in the saddle,” because they didn’t use that invention.)

Of course there were, and are, other beasts of burden.  Oxen and water-buffaloes are stronger; camels and dromedaries (different animals!) better suited to desert lands; donkeys are cheaper to buy and keep.  But worldwide and over tens of thousands of years, the horse has been predominant.

Then, near the beginning of the twentieth century, the horse was displaced.  The internal-combustion engine was more powerful and/or economical as a mode of transportation, in performing farm work, in war.  A partnership lasting a thousand generations was gone within one.  I want to emphasize the extent and suddenness of this change: from a world in which everyone was familiar with horses (though not everyone owned or worked with one) to a world in which they were exotic and rare.  They are not quite zoo animals; but people will still pay money to ride in a horse-drawn vehicle, at a slower speed and with no practical advantages over an automobile, solely because it’s an unusual experience.

Our writer notices it in stories from, say, the nineteenth century.  A knowledge of horses, their handling, upkeep, behavior; what makes for a good one or a bad; all is assumed in the reader.  And much of it is unavailable today, at least without some deep research.  What of the subtleties of a Kipling short story has he missed by being unaware of the finer points of horse-trading?  It’s not the biggest effect, but the loss of the horse places another barrier between today’s population and the literature of not too long ago.

That the world changes, and changes unexpectedly and suddenly, is not a new lesson.  Neither is the fact that something apparently necessary can become dispensible.  What has struck is here at Five Colors is the magnitude of the historical change–and the fact that it has gone all but unnoticed.