Farming is a hugely important idea, vital to the world as we know it. The old hymns which praised and gave thanks for the miracle of the harvest each year were right to acknowledge its wondrous power to sustain our most basic need. And the farmer, specifically the idea of the farmer labouring through the year to bring food from the land, is rightly an elemental, mythic image, at the heart of our relationship with the world for more than 10,000 years. But it is an idea that still needs to be treated with care and reverence if it is to bring us the maximum good.
[1] The Green Revolution began with Norman Borlaug’s experiments with wheat in the mountains of central Mexico in the 1940s. Borlaug’s great idea was ‘hybrid’ wheat with short stems, created by adding pollen from one crop strain to the seeds of another. Boosted with additional fertilisers, pesticides and water, these dwarf hybrids grow quickly and produce a huge grain yield since less of the plant’s energy goes into the stem. When Borlaug introduced his idea to India in 1968, the effect was little short of miraculous. Up until that time, India had been notorious for its dreadful famines. But with the hybrid grains, annual wheat production soared almost overnight from 10 million to 17 million tonnes – and went on rising. By 2006 India’s fields were yielding a staggering 73 million tonnes of wheat every year, and far from being riven by famine, the country was actually a wheat exporter. Elsewhere in southern Asia, hybrid grains were introduced with similarly impressive results, not just with wheat but also new hybrids of rice, corn, sorghum and other staple crops. It now seems as if the rise in production may finally be running out of steam, however, because of the massive drain on India’s scarce water resources, and because of the cumulative effect of build-up of pesticides and fertilisers in the soil.
#23 The Self
As the inscription to his great 1855 poetry book Leaves of Grass the American poet Walt Whitman wrote a short poem, which opens with the line: ‘One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person.’[1] It was a conceit. Whitman did not really regard the self as either simple or entirely separate, yet it was in keeping with the beginning of an age, our age, in which people claim individuality as a right.
Our modern world revolves around the idea of self and individualism. We don’t simply accept our individuality; we are thoroughly committed to it. We expect our individual rights to be respected – our right to vote, our right to equality, our rights as consumers, our right to express our opinions, to make a choice, to follow our own careers, to freedom, to peace, to a decent retirement and much more. Psychiatrists treat us as individuals with our own problems. Economists regard us as self-interested consumers. Game theorists work out strategies on the assumption that we are entirely separate entities working only for ourselves. Governments and businesses set incentive targets in the belief that individuals need them to perform well. Advertisers tailor their commercials to appeal to that sense of self, because you’re worth it. It’s an age when even our genes are selfish and clamouring to join the Me generation.
There’s a political dimension to this, of course. Capitalism needs us to have a strong sense of individuality. It needs us to heed Margaret Thatcher’s infamous remark: ‘There’s no such thing as society.’ There is an argument that we have been encouraged to believe in our selfhood by commercial (and political) interests who take the maxim ‘divide and rule’ to its logical extreme by dividing us right down to the level of our singularity. Divide and sell might be more accurate.
This sense of self and individuality we have is so powerful, and so utterly convincing in its demands to be listened to and respected, that it’s easy to take it for granted. Yet this outlook is actually quite new. It’s not something that people in previous ages would necessarily recognise, let alone understand. It’s a psychological concept, this view of the self, and is uniquely modern.
It seems likely that there was a time early in history when people had less sense of self than they do now, and that self-awareness, maybe even self-consciousness, only began to emerge once many people began to live close together in cities – and perhaps became more conscious of the need for personal space and a separate identity.
Maybe the emergence of monotheism, the replacement of many gods and spirits with one, played a part. It encouraged people to focus inwards rather than outwards – on abstract thoughts inside your head, thoughts separate from the outside world. Christianity and Islam both turned the moral responsibility of how to live and behave on to the individual, rather than the community or tribe. They asked you to make your own choice.
Maybe, though, these monotheistic religions themselves reflected a growing need for self-definition across the civilised world. Some of the most profound explorations of how to live life came from thinkers in cultures that were not in any way monotheistic – Laozi and Confucius in China, Prince Siddhartha in India, and the philosophers of Ancient Greece such as Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and Epicurus. Laozi, for instance, emphasised the importance of self-knowledge. ‘Knowing others is wisdom,’ wrote Laozi. ‘Knowing the self is enlightenment.’
Meanwhile Plato, maybe an exact contemporary of Laozi, argued that the true self is the reason, or the intellect. The intellect is the soul, and is separate from the body. We might call it the mind. Aristotle, on the other hand, agreed that the soul is the essence of self but insisted that it cannot be separated from the body and is, instead, defined entirely by what it does. The debate over whether the mind or soul can exist separately from the body has been a constant strand in Western philosophy ever since. Roman philosophers became interested in the difference between the inner self and the self you present to the world – the persona, a term which originally described the character mask in Greek theatre.
The next great shift in the perception of self emerged from the bustling commerce and bruising politics of the cities of Renaissance Italy. Having a strong sense of self wasn’t just an idea but became a practical necessity. In this turbulent world, people began to realise that you would sink or swim on the strengths of your own talents and choices in life. Humanist thinkers placed humanity, with all its extraordinary talents and limitations, its huge possibilities and many problems, at the centre of the picture. Meanwhile, on a practical level, merchants and politicians began to embrace a life of personal ambition.
Gradually, there began to develop a distinctive new Western personality. ‘Marked by individualism, secularity, strength of will, multiplicity of interest and impulse, creative innovation, and a willingness to defy traditional limitations on human activity,’ Richard Tarnas writes in The Passion of the Western Mind, ‘this spirit soon began to spread across Europe, providing the lineaments of the modern character.’
That new sense of individual potential, of freedom of choice, was, on the one hand, incredibly liberating. It drove a religious revolution as Protestants rejected the mediation of priests and the Catholic hierarchy to seek their own personal relationship with God. It triggered a scientific revolution as thinkers began to understand the importance of looking at the world for themselves. And it unleashed not only the individual pursuit of fame and fortune that unfolded into the capitalist version of society, but also the increasing expectation of control over one’s own destiny which led to political revolution and demands for democratic and other human rights.
But just as it was liberating and motivating, this new sense of self was also unnerving. Suddenly, instead of just being part of a bigger community, or a child directed by God, you were on your own. What could you be certain of? Philosophers started to explore our place in the world urgently, just as natural philosophers were exploring the natural world.
In this world of doubt, René Descartes believed that the only thing you could be certain of was your own consciousness; everything else might be illusion. Cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am’, was the one irreducible fact of existence, Descartes argued, and so he separated the thoughts from the body. It is in one’s thoughts that one’s unique self resides and the body is like an avatar directed from within.[2] He beli
eved in this way that he had, literally, saved our souls.
Many philosophers rejected this mind-body dualism, as it came to be called. Yet the idea of self remained connected to thoughts. A tree maintains its identity as a tree, John Locke argued, even though new particles pass through it all the time, because it is always organised like a tree.[3] What is crucial is the continuity of organisation.
Thus our identity is the continuity of our thoughts, the assembly or experiences, beliefs and, above all, memories, not the material our bodies are made of. You are the person who remembers falling over in the street or that embarrassing occasion when you were caught singing out loud to your iPod in the middle of the otherwise silent library. But what if some trauma made you forget all your past life?[4] Would you still be the same person? Locke argued that you wouldn’t.[5]
The Scottish philosopher David Hume took this argument even further, after noticing just how elusive the self is. Whenever you try to look inside at your own mind, he argued, it seems to slip away and all you get is a bundle of perceptions, experiences and memories. In other words, there is content but no container – just a bundle of thoughts.
This a bit like a wave without water, other philosophers objected. Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that the mistake is to think of the self as something you can be aware of; we just assume it must be because we use the word ‘I’ to express experiences. In other words, it is all about words: ‘In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said, “Cogito ergo sum”. Is there then no mind, but only a body? Answer: the word ‘mind’ has meaning, i.e. it has a use in our language; but saying this doesn’t yet say what kind of use we make of it.’ Daniel Dennett goes even further, suggesting that selves are a convenient fiction, a centre of gravity on which we can hang stories but nothing more.
This kind of logical conundrum, however, can often seem far removed from the messy business of living. In the nineteenth century, a different way at looking at the self emerged in the form of psychology. Scientists began to look at the human mind and human identity as not a philosophical problem but a scientific one which could be subject to research and theory. They adopted an Ancient Greek word for the soul, psyche, to sum up the way thought, behaviour and personality are shaped. The task of the psychoanalyst is to analyse how the individual psyche is shaped.
The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud were of course enormously influential, and although many of his ideas have been challenged, they have seeped into our collective consciousness. We accept, for instance, the existence of a part of our mind of which we are not conscious, but which influences our behaviour. We take for granted that our actions are directed subconsciously by childhood traumas. We believe too that we subtly betray our innermost desires in our actions.
Psychology has enhanced our sense of our own consciousness, and capitalism, democratic rights and liberal values have combined with the analyses of social science to give us an entirely modern sense of individuality, and entitlement to freedom of choice. It’s been exciting and has brought us many benefits. Yet at the same time, our sense of self-determination, of being able to choose the course of our lives, has become less certain. We are racked by self-doubt in a way previous generations weren’t. We worry that we are not in control of our personalities, but driven by subconscious fears and psychological defects.[6] More than one in every four Americans now suffers from what is called a personality disorder. Two-thirds of young American women suffer from some kind of eating disorder.
Even our sense of self seems to be becoming ever more slippery. A powerful strand of ‘postmodernist’ thinking insists that our modern self cannot bear the stresses placed on it by fragmented modern life. It forces us to respond by developing multiple selves, becoming different people in different situations and media. None of these is necessarily truer or more real than any of the others; they are all part of a protean, shifting ensemble which some can keep under control better than others.
The crystallising idea of self seems to have given many of us a degree of self-determination, autonomy, freedom of choice and freedom from persecution that is unique in history. We talk of self-made men. Of people being self-reliant, self-assured, self-confident or self-possessed. Yet it has also made us doubt that we know what to do with this possession. Is the self good, or is it selfish? Why should helping others be described as being self-less? The ghost in the machine is still just as spooky as ever.
[1] One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say
The Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.
Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.
– Walt Whitman
[2] Descartes has been criticised for the ultimate illogicality of his position, which leaves the mind in limbo, but the recent growth in the power of computers and the internet throws up the intriguing possibility, however remote, of being able to upload all our thoughts into cyberspace when we die. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether or not this can be done – it probably can’t – but the question is, are your uploaded thoughts you or not? If they are, then Descartes may have been right.
[3] A famous illustration of this principle is the ship of Theseus. During the course of his long voyage, Theseus replaces worn-out parts bit by bit until eventually the whole ship has been replaced. Is it still the same ship? Some would say so, but what if some salvage expert had gathered up the discarded parts and built another ship from them? Which then would be the real ship of Theseus?
[4] Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid objected to Locke with the famous illustration of the brave officer who remembered being flogged as a child. After he took the enemy standard he was promoted to general but forgot the childhood flogging. Surely, argued Reid, the general and the child are the same person, even though he has entirely forgotten the flogging?
[5] This is a philosophically defensible position, but it’s much harder when it comes to criminal law. Could we really decide not to prosecute a criminal just because he had lost his memory of the crime and so was a different person then from now?
[6] In one of the most disturbing developments of the twentieth century, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, argued that society could be shaped and controlled – indeed should be shaped and controlled – by exploiting the subconscious triggers that his uncle had revealed. He became the PR guru of the USA, operating behind the scenes to shape American society by ingenious image-building and PR campaigns. He helped American tobacco tycoons to make it socially acceptable for women to smoke and gave other titans of industry the tools to persuade us to pave over our countryside or switch to beer as the ‘beverage of moderation’. He also engineered the overthrow of Guatemala’s government, leading to a dictatorship that was guilty of genocide, by sowing the image of dangerous communism in Americans’ minds. By exploiting the very things at the heart of our individuality, he proved us to be sheep.
#22 Electricity Grids
Flip the switch on your lights and immediately they burst into brilliance. Turn on the electric kettle and at once a surge of electricity flows through the kettle’s heating coils. Open the fridge, and out wafts cool air chilled by the continual buzz of current through the fridge’s heat exchangers. All this electricity, available on demand to power the varied range of electrical appliances in the home and office, flows from a power station located perhaps the other side of the country virtually instantaneously when you switch on. The supply is now so routine that it’s easy to forget just what an extraordinary thing it is. Indeed, most of us get quite upset if the power goes off for a few hours, let alone a day or more.
Yet it is an extraordinary thing. Little more than 100 years ago, energy
had to be brought physically into the house. Coal for the fires, oil for the lamps and wood for the stoves had to be fetched and carried, often with considerable effort, then stored until needed. Many early Victorian houses have coal bunkers the size of a small room to store the fuel needed for maybe just a few of the winter months. Filling it up was a physical, dirty job for the coal merchant, and carrying the coal for just the day’s fires in from the bunker was a real chore for the houseowner, or the scullery maid. Electricity grids supply energy effortlessly, invisibly and without any need for storage whatsoever.
Although the electricity supply now provides energy for a huge array of appliances, it was the demand for electric lighting that got the grid created in the first place. Sir Humphry Davy created the first electric light as early as 1802 by connecting the ends of platinum wire to the terminals of the pioneering battery, the Voltaic pile. The current made the wire glow brilliant white before burning out. Over the next 70 years, various inventors tried to create a light using platinum or carbon filaments, but despite the high melting points of these materials, they always burned out.
The breakthrough was William Crookes’ creation of a really good vacuum inside a glass bulb in 1875. With all the oxygen taken out of the bulb, the filament would glow but would not burn out. British physicist Joseph Wilson Swan was the first to take advantage of the new vacuum, demonstrating a carbon rod bulb at a meeting in Newcastle in 1879. The following year, Swan installed 45 lamps in Sir William Armstrong’s country house, Cragside in Rothbury. The next year an electricity supply station was set up in Godalming in Surrey to supply nearby houses with electricity for the new lamps, but the cost was far too high to be profitable and it soon closed down. In 1882, a more successful station was set up in Brighton, which can thus claim to have the longest continuous public electricity supply in the world.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 17
