It is this idealisation that marks out romance as something different from ordinary love. It is never common. It is rare and transcendent. One’s beloved has to be so unique, so special that all else in the world melts away. If it seems like adoration, not simply love, then that’s probably because it is. The star of romance rose in the West as religious faith was at first beset by doubt, then began to wane.
It rose, too, as the blossoming of the self and individualism in the Enlightenment and beyond told us that each of us is, in some way, special, but then left us feeling alone and very small. Romance provided both freedom and self-realisation. Romance, sociologist Anthony Giddens argues, gives us our own story in life.
And of course, while we are waiting for our own love story to begin, we can fill our heads with the romances of others. It is surely no coincidence that the idea of romance has flowered along with a wealth of romantic writing.
Poets often made romance transcendent and noble and even tragic in the courtly tradition. The man suffered and the woman looked down from her pedestal. Love is frequently unrequited. Novelists such as Jane Austen ingeniously turned it around to the woman’s point of view, and showed that the woman suffered or was foolish in love, and so created a much more intimate, much more tender kind of romance. And invariably a happy ending: ‘Reader, I married him,’ sighs Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre finally.
Romance is cherished because it is perhaps the best and most exalted experience we can ever have. We do not always love well. We do not always pin our love on the right person. We may get jealous or foolish or angry or sentimental or smothering or obsessive. But when we do love well, when we do indeed find the person of our dreams, even if that dream is just a little more grounded in reality than in the stories, then it reminds us, maybe briefly, maybe lastingly, that the world is a wonderful place. It’s a precious gift that needs and deserves a lifetime of care.
See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea: -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
– Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Love’s Philosophy’
As Oscar Wilde said, who, being loved, is poor?
[1] Of course, you can get similar chemical changes by eating a sticky bun, going for a run, lying in the sun, having a nap, and having a drink. So if that’s all it is, love isn’t that special.
[2] Philosophers and poets have been talking about it for thousands of years, of course. In Plato’s Symposium on love, in which Plato asks characters to say what love is, the comic playwright Aristophanes tells a story to make fun of those who say they only feel ‘whole’ when they’re in love: In the beginning, there were three kinds of human, one male, one female and one half man and half woman, but they each had four limbs and two faces. They might have been strange, but these jolly creatures were brave and strong and even challenged the Gods. Zeus, of course, got cross, and decided to split them all in half to diminish their strength. And of course, he created us, lonely creatures forever searching for out other halves. It was probably meant as a joke, yet this image of love as finding your other half still has touching echoes today.
Another contributor to the Symposium, Socrates, also thought that love fills a human lack, but for him the lack was the beautiful and good. Love is the desire to possess the beautiful and good for ever – and is, then, a desire for immortality. We can achieve this through creation, inspired by a beautiful beloved, in three ways, each better than the next – having children, performing heroic deeds and winning lasting fame, and finally, and best of all, by creating works of science, education, law and art. For him, human love was simply a necessary step on the way to higher things.
The prophetess Diotima argued that the beautiful love inspires the mind and soul to focus on higher things, in particular Divinity, which is the source of Beauty. This kind of love came to be called Platonic love (after Plato) and merged into the courtly tradition of love, which was also in many ways Platonic, and which became immensely popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now it can often be used as a euphemism for unrequited love, or a kind of pretend love.
[3] It’s quite strange to think that when we long for a bit of romance, to an Ancient Roman, that would be like saying you long for a bit of Cockney.
[4] Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is said by some, with little actual proof, to have been inspired by the tragic Arabic love story from the seventh century of Layla and Majnun, also the subject of guitarist Eric Clapton’s most famous track.
#32 Mass-production
‘Time loves to be wasted’, said Henry Ford epigrammatically. ‘From that waste there can be no salvage. It is the hardest waste of all to correct because it does not litter the floor.’
No wonder, then, he was so ecstatic about the innovation introduced in 1913 at Ford’s Highland Park car factory in Detroit by one of Ford’s managers, Charles Sorensen. Indeed, he was so ecstatic that he later claimed the idea was his own. What Sorensen had done was to introduce an assembly line to build the Model T Ford. The effect was so startling that it inspired what some people called the second industrial revolution.
Mass-production had been around for some time before the Ford experiment. It meant breaking the production process into standardised components. Instead of making a finished item, each factory hand added just a single component or performed a certain routine task, again and again, passing it on each time to the next hand. That way, the item was built up bit by bit. The specialisation and repetition speeded up the industrial process dramatically.
Back in the sixteenth century, the vast Venice arsenal had managed to build a complete ship each day using this kind of system, and in the American Civil War, the Springfield Armory churned out different guns at an unprecedented rate to keep the army supplied by using interchangeable parts and breaking the assembly process into stages.
In the 1860s, the extraordinarily innovative meat processor Gustavus Swift had made sure his Chicago abattoir lived up to his name. Inside the plant, an overhead trolley whisked each carcass to various process stations where workers would lop off a particular part and deal with it appropriately as it passed by. This is, Ford later said, what gave him the idea, and perhaps there is something rather disturbing in thinking that the process behind our modern consumer lifestyle was inspired by mass slaughter.
So mass-production and assembly lines were not new when Ford introduced them. What was new, and revolutionary, was that no one had attempted it on such a large and complex item as a car, which had always previously been coach-built by hand. Nor had anyone tried it on such a massive scale or with such a high degree of organisation. At first, Sorensen experimented just with a conveyor belt that carried radiators around to be assembled in one place, then soldered in another. But before long the entire assembly of the Model T was organised like this, with each car being whisked past overhead, briefly pausing as workers added their particular component or completed their task until finally the finished car rolled off the assembly line. The factory was a vision of non-stop motion.
It all focused, Ford said, ‘upon a manufacturing process of the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, speed and repetition’. The result was astonishingly effective. In August 1913, it took an average of twelve and a half man hours to assemble a Model T; a year later, after Sorensen had introduced the assembly lines, it took just one and a half hours.
The impact of this was genuinely revolutionary. It meant that Ford could sell the T at such low prices that it opened up motoring, previously the preserve of the rich, to the ordinary American. ‘Every time I reduce the charge for our car by one dollar,’ Ford declared excitedly, ‘I get a thousand new buyers.’ And the speed of the production line meant that Ford could keep up with demand. In
1908 Ford had just 10 per cent of the American car market. By 1914 it had pretty much half and was rolling out more than a quarter of a million cars every year.
The first and most obvious impact of Ford’s innovation was on the car industry. Without mass-production, the motor car would have remained a specialist item for the rich, no more affordable than a luxury yacht. Mass-production meant that cars could be made cheap enough and in sufficient numbers for them to become a standard purchase for people even on relatively modest incomes.[1]
The figures are staggering. Today, there are some three-quarters of a billion cars on the world’s roads and the car industry worldwide makes a million new ones every year. The mass ownership of cars has transformed cities and people’s ways of life. Many cities in the USA are built entirely around the car, with such vast distances between residential and shopping, leisure and business areas that the only way of travelling between them is by road.
But it is not just the car. Countless items in our homes and offices are affordable and abundant because of mass-production. Very few items have escaped the relentless pull of the assembly line. Computers and TVs, washing machines and microwaves, and numerous other quite complex items are built at prices ordinary people can afford. Even items such as food are packaged using the same principles. So many of the things we take for granted would be restricted to the homes of the super-rich if it were not for mass-production.
Of course, there is a downside to all this. First of all, mass-produced items are often less well-made than hand-crafted items – though there are some items that cannot be hand-made at all. They are also dully identical and have none of the interesting individuality of hand-made items. Secondly, they have taken away much of the job satisfaction of factory workers, and in many cases taken away their job altogether. Instead of the contentment of completing a job, factory workers have simply to add their part, routinely and repetitively without often ever getting to see the product finished. And of course many factory jobs have been lost to automation and robotic assembly systems.
There is a sense that mass-production has helped us both become voracious consumers and fill our lives with the soullessness of gently buzzing factories. There is something quite wasteful about a system that seems to generate masses of products that we don’t necessarily need in order to fuel economic growth.
And yet it’s easy to sit in one’s ivory tower and get rueful over the passing of craft items and skilled labour. But in the pre-mass-production era, life for most people was grim. Poverty was widespread, and life expectancy was shockingly low. The houses of the working class were empty of all but the most basic items, since those beautiful hand-made items were unaffordable even to those who made them. And jobs were often dangerous and demanding.
The coming of the mass-production, mass-consumption approach transformed the lives of millions of working-class people in the Western world. The consumer goods factories gave them, for the first time, reasonably well paid and secure jobs and a lifestyle that their grandparents could barely imagine. And though the work may have been dull, at least it was pretty likely you would get through the day without being maimed and not so exhausted that you couldn’t enjoy some of the new pleasures on offer.[2]
[1] Such was the charismatic personality of Henry Ford, and the huge impact of the mass-production, mass-consumption approach that a range of social theories known as Fordism sprang up. The key idea was that not only should goods be produced cheaply in massive quantities using standardisation and assembly lines, but that factory workers should also be paid well so that they provide a mass market for the products they make.
The Ford approach became such an extraordinary phenomenon in the 1930s that Hitler had a picture of Henry Ford on his desk and Stalin took Ford’s ideas as a role model for Soviet industry in the Five Year plans. ‘American efficiency is that indomitable force,’ historian Thomas Hughes quotes Stalin as saying, ‘which neither knows nor recognises obstacles; which continues on a task once started until it is finished, even if it is a minor task; and without which serious constructive work is impossible … The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism.’
For Aldous Huxley, this mass-production, mass-consumption world was such a profound and dispiriting change that in Brave New World he sets up the coming of Ford as the dawn of a new age like the dawn of the Christian era. Dates in his new world are given AF (After Ford) and people praise Our Ford.
[2] One of the inherent qualities of mass-production, though, is the division of tasks and labour, and this has proved a problem for many more developed countries. Over recent decades, more and more production tasks and finally entire manufacturing processes have been transferred to factories in places like India and China. The low cost of wages in these countries means that goods can be made for the developed world cheaper than ever before, but of course jobs in manufacturing in developed countries have been lost, while the factory workers in places like China and India are often paid too little for them to become large markets for the goods they are turning out themselves. The complete split between producers and consumers is contrary to the basic thrust behind Ford’s ideas, and although there is always something worrying about the ideas of a man who says ‘History is bunk’, it does seem as if this is an ultimately unsustainable situation.
#31 Laws of Motion
‘Truth is ever to be found in simplicity,’ Newton is said to have written in Rules for Methodizing the Apocalypse, ‘and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.’ And with his three fundamental Laws of Motion, along with his law of gravity, he reduced the entire history, present and future of the universe to a few simple premises and a couple of simple mathematical equations.
Although a few minor adjustments are needed at the very extremes of the scale – for Einstein’s relativity on a gigantic scale and for quantum theory on the subatomic – Newton’s ‘System of the World’ provides a simple and powerful tool for studying and predicting every motion in the universe. Using Newton’s laws, scientists can work out anything from the way a motorbike will corner to the trajectory of a space probe around Jupiter, from the force on a butterfly’s wings to the tidal motion of the oceans. It is a quite astonishing idea, and has underpinned many of science and technology’s greatest achievements in the last three centuries.
To see how elegant and far-reaching Newton’s laws are and what a crucial part they continue to play at the cutting edge of science, you only have to look at two key recent discoveries in astronomy: dark matter and extra-solar planets.
The universe is a wonderful clockwork of circling objects, with moons orbiting planets orbiting stars, stars orbiting galaxies, and galaxies circling each other. Newton’s laws of gravity and motion demonstrate quite simply that the further out an object is circling, the slower it needs to travel to give it the momentum to keep a steady course. So astronomers were very surprised to discover in the 1970s that stars at the edges of a galaxy are orbiting just as fast as stars near the centre. The only good explanation was that the stars are not at the edge of the galaxy as they appear.
They are actually held within a much larger disc of matter that we simply cannot see. Astronomers now call this invisible matter dark matter. Using only Newton’s laws, astronomers have been able to calculate that all the stars in each galaxy are embedded in huge haloes of dark matter stretching way beyond the visible disc of the galaxy in all directions. In fact, the disc of stars is like a scattering of pepper in between the halves of a gigantic invisible bun of dark matter. We cannot see this bun at all; we just know it is there because of the huge effects of its gravity.[1]
Similarly, in 1995, astronomers confirmed that they had detected for the first time a new planet far beyond the solar system, orbiting a distant sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. Since then many more of these extra-solar planets have been discovered orbiting distant stars, and the total as of July 2010 was 466. These planets are so distant and so dark compared to their pare
nt star that it is almost impossible to see them directly, even with the most powerful telescopes in space. Indeed, only ten have actually been imaged directly. Nearly all these amazingly distant planets are being discovered using Newton’s laws. Astronomers look for the slight wobble in the parent star’s motion caused by the planet’s gravity – and Newton’s laws allow them to calculate the size of the planet and its distance from the star. There is no greater testament to the power of the laws than this, applied to some of the furthest extremes of space we know of.
Newton claimed during a lunch with William Stukeley in 1726 that the inspiration for the idea of gravity came to him one late summer day 60 years earlier as he sat thinking in the garden at Woolsthorpe, and saw an apple drop from a tree.
It is not entirely clear what the falling apple made him think, but Newton’s real insight was to understand just why it fell. In the previous half century, Kepler had shown that planets have elliptical (oval) orbits, and Galileo had shown that things accelerate at an even pace as they fall towards the ground. Yet no one had thought of connecting these two events, let alone showing they have the same universal cause.
Newton realised that the apple was not just falling but being pulled by an invisible force – and later wondered if this same force might be holding the planets in orbit. Just as gravity pulls the apple to Earth, so gravity keeps the Moon in its orbit round the Earth, and the planets round the Sun, and stops them flying off into space. From this simple but brilliant idea, Newton developed his theory of gravity, the universal force that tries to pull all matter together. With his extraordinary mathematical proofs, he showed that this force must be the same everywhere, and that the pull between two things depends on their mass (the amount of matter in them) and the square of the distance between them.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 12
