In fact, the widespread availability of contraception – pills, condoms and other methods – and even the introduction of the morning-after pill, has not stopped the UK racking up one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe, or the USA becoming the country with the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the developed world. In many countries around the world, people marry young and teenage pregnancy is a normal part of married life, but in Europe and North America, where teen pregnancies are mostly extra-marital, it has become a social issue, with tabloid newspapers proclaiming each example of the ‘youngest teen mum’ as evidence of a damaged society and the sexualisation of children, with sex education and the all-too-free availability of contraception as the major culprits.
Each faction in the debate uses the evidence to support its own standpoint, but the evidence is ambiguous. In Europe, the Netherlands, where contraception and sex education is freely available, has the lowest teenage pregnancy rate of all. But teenage pregnancy rates are also low in Spain and Italy, and many attribute this to traditional values. In the USA, the high teenage pregnancy rate became the justification for the moral backlash in the 1990s which fuelled ‘abstinence-only’ programmes.
In 2004, the Bush administration allocated $131 million dollars to urge schoolchildren to abstain from sex, and virginity pledges became popular among certain groups of American teenagers. The abstinence programme diverted attention from the fact that teenage pregnancy declined steadily between 1991 and 2004. One study attributed 75 per cent of this decline to better use and knowledge of contraception. Another said it was half due to better contraception and half due to abstinence. Ironically, since 2004, teen pregnancy rates have risen again. Interestingly, some research suggests that teenagers who pledge abstinence are much more likely to indulge in higher risk (of disease transmission) sexual activities such as oral and anal sex.
Sexually transmitted diseases are, of course, another issue that feeds the controversy over contraception. Notoriously, Pope John Paul II decried the use of condoms even to prevent AIDS, let alone prevent conception, and called industrialised nations’ focus on contraception and abortion part of ‘a culture of death’. Many AIDS campaigners, anxious for people to use condoms to prevent the transmission of AIDS, were of course horrified. Recent research shows that condoms actually reduce transmission of the HIV virus by 80 per cent. It was with some dismay, therefore, that they found Pope Benedict XVI reiterating a similar view when he travelled to Africa for the first time as Pope in 2009. Benedict erroneously claimed that the distribution of condoms would ‘aggravate’ the spread of AIDS.
Now that effective contraception is now widely available in the developed world – not just in pill form, but also as condoms and coils – it is easy to forget what a difference it has made to people’s lives, especially to those of women. The picture that Mary Sanger painted of the burden pregnancy placed on women was real and debilitating. It wasn’t just the tragedy of unmarried girls who got ‘in trouble’; it was the continuous and exhausting trial of repeated pregnancies even for women who were safely married and adequately supported. Improved hygiene and medical care has meant that the number of women who die in childbirth, or from complications in pregnancy, is now thankfully small. But in the not so distant past, without effective contraception, pregnancy was the norm for many married women. Very few women today would ever want to go through the emotional and physical exhaustion Dickens’ wife Catherine must have felt after her tenth successful pregnancy and twelve miscarriages in just fifteen years between 1837 and 1852.
There are, of course, profound moral issues involved, and many people have expressed concern about the emotional impact on women of delaying motherhood too long.[2] Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World also created what turns out to be a nightmare, dehumanising vision of sex without consequences. Nonetheless for most women, and for most men, the availability of effective contraception has been hugely liberating. The real problems are perhaps more prosaic. ‘I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception,’ tells Woody Allen. ‘I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said “No”.’
[1] Contraception has, typically, just a single meaning which is essentially personal. Contraception is the measures a woman or a man take to prevent the woman conceiving a child after sex. Mary Sanger’s term ‘birth control’ has a public aspect, too. Governments such as the Chinese have practised birth control, limiting couples to just a single child, in order to slow population growth. The policy has undoubtedly restricted the growth of China’s population. But the costs have been severe, with many girl children sent away or even murdered to allow the single child to be a boy, and many Chinese men are now facing the prospect of a life without a partner because of the shortage of girls. The philosopher Bertrand Russell was fairly adamant about the public side of birth control, however, saying that ‘those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life’.
[2] Research by scientists at Liverpool University in 2008 suggests that the contraceptive pill may lead women to choose the ‘wrong’ partner. The scientists suggested that while on the pill, women choose men who have a similar immune system to themselves, responding to their scent. That combination can lead to unhealthy babies. Moreover, the scientists said, if a woman stops taking the pill – perhaps to get pregnant – she may suddenly find her chosen man less attractive.
#2 Writing
There is a simple reason why the story of humankind is divided into prehistory and history. In prehistory, there was no writing to record the story; in history there was. The discovery of writing was the most significant watershed in human history. It made history possible.
Of course, people could pass on thoughts in the prehistoric age. Stories and valuable information could even be learned and transmitted verbally from person to person and generation to generation. Everything from myths and epic poems to practical ideas such as how to skin a bear could be spread across the world and remembered through the years like this. But the story was only as reliable as the teller. For all kinds of reasons, stories passed on verbally would shift, getting further from the original like the famous game of Chinese whispers.[1]
Writing changed all that. It preserved the original message exactly as it was expressed. That was vital for legal agreements, laws and government decrees, and meant that nobody could argue about what was said and what wasn’t (in theory!). More significantly, stories and information could be read by anyone at any time – whether it was the next day in the next street, or far away and many years later (as long as the writing was preserved). That meant that you didn’t have to be face-to-face to give someone a message. You didn’t even have to be living in the same era. In other words, writing allowed accurate communication at a distance.
It also meant that a store of stories, ideas and information could be accumulated over time, so that each generation built on the learning of those that had gone before. Instead of continuously fragmenting and becoming corrupted over time, information could become increasingly ordered, increasingly reliable, as each generation added its own contribution. Without this, the great storehouse of ideas bequeathed to us by history would have been largely lost. The thousands of years of progress in science and other areas would have been much, much slower if not impossible. And we’d never have the wonderful treasury of literature from Shakespeare and Tolstoy to Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter.
The creation of writing was an astoundingly powerful, world-changing event. Yet it is something we take a little for granted. We learn it, slowly, when we are so young that the memory of our struggle with words and sounds is soon forgotten. As adults we rarely stop to think of the incredible mental process which turns thoughts in our head instantly into letters on a page or on screen. And we read those letters then, mostly, translate them into ideas almost as fast as the eye can scan them. It’s probably the most astonishing of all common feats of the human b
rain. Yet it didn’t evolve; we weren’t born with this skill. It had to be invented in the first place, and every human being has to learn it afresh when he or she enters the world. Remarkably, most do.
The origins of writing are shrouded in mystery. The oldest proper writing was traditionally thought to be the cuneiform of Mesopotamia, the wedge-shaped marks on clay, dating from around 3000 BC. But in the last few decades, other scholars have been putting the case for other scripts.
Some argue that Egyptian hieroglyphs came before cuneiform, for instance, while Chinese scholars put the case for the first writing appearing in China. Then, in 2009, a team from America and Pakistan used computers to analyse ancient marks on clay tablets and amulets and other artefacts found in the Indus valley in Pakistan. The language of the ancient civilisations which flourished in the Indus valley from around 3,200 to 1,700 years ago has been lost, so it is hard to interpret whether symbols found on artefacts are proper writing or just signs, such as road signs and loading marks. But computer analysis of the marks suggested that symbols recurred in particular sequences that suggest they might be letters. More controversially, Indian doctors Rha and Rajaram claimed in 1999 to have deciphered the inscription on a tablet dating from 3500 BC, as reading ‘It irrigates the sacred land’. If confirmed, this would be the oldest writing, but they were accused of faking the data.
Almost equally controversial are interpretations of mysterious marks found on tablets, figurines and pottery belonging to the Vinca culture in south-east Europe. Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–94) believed these marks, which date back 7,000 years or more, were a form of writing in a script which she called Old European. Finnish linguist Harald Haarman believes the Old Europeans were driven out of Europe by the invasion of Indo-Europeans (from who most people in Europe and southern Asia are now descended) and ended up on Crete where they became the Minoan civilisation. Haarman notes remarkable correspondences between ‘Old European’ and the mysterious Linear A script on the famous Rosetta stone.
At the moment, the consensus is still that cuneiform came first, but that could easily change. What’s clear, though, is that writing didn’t suddenly appear. It gradually developed over a very long time. The consensus is that the immediate precursor was marks made for trade and administration, such as the cuneiform-like marks on clay tokens found across the Middle East, which seem to be receipts for particular numbers of cattle, sheep or bags of corn. But marks and symbols date back much earlier. In 2010, for instance, palaeontologists found that certain symbols seemed to be repeated in cave paintings found across France dating from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, such as spirals, zig-zags, arrowheads, crosses and so on. They may not be writing, but they seem to be attempts to record or communicate through particular marks.
The theory is that full-blown writing evolved through pictograms – iconic drawings of particular objects, such as a fish, a reindeer or a spear. Pictograms like these have been found in Mesopotamia and Egypt as well as the Indus valley and China. At first they were identifiable little drawings, but over time they became reduced to just a few symbolic strokes. This kind of development is clear in cuneiform.
The limitation of pictograms is that they cannot express anything but abstract ideas. That’s why the discovery of the ‘rebus’ principle was such a massive breakthrough. It seems like a child’s game to us, but it was ingenious. The idea is that pictograms can be combined for their sounds alone to make other words. Thus, in an English system, the pictogram for ‘bee’ might be put next to the symbol for ‘4’ to create the word ‘before’. The Egyptian spelling of the name of the pharaoh Ramesses, for instance, begins with the sign for ‘sun’, Ra. Similar correspondences can be seen in cuneiform.
In time, these rebuses probably developed into entirely phonetic symbols – that is, letters with a particular sound from which any word at all can be built up. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters are a mixture of pictograms and phonetic symbols. But in Europe and the Middle East, at some time around the second millennium BC, the pictograms were abandoned altogether when it was discovered that every known word, and any that could be invented, could be built up just from a simple ‘alphabet’ of phonetic symbols, with the key addition of sounds for vowels as well as consonants. There is an argument that this was an even more radical breakthrough than the rebus principle, and maybe it was one of the key factors that allowed cultures in the Middle East and the West to overtake China, which had once seemed so advanced.
It’s well known how the Western alphabet was inherited from the Greeks, with even the name coming from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. But just how the Greek alphabet evolved is a mystery. There are alphabetic signs in later Egyptian hieroglyphs and in later cuneiform, but there is a suggestion that it was traders such as the Phoenicians who may have found it a convenient shorthand way to write down the Babel of languages they encountered as they moved around the Mediterranean. Pictograms and rebuses only work in one language – alphabets can build up a word in any language, letter by letter.
However it came about, the alphabet unleashed the power of writing by allowing the writer to construct and even coin anew any conceivable word. Indeed, it is quite possible that the scope of the alphabet allowed writers and scholars to think in new abstract ways as well. It would have been hard to develop a complex, abstract idea through conversation alone. Writing opened the way for really elaborate, and rigorous, trains of thought to develop. Indeed, it may have been the key factor behind the astonishing flowering of thought in Ancient Greece. Either way, the Greeks certainly took advantage of it, and scholars such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle showed just what you could do with writing to move human thought on to another plane entirely – and we still have their written words to prove it.
Writing is now so integral to our lives that it is impossible to imagine life without it. Whether it’s used for brief text messages to friends or great literary masterpieces, cooking instructions or scientific treatises, it is absolutely indispensable. And you have that in writing …
[1] There’s an apocryphal example of the errors that can creep in from the First World War, when the message was passed down the trench: ‘Send reinforcements; we’re going to advance,’ which reached the far end as: ‘Send three and four pence; we’re going to a dance.’
#1 The Internet
No technology has ever had such a profound and instant impact on so many people as the internet. Some 2 billion people, a third of the world’s population, already use the internet, and the numbers are growing every day. More significantly, perhaps, the number of hours that people spend online is growing, so that the internet is filling a huge proportion of our waking lives.
It’s all been so rapid that it’s hard to assess just how it will change the world, but there’s no doubting the excitement of people who say it’s the most significant development in human communication since the invention of writing. Some say it will change the way people interact forever, as they meet, communicate and even live in virtual worlds. Others say that it is altering our brains, as the constant clicking and stimulus of new information prevents the laying down of long-term memories and keeps the brain in a constant state of agitation.
It’s opened up a cornucopia of information, of course, yet its sprawling, untamed nature means that the information is not always easy to find. Nor are there the same checks on the authority and accuracy of material that you might find in traditionally published works and books. But the sheer quantity and range of data dwarfs any library that has ever been seen in the world by a long way, and it is there pretty much instantly in your home or office, night and day. The internet has democratised information. It’s not that the information wasn’t available before, but the time it took to access it, perhaps by going to specialist libraries, limited much of it to the privileged few.
What’s more, although there is plenty of material that’s now quite old, much is being updated continuously. Informat
ion of all kinds, from the latest research on distant galaxies to changes in local bus times, can be spread instantly to everyone who is interested, right round the world. This kind of immediacy is both exciting and frightening.
The internet is not just about information, however. By far the majority of traffic, in terms of bits of data, is the uploading and downloading of media – films, TV programmes, music and so on. It doesn’t necessarily involve a lot of people but these media are so data-heavy that they create a lot of traffic. This kind of use of the internet is growing by the day. The internet has made a staggering range of entertainment available freely on demand.
Yet some people feel that its most significant impact of all has been on the way people communicate. In 2009, more than half a billion people, for instance, communicated by Skype, allowing friends and relatives half a world apart to see and talk to each other so casually and so easily that the distance between them melts. In July 2010, half a billion people, too, were using the social networking site Facebook. That was twice as many as in 2009.
The proliferation of such sites and other ways of communicating online, such as chat rooms and online gaming forums, has made some people suggest in doom-laden tones that the whole basis of human interaction is being altered by the internet. People are forming numerous virtual ‘fantasy’ friendships online, the argument goes, and becoming less able to form real relationships. This is probably a misplaced fear, and may actually prove no more harmful than the escapism of reading books.
It’s all very far removed from the origins of the internet, which emerged from the era of Cold War fear. Back in the 1960s, the US military depended heavily on its computer network to provide advance warning and response to nuclear attacks. The worry was how to ensure the network kept working in the event of a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the Russians. The answer was to cross-connect the computers with a series of links called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or Arpanet. Arpanet split data travelling between computers into ‘packets’ which could be directed by a router to particular computers. If any part of the network was damaged, the router could redirect the packets to undamaged parts.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 28
