Fire’s warmth was no doubt just as attractive. Even in the tropics of Africa, nights can get cool enough to have made life uncomfortable for our naked or only slightly hairy hominid ancestors. It might well have been impossible for humans to have spread beyond Africa into cooler parts of the world without fires to keep them warm through winter. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how most of the places humans have lived throughout history could have been permanently settled at all without the warmth of fires. Just think how miserable life becomes on the chillier nights of winter in the temperate parts of the world where billions of us now live if the heating fails even for a while. Now think of life without any form of heating at all and the crucial importance of fire in simply keeping us warm is plain.
Still, although it seems almost blindingly self-evident that our earliest human ancestors lit fires for light, protection and warmth, there is no evidence from this distance in time that they actually did so. What there is evidence for, in the charred animal bones found in ancient fire sites, is that they used fire for cooking. There are not only burned bones at the Swartkrans site in South Africa that hint at a little early roasting, but at a handful of other sites around the world dating from 200,000 years ago or more. There are burned rhino bones alongside a 400,000-year-old hearth near Menez-Dragan in France, while the charred animal skulls at the equally ancient Zhoukoudian cave site in China indicate that baked brains were a favourite dish some 400,000 years ago.
It is hard to overstate the crucial influence of cooking in human evolution and diet. Cooking enables us, above all, to eat more meat and some otherwise inedible vegetables and roots. Like other apes, humans simply cannot eat much raw meat, so the discovery of fire and cooking perhaps represents a massive turning point in human evolutionary history. Palaeontologists debate fiercely over what the impact of turning at least partly carnivore was. Some argue that the sudden availability of a high-protein diet was what helped the human brain take a giant step forward. Others believe that the true benefit of meat and cooked vegetables is to give a high-energy diet, crucial to the unusually high energy demands of the human brain.
It is of course hard to say conclusively which came first – whether the human brain developed with the change in diet or the diet changed with the development of the brain. Either way, the change had a profound impact on the human ape’s place in the world. Although humans may have hunted for raw meat long before they began to cook it, cooking surely gave them the incentive to hunt more. Either way, no longer were humans simply ambling plant browsers like other apes; they were now active hunters, able to range far and wide into all kinds of habitats, where familiar plants might be scarce but where they could still find the high-energy meat they needed to fuel their activity.
Hunting and cooking also had a profound effect on human social interaction – perhaps the key changes that brought us to where we are today. No longer would humans tend to browse alone. They would work together in groups when hunting, then sit around the fire to cook their food and share it among their fellows. And maybe it was around those early campfires that so many of our basic human interactions developed, including language. It is no wonder that fires have such a powerful place in the human psyche and the ability to stir the deepest emotions.
As if this weren’t enough, there is one other early use of fire for which there is tangible evidence; that’s the use of its heat to alter materials. Discoveries in the southern tip of Africa in 2009 revealed that as long as 164,000 years ago, humans were using fires to heat-treat stones to make sharper, tougher weapons. Later, of course, humans learned how fire could give them the gift of metals. Fire enabled rock ore to be melted to extract the pure metal, and also made the metal soft or even liquid enough to be shaped. The discovery of metals and their role in human development is another story, but it is a simple fact that without fire we would have no metal at all.
Of course, our relationship with fire has changed profoundly since those very first campfire sparks. Yet it still plays an absolutely pivotal role in our lives. In metaphor, if not in fact, our whole modern society is a vast campfire. Every city in the world, the vast majority of economic activities and most of our means of transport roar along to the burning of fuel, whether it is wood or coal, oil or gas. When we talk about energy, we are talking, essentially, about heat energy, since wind and water power still play such a small part. Indeed, the very concept of energy came from nineteenth-century efforts to understand how fire, in steam engines, produced power.
And this of course brings us right to the heart of whether fire use is a great idea. It is a powerful idea certainly, maybe the mightiest idea of all time. Fire continues to awe with its power and we continue to be mesmerised by our ability to control it. Fire gives us power over the natural world, power over the elements, power to travel beyond our world driven by rockets.
Indeed, in some ways, fire has turned each and every human into a god. When the Titan Prometheus of Ancient Greek legend stole fire from the gods, he was not simply giving a great gift, he was equipping mankind with godlike power. No wonder the gods bound him in chains. If we have been seduced by such power, it is hardly surprising.
With it, we can lighten the darkest night; we can stay warm through the iciest winter; we can drive away the most dangerous foes; we can turn inedible food edible; we can shape metal to make bridges and aeroplanes; we can fire bricks to erect cities; and so much more.
But, of course, the power of fire has its dark side. There are not simply the tangible dangers of fire: stand too close to a fire and it will burn you; let it get out of control and it may destroy your homes and your cities; misuse it in bombs and other heat-based weapons and its terrible destructive power is inescapable. There are, too, the less tangible dangers created by the pivotal role of heat energy in our global culture. The fires of our society are now heating the air so avidly that the whole world, it seems, is getting steadily warmer. Although there are plenty of noisy sceptics who insist that the evidence for global warming is shaky, the consensus among scientists is that we may be putting a few too many logs on the fire for our own good.
#4 Music
‘Music,’ wrote the German poet Berthold Auerbach (1812–82) in his Music Talks with Children, ‘washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.’ Friedrich Nietzsche was even more emphatic: ‘Without music life would be a mistake.’
Now, more than ever, music is the soundtrack to our lives. Sometimes it is unwanted, like the piped music that irritates in the supermarket or the jingle that is there in lieu of an actual answer when you call some faceless corporation. But most of the time it is wanted, and portable music players and all kinds of other sound systems can now set your ears vibrating with it whenever there is silence to fill.
Music is such an integral part of our lives that is perhaps wrong to call it an idea. Yet some scientists insist it has no evolutionary value. It’s an accident of evolution, or it’s an invention that was gradually developed. ‘Music is auditory cheesecake,’ psychologist Steven Pinker argues. ‘It just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the palate.’
In other words, the pleasure triggers were there in the brain already – and music just turned out to be a good way to trigger them. Music is useless in evolutionary terms, it seems, and simply taps into the same response set off by human cooing and crying. ‘… [M]usic could vanish from our lifestyle,’ Pinker declares in The Language Instinct, ‘and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.’ He’s not saying, of course, that music is a waste of time – simply that it exists only for the pleasure it brings; it has no survival value, and so cannot be regarded as an evolutionary trait like language or vision.
Not everyone agrees with this line. Some music psychologists such as Daniel Levitin argue that it is an evolutionary trait. Levitin argues that the length of time music has been around suggests that it must have more value than simply pleasure. Pleasures, however great,
would be more ephemeral. A bone flute, made from the wing bone of a vulture, was found in Hohle Fels cavern in south-west Germany in 2009, and estimated to date from well over 30,000 years ago. It was one of eight ancient flutes found in the area, four made from bird bones and four from mammoth tusks. It all suggests a prehistoric band, and that music was already fairly sophisticated this long ago. It’s quite something to imagine these ancient people listening to a lively concert in their cavern at night tens of thousands of years ago.
Levitin cites three possible evolutionary benefits of music. The first is the one Darwin suggested 150 years ago – that it aids sexual selection, with musical and dancing ability attracting a mate, because it creates pleasure. Another is the idea that it helps social bonding and so promotes a group’s survival. The third is that it helps to promote cognitive development.
Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that now and through the centuries, music has had the capacity to strike such a deep emotional chord, to use the obvious metaphor, that it seems to touch the very meaning of life. ‘All deep things are song,’ wrote Thomas Carlyle. ‘It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!’
Music’s resonance is so powerful that in times of extreme emotion it can seem even more important than food. Deep into the terrible Nazi siege of Leningrad in 1942 when the city’s starving people were reduced to gnawing on leather belts to gain a tiny scrap of sustenance, an orchestra gathered to play, for the first time in the city, Dmitri Shostakovich’s new symphony No. 7, dedicated to Leningrad. Loudspeakers broadcast the symphony through the stricken city and tens of thousands of people wept together.
A year before, the young French composer Olivier Messiaen, after being captured by the Germans, was in the Stalag VIII-A concentration camp near Görlitz in Poland. There he met three other musicians, and instead of giving into the despair of the situation, obtained some paper from a sympathetic guard and wrote for them all the astounding ‘Quatuor pour la fin du temps’ (‘Quartet for the End of Time’), which was premiered in the icy camp in front of a vast audience of freezing prisoners and their guards.
Both these stories suggest that there is something far more powerful at work with music than pure pleasure. Music has the capacity to tap into, indeed shape, our emotions to a remarkable degree – not just the lineaments of tragedy, but pride, joy, frivolity, anger, longing and just about every emotion, subtle or strong. Advertisers and filmmakers know this, and use it to deliberately provoke particular feelings. Advertisers use the power of association, choosing music for commercials that stirs particular feelings such as pleasure or pride, so that you link these feelings with the product. And filmmakers guide your emotions through a film, helping you to weep at the climactic reunion, or shiver with anticipation as the hero descends into the darkened basement. It would be hard to imagine films like Brief Encounter or Lord of the Rings with dialogue only.
Music heightens the emotions at key events, such as weddings, religious festivals, parades, anniversaries. And the music so often coincides with the peak of the event. Even at a simple birthday party, the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’ is the focus of emotions, while a piper’s lament can bring a lump to the throat at a funeral. Such events would seem hollow, even impossible, without music.
But simply listening to music, or playing it, entirely in isolation can seduce our emotions even more powerfully, whether it’s the sheer pleasure of the fragile, elegant beauty of a Mozart concerto, the excitement of a terrific dance track or the profound sadness of a true song of love lost. Music draws emotions out of us in such a true way that some people insist it is a spiritual quality. Beethoven averred: ‘Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.’
Pianist Karl Paulnack believes, rather, that it serves a vital psychological need to help us get through life intact, like a miraculous psychotherapist.[1] When he addressed parents of incoming students at the Boston Conservatory of Music in 2004, he said: ‘Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds.’ As the essayist Leigh Hunt, partner of the great Victorian novelist George Eliot, put it simply but beautifully: ‘Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.’ But it is also the food of love, the champagne of carnivals, and so much more. Indeed, there is music everywhere:
There’s music in the sighing of a reed;
There’s music in the gushing of a rill;
There’s music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
– Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XV. St. 5
[1] Music therapy is an increasingly popular treatment for people with emotional problems.
#3 Contraception
Sex without consequences. Hmm. For some it sounds like bliss. For others it sounds deeply immoral. For others still it sounds simply unrealistic. And that’s the problem with contraception. While some think it’s great; others think it’s a great sin. (Spike Milligan believed it should be used on every conceivable occasion …)
When the American social reformer Mary Sanger campaigned for what she termed ‘birth control’[1] in the early twentieth century, she was in no doubt about how crucial contraception was. Unwanted pregnancy, Sanger believed, was the greatest curse women faced, especially working-class women. Unwanted pregnancy entirely ruined women in a way men couldn’t imagine. Social revolution was nonsense, she felt, while women were still at risk of pregnancy from every sexual act.
It wasn’t simply the trials of pregnancy, becoming a social outcast and the burden of raising an unwanted child, though all these were tragic enough; Sanger also witnessed the desperate efforts of pregnant girls to get rid of their babies. ‘Suggestions as to what to do for a girl who was “in trouble”, or a married woman who was “caught”,’ she wrote, ‘passed from mouth to mouth – herb teas, turpentine, steaming, rolling downstairs, inserting slippery elm, knitting needles, shoe-hooks.’ And she personally nursed girls who were in terrible pain or bleeding to death from botched abortions. No wonder, then, that Mary Sanger was so adamant that educating the world about methods of birth control was the greatest service she could do for women. ‘I would strike out – I would scream from the housetops. I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard. No matter what the cost. I would be heard.’
She spent her life campaigning for birth control education, and was deeply gratified to hear of the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1960 before she died. H.G. Wells regarded her life’s work as of the utmost importance, and one of the great marks of progress in the twentieth century, saying in 1935: ‘When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Mary Sanger will be its heroine.’
Yet her work was always controversial. Although she might have expected natural allies in the women’s movement, she actually found many feminists and suffragists deeply opposed to her. Some of them believed that sex subjugated women and should be avoided altogether. Others thought that motherhood was the highest calling and that birth control was an insult to womanhood. And the fact that Mary Sanger, lacking support from feminists, found allies among the eugenicists, who believed that racial supremacy could be enhanced by discouraging reproduction among the lower classes, only seemed to play into the hands of those who found contraception a rather dubious aim.
When the contraceptive pill was launched in 1960, though, many women hailed it as a great breakthrough. US Congresswoman Claire Booth Luce proclaimed: ‘Modern woman is at last free as a man is free, to dispose of her own body, to earn her living, to pursue the improvement of her mind, to try a successful career.’ And Congresswoman Luce’s hopes seemed to be borne out in the 1960s. Although many other social changes also played a part, women did begin to go to university in unprecedented numbers, did start to pur
sue careers and did seem to take charge of their bodies and experience an amazing sexual liberation. But then in the 1970s, medical research began to hint that there might be some side effects to the pill, including an increased risk of breast cancer and heart disease. Some feminists immediately asserted that the pill was a male invention to allow men to have sex with women without the consequences – at the risk of women’s health. In fact, studies since have suggested that the link with breast cancer is ambiguous, and that the health risks of pregnancy are much greater.
More significantly, the pill, and all kinds of contraception, became associated with promiscuity and premarital sex. Many traditional religious and conservatively minded people began to condemn any artificial methods of contraception. The Catholic Church in particular confirmed its view that artificial contraception was contrary to the true purpose of sex. Irish Catholics, famously, urged the ‘rhythm method’ as the only way to have sex and avoid conception. Cambridge Catholic mother Victoria Gillick, equally famously, tried to prevent doctors prescribing the pill to her five underage daughters without her consent, claiming that: ‘Doctors encourage children to be promiscuous.’ Mrs Gillick lost her case, but the issue of doctors prescribing the pill, or even giving confidential medical advice on sexual matters, to young teenagers has remained a thorny one ever since. In 2002, Mrs Gillick won £5,000 damages against a sexual health charity, which alleged she was responsible for a rise in teenage pregnancies by encouraging promiscuity.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 27
