LETTERS TO LILY: SOME BACKGROUND THOUGHTS
Alan Macfarlane, April 2005
Preface
As I was writing ‘Letters to Lily’ in 2003-4, I wrote a number of autobiographical accounts of what I thought lay behind the letters. Here they are in the form of further letters to Lily.
Originally I had intended to put these on the web-site behind the book (www.letters2lily.com). On reflection, and with advice, I decided not to do this since there is some overlap both between the different ‘thoughts’ here, also some similarity to the ‘Letters to Lily’ themselves.
However, it does seem worthwhile preserving these reflections on some of my life’s experiences which led to the various letters to Lily, with all their repetitions and half-remembered hints.
They are perhaps the nearest I will approach to a sort of intellectual autobiography. They are offered here as a brief insight into a few fragments of the creative process of writing a book.
Contents of ‘Letters to Lily’ and associated ‘Walk’
Why write to you?
Who are you?
Why are families often difficult?
What is love?
Who are our friends?
Why play games?
Is violence necessary?
What is war and why do we fight?
What is witchcraft?
Who are the terrorists?
Who is God?
Can we control the spiritual world?
How do we learn?
Does information destroy knowledge?
How well does democracy work?
Where does freedom come from?
What is bureaucracy for?
How do we get justice?
Why is there inequality?
What makes us individuals?
Why do many work so hard?
What made our digital world?
What are the limits to growth?
Why do so many starve?
Why are we diseased?
Why have children?
What makes us feel good?
What is sex?
What controls our minds?
Why are we here?
During my last two years at school I began to ask those questions which many people puzzle over in their late teens. Is there a God? Is there Heaven and Hell? What is the difference between right and wrong? Why is there so much pain in the world? How has the world come to this point? Is magic real? Is it possible to be altruistic? Why do I feel anger, fear, shame?
These questions took
their particular flavour from my experience until then and especially from
certain shocks and contrasts. There was the experience of vague memories of
my first few years in
Of course I met some teachers, family and friends who tried to explain bits of the jigsaw. And I read books which jolted me out of my complacency. Some of those which I found most interesting I have listed in ‘further reading’ on my web-site, which charts my reading and thoughts through my life. At school I thought that Western literature, great poetry, plays, novels, might hold the key. I also hoped that my strenuous Christian faith might answer the big questions. Yet neither of them did more than give glimpses.
All the broad questions one asks at that age began to be focused a little when I went to University to study history. I hoped that looking at the past, history, might explain how we are and why we are here. But the kind of fairly dry institutional and economic history I mainly studied as an undergraduate at Oxford failed to provide anything more than a few more glimpses of how things worked. However, I did see something of what I was searching for in the work of R.H.Tawney and some social historians.
At University I spent much of my time trying to reconcile a growing freedom and feelings of adulthood with a desperate desire to retain a religious vision of the world. As I saw it then, I was suffering the same fate as Wordsworth. The magical, integrated, vision of my childhood was ‘fading into the light of common day’. The interconnectedness of things, the innocence, the simple black and whites were being lost.
I remember, for example, an essay I wrote on the loss of faith of the Victorians in which Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy and Dover Beach figured significantly. I loved Keats, Swinburne, children’s stories about magic lands. I was deeply moved by Llewellyn Powys’ Love and Death, with its passion and elements of otherness, a continuation of my childhood love of Kipling and fairy stories. In other words I was suffering from that split between mind and body, between spiritual and material worlds, which William Blake and later, I discovered, the sociologist Max Weber and many others have analysed. Yet I did not really have the tools to analyse what was happening to me.
So when I decided
to continue and do a doctorate, I tried to choose a subject which would focus
on the problems of disenchantment, of alienation, of what T.S.Eliot called
the ‘disassociation of sensibility’. I proposed a grand study of how this
split had occurred in the seventeenth century, but was rightly warned that
this was too large a topic for a D.Phil. So I narrowed it down to one aspect,
namely part of the problem encapsulated in the title of
my supervisor Keith Thomas’ book, Religion and the Decline of Magic.
So I focused on the history of witchcraft in
As I wrote my thesis I discovered the discipline of anthropology where much of the best work on witchcraft had been done. This discipline seemed to integrate the different worlds which were coming apart in my life as I grew up in a capitalist and individualist society. Studying anthropology seemed to provide a way to continue to seek answers to those very large questions which had haunted me in childhood, especially if one combined anthropology with history. For anthropology asked very broad questions such as what is the nature of human beings? Why do people believe in magic and religion? Why do people behave so cruelly to each other?
*
Yet there was still something missing, some philosophical underpinning, some grand theoretical overviews made by wide and deep minds who were grappling with the ‘spirit of the laws’ that shape our world. I partly found the door to this new world in the thinking of my friend Ernest Gellner, whose majestic combination of philosophy and anthropology took on the largest issues with wit and insight.
Ernest was not only an anthropologist of Islam and the Soviet Union, but a philosopher whose great love was David Hume. I can’t remember if it was through him that at the age of about fifty I decided to educate myself in the foundational thought of the Enlightenment philosophers, particularly the French and Scottish. In any case I started on a project to read as much as I could of the works of a succession of great figures – Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, De Tocqueville. I was bowled over by them, for now I had encountered world theorists grappling with many of my basic questions. To these I added a more superficial study of other figures, Marx, Weber and Durkheim. I also incorporated my work on the great legal historian Sir Henry Maine and a long-abiding interest in the work of the founder of modern economics and demography, T.R.Malthus.
Yet there were still parts of the puzzle of who we are and how we got here which eluded me. So I further added a study of the greatest Japanese social philosopher and modernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi. I found in his Autobiography and books that he was asking many of the questions that I had long asked about the nature of civilizations, what the key to western development is and other grand matters. Alongside these interests was my continuing attraction to the work of the two greatest historians of the twentieth century, Marc Bloch and F.W.Maitland.
*
So, for the rest of my life, I have sought to ask these sorts of questions, even though I am not a philosopher or theologian. I try to answer them in a very concrete way by looking at particular people, particular places and periods of history. I pursue the answers through space and time, through reading, talking, lecturing, teaching, travelling, filming. In particular I share the pursuit with my wife Sarah, who has helped me develop so many of my ideas and worked so hard to make many of the explorations possible.
Of course, if we ask these very large questions, we are very unlikely to answer any of them finally. Yet these Letters to Lily are an attempt to gather together some of the simple conclusions from the searches.
The search is really
concerned with one theme; how did we get to where we are? This can be broken
into sub-questions at different levels. Starting personally, how did I become
the person I am? How did
In searching for
answers I have consulted great authors in all fields, from philosophy to poetry,
from history to anthropology. I have also tried to study from the microcosm,
the life of a particular family in the Himalayas, up to the macrocosm, the
whole history of humankind. I have concentrated on three particular places,
*
So here I am, once again, now in my early 60’s, trying to understand the world. At last, by combining all my loves, literature, history, anthropology and philosophy, I feel that I have begun to understand the answers to some of the questions concerning how the world works. I want to write to you Lily to share what I have found. I often have the image in my mind of a moment when I gazed down off a bridge in the Lake District and for a moment all the eddies and confusion in the water vanished and every pebble and every fish at the bottom were revealed through the crystal water. Then the eddies swirled back again and ‘fled is that vision’.
I feel that things are now at their very clearest. I have a life of experience, of teaching, travelling and studying. To change the metaphor, before the mists begin to settle and the mountains are covered again, I would like to share with you Lily what I have found. I have to believe that it really is possible for one human being to help another in this way, that wisdom not only exists but that it can be shared.
If it does and it can, and if my Letters to you give you a moment of pleasure or peace, it will have been worth the work. I write to you to express my love for you and to return to you and the many others who have helped and stimulated me, some of the privilege and joy I have myself received in a rich and marvellous life. I also write to clear my mind and to put down before I forget what I think I have found in a life of searching.
(Who are you?)
I started life as an
Indian, and am now Chinese, having been British, Nepalese and Japanese on
the way. Perhaps I had better explain this strange statement. I was born in
Then suddenly I was wrenched away and placed in an English middle class home in Oxford and then Dorset. For the next twenty years my identity was being forcefully shaped by a series of schools, friends and family. I became quintessentially English, though at times on holidays I gained a flavour of my father’s S cottish background.
Then for fifteen months
I lived in
So when I came to write my book on English ‘peasants’ in history, I suddenly found my mind dragged off in an unexpected direction, namely towards an investigation of English identity in the past. When had the English become so individualistic? When had men and women been assumed to be roughly the same? When had the group based peasant civilization been transformed into a modern capitalistic one? When had people started to conceive of themselves as primarily English, rather than by regional or even village identities?
These were all things I explored in my book on The Origins of English Individualism, written in 1977. And I have pursued the themes in many later books and articles.
Later, in the 1990s,
I began to study and work in
Finally, at the start
of the third millenium, I started to explore
All this searching
to understand myself and my country occurred in a context in which
So, like most other people in the world, I was wondering who I was, how I was constituted, how my traditions had been made, what my nation is, where I belong. If I am somewhat confused by all this, I expect you are too, Lily. So I thought it would be good to try to explain how we make and re-shape our various levels of identity.
(Why are families often difficult?)
Families
I never really thought much about the kind of family I was living in when I was at school or whether it was normal or not. Nor did I wonder whether I was a highly desired or unwanted child. Yet there were a number of features of my family background which may have shaped a great interest in the history of the family which developed later in my life.
I was part of the
last generation of children of the British Empire whose parents were abroad
and who sent their children home very young (in my case aged six) and thereafter
hardly saw them again until they were grown up. After a warm and loving five
years with my mother in
Over time I also
became conscious of a difference between my father’s Scottish family and my
father’s temperament, with its more emotional, clannish, nature, and my mother’s
English middle-class family, always more rational, calculating, reserved and
individualistic. So I have always felt as if I lived on a divide between family
systems, the warmth and emotion and irrationality of
Yet at school we learnt nothing about this in a formal way. Family systems, marriage and even sex were hardly discussed in lessons, though the last of these was obviously at the forefront of my development through puberty. I enjoyed the usual attractions and suffered the usual guilt and repressions, exacerbated by attending two boys-only boarding schools for ten years, and this again, no doubt partly shaped a life-long interest in the sociology of sexual behaviour.
At University likewise,
we learnt practically nothing about the history and nature of the family system
and marriage in
My first memory of encountering a theoretical discussion of the subject of marriage and sex in history was when I did an essay on the causes of the industrial revolution in my third year at Oxford. Here I began to look at the theories that partly explained the origins of the industrial revolution by a rise in population. That rise in turn was probably partly caused by a rise in the number of children being born and surviving infancy. It was clear that the age at marriage was an important factor in all of this, but at the time I knew little about how marriage systems worked.
When I began to train as an anthropologist in 1967 I was abruptly thrown into the analysis of family systems. Because most of the societies which anthropologists have traditionally studied were organized on the basis of kinship and marriage relations, roughly half of all anthropological work was concerned with this subject at that time. To proceed in this new subject I had to master this field. I wrote about one aspect of it in my long dissertation on sexual controls and particularly incest taboos in history under the supervision of Isaac Schapera, who had written one of the major textbooks on marriage. I was examined on this by Jack Goody, who later became my Professor at Cambridge and a deep influence on my intellectual development. He was a world expert on kinship and marriage and his comparative and historical work influenced me greatly.
The theme of the
world population explosion was also at the front of my mind, so fertility
and its social setting, that is kinship and marriage
relations, continued to be a central interest. In my doctoral research in
This background must have prompted the Department of Social Anthropology to ask me to follow several distinguished colleagues (e.g. Meyer Fortes) who had given the eight introductory lectures on kinship and marriage to first-year students. I gave this series for over ten years and, with other lecture courses on the history of the family, this indelibly imprinted an interest in how the English system worked on my mind. From my first book, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin (1970), which placed the seventeenth century family into anthropological perspective, through The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (1978) to Marriage and Love in England, 1300-1840 (1986), a main part of my work was concerned with trying to understand the way in which the English family system had evolved and what effects, particularly on fertility, this might have had, a theme I returned to (while adding a Japanese dimension) in the last four chapters of The Savage Wars of Peace (1998).
I wanted to see how the English system worked, why romantic love was so important, how the relations between parents and children operated and so on. All of this was set alongside my interest in what encouraged or dissuaded people from having children, as I argued in my Malinowski Memorial Lecture in 1978 on ‘Modes of Reproduction’ where I specially linked high and low fertility to different family systems.
Working in and on
the subject of
(What is love?)
Love
There are many forms of love, so I shall stick here to what we call ‘romantic love’. My first memory of falling deeply in love was when I must have been about seven or eight. She was a little girl with freckles and I think called Patricia, whom I met briefly on a holiday. I did not ever declare my love, but for some years dreamt of meeting her again. Likewise the girl I saw in a railway carriage on Carlisle station when I was about 15. She smiled and waved and my whole world came alight. I dreamt of that smile for many years.
Among my first loves were, of course, other little boys of my own age, the first deep one I remember was when I must have been about twelve, and there were several more in my boarding schools. We also fell in love with handsome older boys and I remember standing under the stars under the northern fells reciting some boy’s name, with ‘I love you’ appended, many times and my heart singing.
Of course I did not know what love was in any formal, analytic, way, but I knew that feeling of overpowering attraction when everything suddenly seems to come together in an intense flash of lightning. I did have a few very tentative girl friends, but they were all people I met in the holidays as it was a single sex school.
I tell you all this
really to try to understand why I should have been so interested in love.
I have lectured on the subject in
I don’t suppose I am much different from many others, but if there is any difference it may have been partly my separation from my parent’s at a very early age, my own mother’s search for love through poetry and writing, and partly the search for the perfect companion to share my life with. For whatever reason, trying to obtain and understand love has long pre-occupied me.
When I was at University I spent much time in search of ‘perfect love’. I read Shakespeare’s love sonnets, John Donne and the metaphysicals, Keats and Shelley and Yeats and other great love poetry. I adored the story of Abelard and Heloise, of the love stories in the Arthurian legends, I swooned over the pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne. I read Llewelyn Powys’ Love and Death which had a great effect on me. I was a very romantic and moon-struck individual and I had several lovely girl-friends with whom I shared my drams.
I was also very conscious of the links between love and marriage. I knew that if I found my Heloise I would want to marry her, and that I should not marry anyone but such a person.
My search for love and its mysteries led me to a first marriage which turned out to be wrong for both of us. It ended earlier than it might have because of the strains of anthropological fieldwork together and I suddenly discovered the love of my life elsewhere. Through a rose-filled summer we wandered the hills and dales and I have never experienced such bliss. I found your grandmother, Lily, and she gave me the happiness of sharing a life with your mother and her sister at an early age.
Yet while I took love to be the core of my own life and deeply associated with marriage, as in the Christian tradition, as I began to study anthropology I suddenly realized how peculiar my own views were. I came to learn that western civilization has an ‘instituted irrationality’ in believing that love and marriage are linked. Most societies, including those I studied like the Gurungs, Nagas and historical Japanese and Chinese, saw childhood love as one thing, marriage entirely another.
So as I lectured year after year to undergraduates on the nature of love and marriage I pondered all these things. My colleagues, Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody, Edmund Leach, and my L.S.E. teachers, Isaac Schapera, Lucy Mair and Robin Fox, had all written famous works on marriage. I learnt from them to analyse this institution and began to wonder when the peculiar English obsession with love, which I so fully shared, had come from and why it was there.
It is a particular pleasure to write a letter to you, Lily, on love, since in a sense you are one of the unexpected side-benefits of my love for your grand-mother. You will also find it a constantly absorbing subject and be tugged this way and that. I hope that understanding a little of why we love and how peculiar it all is will help you keep your balance. It can also be read as an expression of the way your beauty and innocence have rekindled memories of the wonderful love I have known in the dawn of my life.
(Who are our friends?)
Friends and friendship are so much part of my life that I have never really been aware of this phenomenon until I decided to write to you Lily about this. No-one ever told me about what friends were, how they were to be made or unmade, or even what friendship really is. I just absorbed all this intuitively in millions of experiences and encounters, like everybody else.
I don’t remember my early friends, but my mother tells me that my best friend was a little Indian boy. Then through all my schooling, friends and friendship dominated my social life. Meeting, assessing, incorporating, sharing, quarrelling with, making up with, keeping in touch with, dropping, cultivating friends became a central pre-occupation. I suppose it is with the majority of children in many societies.
So, by the time I left University, I had assumed that friendship was part of nature, that all people in all societies entered into many relations of trust with unrelated people in an open, non-exploitative and equal relationship and called them ‘friends’.
It was only when I came to study anthropology and, in particular, when I lived in a Himalayan village and began to feel the weight of other ties (kinship, neighbourhood, village, caste, religion) that I suddenly realized what an extraordinary and unusual system I had grown up in. I began to realize that friendship was not a natural institution, but the cement that held together people in that minority of societies in history where individuals have been set free from the automatic bonds of birth, of caste, tribe and kinship.
Friendship presupposes that an individual can freely chose with whom he or she has their most important relations. It also assumes that a person has the time and energy to invest in such relations. It assumes a great deal of trust, and a relaxed attitude towards ‘honour’, ‘face’ and reputation, especially in friendship between men and women.
So I realized once again that my own experience of intense or passing friendships that had shaped my life could not be taken for granted. I wondered why friendship had developed and particularly in the context of my academic life. For it was in my daily life in a Cambridge College that the variations of friendship became especially important. What was the difference between a colleague and a friend, a Fellow and a friend, a friendship with one’s peers and with one’s students? Were there any special problems in male-female friendship, for instance, what is the difference between friendship and non-sexual love?
The world of King’s College which I have enjoyed for thirty years is especially fruitful for the study of friendship. Sharing rooms with distinguished academics, being involved in sudden friendships with visitors and students, witnessing the solidarities and sometimes the frictions of friendship in the College of E.M.Forster, John Maynard Keynes and others, with its one time reputation for intense male friendship, is very fruitful.
So I decided to write you a letter, Lily, about friendship. This was partly because a young friend I talked to about the book in its early stages said that what she spent much of her time thinking and worrying about at school was friendship. She thought this something really needing explaining. Watching you and your friends shows she was right, and watching your friendship with your sister adds depth to my observations. So who are our friends, why is friendship so important in our civilization, and, come to that, what is friendship and can a grand-father and grand-daughter be friends?
(Why play games?)
Like you, Lily, my
interest in games dates back to my early childhood. As a very small boy in
When I returned to
Robert taught me most of the common games as well as played imaginary games with soldiers, cars, horses, meccano and many other games playing devices. His mother, my grand-mother, was also a games fanatic, particularly card games and mah-jong, a Chinese game which I early learnt. So I entered with passion into competitive games, and also watched the obsession of those around me. Robert cut out and collected everything about his favourite football teams, made and played with many kinds of model. So I became imbued with gaming and imaginary worlds from childhood with a rich set of rules and toys.
Looking back from fifty years later it is difficult to understand or remember the reasons for this passion; a mixture of loneliness, competitive spirit, imaginative wonder, joining a wider world, all these things and others no doubt. Each game opened up new worlds, ‘subuteo’ (football), a game of horse-racing, toy soldiers ball games of many forms. They seemed to give a sudden expansion of the mind as well as the body. Expanding the small models to the large, learning the rules and mastering the skills, it was all exciting. A huge amount of my time and energy was devoted to games, inventing, playing, subverting.
So games shaped the person I am and all of my adult life, both in work and leisure, has been an application of what I learnt in those early hobbies and games. They have clearly been one of the single greatest influences on my personality and hence there is sense in writing a letter to you Lily about games. Understanding games will help me to understand myself, as well as the games-mad British.
My schools added to this, for both my preparatory school (the Dragon) and public school (Sedbergh) set a huge store by games. I soon learnt that games, both individualistic like conkers or marbles, or team, football, cricket, rugby, were as important as work, both in the eyes of the teachers and the pupils. It was quite explicitly stated that they were ‘character forming’ and it was clear that in order to gain prestige amongst other boys I had to learn to play well.
So I ran and jumped
and kicked and batted and threw vigorously for ten years. Fortunately some
natural ability, perhaps inherited from my father, plus the early training
from my uncle, combined with determination, meant that I was reasonably successful,
though not outstanding. As well as all this, I became an obsessive fisherman.
I dreamt of huge trout waiting for my bait in overgrown pools and put much
of my thought and energy into planning and perfecting my fishing techniques.
Holidays in
All this faded out quite rapidly at University. I continued to play football for my College, but with diminished enthusiasm and likewise fishing was no longer the centre of my life.
This early immersion in games may be behind my realization of the power games have over us. I have been there. But also passing out of this phase left me with a sense of astonishment at myself as well as with the general importance given to games in world culture. Why do humans love to play so much, and not only play but just sit passively and watch others play? What are the functions of all this? Since games and sports now appear to be the new unifying force in the world, a kind of super-religion or language to join nations, it seems important to understand this. If we want to understand ‘how the world works’ we must certainly pay deep attention to games and sport.
One final thought. It seems to me obvious that much of my passion for games was re-directed into my academic quest. Many of my feelings for games and sport find parallels to the feelings I have in research. The care and detail of planning to find and capture a trout does not seem dissimilar to the process of finding new and exciting ‘facts’. The excitement of that ‘mad pursuit’ of academic life is very close to games and sport – the rules, the teams, the strategies, the tactics, there are very many similarities. The setting up of models, playing thought games of various kinds, all this, which is the essence of games, is also the essence of science. So this is one of the reasons why in my letter on games I talk about the games-like nature of science.
(Is violence necessary?)
As a little boy I was probably as violent as the rest. I do not remember being cruel to birds and insects, or even particularly horrible to my younger sisters, but I probably was. And I certainly remember acts of violence later on which I now look back on with regret – bullying in a mild way, or at least not stopping others when they bullied. I remember verbal violence, impaling worms on hooks and so on.
I also remember being involved in a good deal of violence at school, though it was mainly channelled into games, or informal rough and tumble. I also played violent games of ‘cops and robbers’, Robin Hood, cowboys and Indians, and loved mildly violent films and comics and books. Mine was a world of endless minor acts of violence which were taken for granted and hardly noticed.
Although this preoccupied me and my friends, I was not told much about the principles by which I could understand the nature of violence in our world, even though the history of our world, which I began to specialize in from the age of sixteen, was saturated with cruelty and violence. The long catalogue of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ (and other animals) often sickened me, but I never really understood it, or even tried to do so and no-one explicitly explained it to me.
It was only with the
experience of living in other societies, or studying them, that my own violence
and that of my civilization came into perspective. When I worked among the
Gurungs in
I was asked to give
lectures on war, feud and violence to undergraduates and this took me into
reading about organized crime, another form of violence. I studied the mafia
and when in
Throughout all of this I pondered on what violence rally is. Is it a physical, a moral, a symbolic thing – or all of these? And I tried to understand my own violent feelings (on occasions) and the apparently mindless violence I saw all around me on the television and in the newspapers.
Violence is a grim, but central, characteristic of most animals species, humankind included. I agree to a certain extent with Thomas Hobbes, whom I increasingly came to admire, that man in his ‘natural’ state lives a life full of fear or ‘Warre’. Of course such a ‘natural’ state has never existed, and records of some of the very simplest societies show them to be peaceful and largely non-violent. But it is best, I think, not to underestimate human ability to be violent. If we start with the assumption of violence, and then see how it can be channelled or controlled, I think we end up with a more realistic and useful approach than if we start as Godwin, Rousseau, Marx and others do, with the assumption of basic peacefulness.
Much of this will come out in my letter to you Lily. All I want to say here is that violent feelings and acts will follow you through life. Be aware that they are not unnatural, but nevertheless must be controlled. If you understand a little of the springs of violence, both in yourself and in others, and in the State itself, you may be in a better position to exercise this control and know the pleasures of peace and calm.
(What is war and why do we fight?)
War
Like most people in
the war-torn twentieth century, I come from a family with many military connections.
I was born in 1941 on the edge of the area towards which the Japanese were
advancing in the Second World War. My father was then a major in the Assam
Rifles. My grand-father was a Lt. Colonel in the Indian Army. Two of my uncles
were Gurkha officers fighting the Japanese in
At school we fought and bullied and played further war-like games, but I do not recall much discussion in the lessons at Sedbergh of why people seem to be so endlessly fighting. So by your age, I knew little about the history of war or how it varied across cultures. Nor was I particularly interested in the subject except as a form of game and in the stories of my family.
When I studied history at Oxford, much of what I was reading about concerned the effects of war. Indeed, endless wars, civil wars, revolutions, battles floated before my eyes and there were so many names, dates and campaigns that I became bored with war. Its revolting history, combined with earnest religious convictions, turned me into a pacifist. I do not remember learning about imperialistic wars of aggression, of the theories and art of war as a science, nor in any detail of the dreadful consequences of war. Just an endless catalogue of campaigns, changes in technology, battles, the doings of Cromwell or Napoleon. It all seemed a long way away.
War continued to
hover on the edge of my work on witchcraft and magic and other work I later
did on the village records of
Another strand in a growing interest in war lay in my work on population questions which developed in the late 1960’s. Thomas Malthus had rightly placed war first in his list of checks to human population growth because its effects, particularly its side effects on famine and disease, and the way in which growing population growth often triggered hostilities, made it so important in understanding the catastrophic history of mankind. If I was to try to understand the recent rapid growth of population in many parts of the world, I needed to know about the history and causes of war.
In the middle of the 1980’s a further impetus to my interest occurred when a small group of us made an intensive study of the Naga peoples who live on the Assam-Burma border. These famous and artistic peoples had based much of their recent history on the art of war. Their whole culture, economy and political system revolved round raids and feuds and the threat of war. I could certainly not understand their world at all without investigating why people throughout most of history have been so war-like. This interest led me both to study war, and to lecture on war and violence for a number of years to undergraduates at Cambridge in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Feud, war, vendetta, the mafia and all forms of instituted violence became a central pre-occupation in my work.
A further influence was the experience of going to Japan in 1990 and subsequent visits and reading on that ancient and well-documented civilization. There were so many puzzles again in the Japanese attitude to war. On the one hand the Japanese samurai tradition of warfare with its amazing suits of armour and swords and ethics all proclaimed a world of constant war and martial honour, which had later led into the disasters of the Second World War and the horrors of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand, as I studied Japanese history I discovered that for nearly 250 years, from the early seventeenth century, the Japanese had enjoyed the longest absolute and most complete peace of any civilization in history. This gentle, peaceful, careful world was reflected in its art, culture and society. Like the Gurungs of Nepal, like my gentle poetry-loving grandfather with his DC and Military Cross, there seemed to be a complete contradiction between two sides of human nature.
So I decided to try to sort out a few of my ideas on the nature and history of war within a Malthusian framework in my book on The Savage Wars of Peace which I wrote in the mid 1990’s. I discovered some of the tendencies and patterns which nearly always lead human beings to fight and kill, but also one or two odd exceptions or escapes from the ravages of a horrific human addiction. As a background to all of this there was evidence on our television screens and newspapers of continued warfare. The horrors of Vietnam and the almost ceaseless succession of minor ‘hot wars’ which simmered within the Cold War, the periodic slaughters in wars between India and Pakistan, in Rwanda and in many other wars made it impossible not to wonder about the wider issues of what all this fighting and killing is about and what the wider effects of war is on human societies.
(What is witchcraft?)
When I was a child, at school, and even when I went to University, I loved books and poems about magic and witchcraft. I read all the books of C.S.Lewis on Narnia. I read Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, I read some of the fairy stories told by Andrew Lang and the Brothers Grimm. At University I read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I remember deliberately trying to keep alive the enchanted world of ‘faery’ by reading these and many other works (including King Arthur’s magic feats, Kirk’s Kingdom of the Elves etc.) and many poems by Yeats, Keats, Swinburne, Tennyson and others right up to the time I took my final exams at University. I did not want to leave that enchanted land, which seemed so much richer and more fascinating than the grey world of my Protestant Christianity.
The day after I finished my history exams, I thought I would do what no sane person would do, that is go back into the Bodleian Library and read another history book. But this book would be something entirely different, something I had chosen for myself and of no practical use in exams. I chose a book on the history of witchcraft, as I recall by a man with a strange American name, Preserved Smith.
The book showed me a picture of witchcraft which was very different from the cheerful and, in the end safe, wizards and witches of the Harry Potter variety. This book and several other histories of magic that I then read showed a world where real people were accused of the most horrific crimes, killing their own children and eating them, perverted sexual behaviour with animals, worshipping the Devil and so on. Serious judges and courts examined them, often using torture such as squashing their feet until their bones were crushed to jelly, extracting their finger nails, stretching their bodies on racks until their limbs were torn from each other. Then, if they were found guilty they were often burnt alive in great agony. Much of this was done in the name of the loving Christian God. I wondered how devout and high-minded people came to such a situation.
There were many other puzzling things. Some historians argued that there really had been a huge underground organization, a sort of Satanic Al-Quaida, whose members met and plotted the downfall of civilization and Christian society. Others found cases where people willingly and freely confessed to the most terrible crimes, often naming their most beloved family and friends as accomplices, yet they were crimes which it was impossible for them to have committed (e.g. flying through the air or going through key-holes). Why would they confess this?
So I began to realize that there was a whole realm of supposed demons, witches, familiars (the little animals they were supposed to keep which sucked on them), witch-hunters, wizards, astrologers, to be understood. It was clear that one could not take either of the easy options. One could not dismiss all of it as madness, irrational, evil beyond comprehension. Yet, at the other extreme, I could not believe in it. It was a mystery that so many intelligent people could believe so much (to us) rubbish with such conviction and in a way which lead to huge cruelty and savagery.
All
of these early questions were in the back of my mind when I came to chose
a topic which might well be my major life’s work, namely the subject for my
Oxford D.Phil. in history. Having toyed with the idea of trying to tackle
the huge question of the split between mind and body in the seventeenth century,
but being told it was far too large, I finally narrowed down to the topic
of witchcraft trials and beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.
With the support of my proposed supervisor, a young historian called Keith
Thomas, who later became famous, I tried to tackle
the questions surrounding apparently irrational beliefs in magic and witchcraft.
Why had witchcraft accusations suddenly flourished from about 1560 in
In order to try to understand why people were accused of being witches and even sometimes seemed to believe themselves witches, I decided to look not only at the English evidence, but also at the work of those who had lived in societies where witchcraft beliefs were still a major obsession. These people were called anthropologists. The most famous of them, whose book on witchcraft in a North African society, the Azande, was my major inspiration, was Edward Evans-Pritchard.
His idea of why witchcraft is so widely believed in and why, once there is such an idea, it is almost impossible to break out of such a belief, describes a very normal path for human beings.
When I went on to study anthropology properly at the L.S.E. I wrote a long essay on pain, sin, guilt and witchcraft. I read and corrected Lucy Mair’s book on witchcraft and attended a memorable conference on witchcraft at King’s College, Cambridge where I met all the leading experts on the subject and gave my first academic paper. In a book I was writing on the seventeenth century clergyman Ralph Josselin I tried to understand how he could have believed in witches, and wrote about another Essex clergyman, George Gifford, one of the greatest opponents of witch beliefs in Essex. So witchcraft was still very much on my mind.
When
I went to
So I spent many days noting down anti-witchcraft rituals. Then, and over the years since, we have attended and filmed a number of long shamanic rituals designed to cure and drive away witches. Unlike most historians, therefore, I have lived in a world of witchcraft beliefs and both felt and seen these beliefs in action and talked to those who believe in magic and witchcraft and try to counter its power. I have even undergone rituals to cure me of witchcraft (a possible cause, the shaman said, of my deafness).
In all
this work one puzzle has never really been resolved in my mind. It is clear
that witchcraft and magical beliefs are almost universal. They are also self-confirming
and there are various ways in which they are protected against doubt. Yet
there was indisputably a decline in witchcraft accusations and beliefs, among
the intelligentsia at least, at the end of the seventeenth century in
Further
thoughts on the subject came from our visits to
Even Keith Thomas in his two great books on Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World, had not provided a satisfactory explanation for the decline of witchcraft beliefs. Recently I went over his arguments again and in an essay published in a collection for his retirement I tried to suggest a new explanation for the decline of witchcraft based on a life’s thought and experience. It suggested that just a slight tipping of the balance between various factors such as insecurity, knowledge, social relations made all the difference. Yet there are still puzzles. Perhaps appropriately, witchcraft and magic are among the most mysterious and inscrutable of all subjects.
(Who are the terrorists?)
During my childhood, at school and University and through most of my years as a University teacher, that is in the half century from 1941, I never heard much of or thought greatly about terrorism. It was only when I was about sixty, that is at the start of this millenium, that people started to talk widely about terrorism or it began directly to interest me. This is perhaps the most important thing to say. Terrorism is a very recent obsession that has only gripped the world more or less overnight in the twenty-first century.
That is not to say that there were no subversive movements that tried to overthrow rulers and the state before 2000. Throughout history there have been real and imagined enemies of civilizations and I have long been interested in some aspects of these.
In particular I have made some study of three predecessors of ‘terrorism’. One was the attack by and upon medieval heretics. In the 1980s I had become interested in the strange ideas of the Albigensian or Manichaean heretics. This movement had drawn ideas from eastern religions which rejected the basic Christian belief that God ruled the world. Instead they believed that this world was ruled by the Devil and God was elsewhere. Along with a less vicious view of Heaven and Hell and a more benign view of human nature, it was in many ways an attractive alternative to Christianity. Its philosophy had attracted large numbers of converts in southern Europe in the thirteenth century.
The response of the
Christian church, in an alliance between the Catholic Papacy and the King
of France, was a crusade, involving a savage brutality towards the heretics
which it is sickening to read about. A massive campaign of terror was launched
against them and they were tortured and executed in their thousands. We visited
the ruins of their castles in the beautiful mountains of southern
The next set of ‘terrorists’ who I looked at in much more detail were the so called ‘witches’. This was a really important way in which my thoughts about terrorism have been shaped. Witches were at first rather vague figures of hate, not clearly demarcated off from other evil forces. But soon the Catholic inquisitors wrote text books which explained how to identify them and how to prove their guilt, including that most famous of all, the Malleus Maleficarum or ‘Hammer of Evil’, published in the 1480s.
This put forward the argument that witches were particularly dangerous because they attacked the very foundations of civilization by subverting all morality and worshipping the anti-Christ or Devil. They were also particularly cunning and secret, for they could operate at a distance, fly through the air, poison people through magical potions, even kill and maim just by looking at a person or animal. They were very well organized, into groups or cells called ‘covens’, linked by a master-strategist, the Evil One or Devil himself. Consequently the normal methods used to investigate and try people should be altered to deal with this threat. The suspects were tortured, held without accusations, the testimony of children used against parents, trapped by leading questions.
With these methods and underpinned by this vision, hundreds of thousands were rounded up over the next two centuries and a vast conspiracy of terror threatening Christian civilization was located. Many ordinary people were terrified and the normal safeguards of law were abandoned.
Then, gradually, the whole basis of the belief in witchcraft was questioned and by the end of the eighteenth century it was widely accepted that there never had been witches, that it was an impossible crime, that it was the methods and the fears which had conjured up these early ‘terrorists’.
I had become deeply interested in all of this and wrote my doctorate and my first book on witchcraft. I remember well my disgust and horror at the tale of cruelty and false logic that led to this terrible episode in European history.
Yet it was not the only one. Another crusade was against the Jews, who were likewise looked upon as a secret, threatening, ‘terrorist’ organization, also posing a fundamental threat to Christian civilization. Throughout the medieval period they periodically suffered pogroms or annihilation, being tortured and burnt alive.
Another threatening
wave of ‘terrorist’ organizations arose to challenge the Catholic orthodoxy.
One set consisted of numerous heretical sects, successors to the Albigensians,
in particular the Lutherans and Calvinists in northern Europe. Another consisted
of mystical or other organizations such as the Rosicrucians and the Masons.
Then again there were the people of north African
origin in
I became interested in all this during the late 1970s and for a time co-ran a project on the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition. I worked with Portuguese scholars and made several visit to the archives in Lisbon. I read the inquisitors manuals and the trial records, and saw the perfection of the techniques of uncovering supposedly secret challenges to the status quo.
The sleep deprivation, the false evidence suggested to the accused, the denunciations of close friends and family, the use of spies, numerous techniques now re-established in the twenty-first century ‘war against terrorism’ were then developed and used against these threats. In many cases they drove the remnants of the Jews, Moors, Lutherans, Masons and others out of Spain and Portugal and the pure ‘Christian Blood’ of those countries was re-affirmed in the smoke of burning flesh.
Yet there was a cost.
Yet the demons and the fear did not disappear. I never made a study of the twentieth century anti-terrorist purges, Stalin’s gulags and exterminations, Hitler’s Jewish ‘final solution’, Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution or Senator McCarthy’s ‘Un-American Activities’ persecution of supposed communists. But they all tended to use methods which overlapped with the earlier inquisitions and to create ‘enemies of civilization’. In each case, when the purges and anti-terrorist terror ended, their targets were found to be largely invented. In some cases, such as the witches, they were a total fiction. In others, such as the communists or protestants, they existed but were far less of a threat than the methods to counter them created. Millions had been mistreated and often destroyed on the basis of hugely exaggerated ‘moral panics’.
When the ‘Empire of Evil’ collapsed in 1989 with the break–up of the Soviet Union it looked possible that for the first time in history the world would escape from these nightmares. But hatred and fear seem, like nature, to abhor a vacuum. Very soon a new world conspiracy against our civilization had been identified – radical Islam and a loose confederation of evil terrorists was again threatening our values. The justification for striving against a threatening enemy was again present.
So my interest in terrorism, which has led to the letter to you Lily on this subject, has arisen directly out of a lifetime interest in what Norman Cohn called in one of his books ‘Europe’s Inner Demons’. I felt I needed to understand why we manufacture, or exaggerate grossly, forces which supposedly threaten us and then persecute them. Only to discover again and again that they are either entirely, or largely, our own projected nightmares.
In the midst of these ‘moral panics’ as a French historian called some of the earlier ones, it is very difficult to stand outside the climate of fear. Doubters and critics are at the best accused of complacency, at the worst of complicity in the crimes of the ‘terrorists’ or heretics. Thus recently a Dutch politician who dared to question the Russian brutality against the Chechen ‘terrorists’ was accused of ‘blasphemy’ (a religious offence) by a Russian minister. He had dared to question the religious ideology of the divine Putin and should apologise. There is no middle-ground; in the words of an American President, you are either for us, or against us.
It is this narrow-minded and unhistorical perspective which I hope to expand and question, even while accepting that there are indeed people who feel so deeply that the world is unfair or that those in power have no legitimacy, that they resort to the same weapons as those who invade and attack and suppress them – the gun and the bomb. If they succeed, of course, they are no longer terrorists, but liberation heroes.
(Who is God?)
I come from quite a religious family and from childhood have been interested in religious questions. My mother has always been a searcher after spiritual truths and for much of her later life has been a sort of Buddhist. One of her brothers has long been an Evangelical Christian and influenced me greatly by arranging for me to go to Christian boy’s camps from the age of about ten to twenty-two. There we were fervently encouraged to ‘Open our hearts to Jesus’ and to study the Bible.
At school I was quite devout and sought spiritual satisfaction through reading and worshipping nature. I remember many intense conversations on the meaning of life, the problem of pain, the ways to overcome the constant assaults of the Devil. I desperately wanted to believe, but found it an effort to do so.
It was when I was about twenty-two and started to read seriously about other societies that the narrowness and proselytising zeal of my Low Church Anglicanism began to irk me so much that I abandoned going to Church and relaxed into the relativistic agnosticism which has sustained me for the rest of my life.
Yet I have retained
an interest in the questions which religious people ask and I have gone on
asking them. It is just that I have sought the answers across the world, either
through reading or travelling. In
Studying witchcraft and, later, the records of the Portuguese Inquisition brought home to me more strongly the abuses of religion when it became mixed up with politics. All this was a theme which I also pursued in the lives of a number of great thinkers like Montesquieu and Tocqueville, who tried to reconcile their beliefs in God with beliefs in freedom and responsibility among humans.
Later, working in
This is a short account because there is really too much to say. All of my letters are phrased as ‘why’, that is quasi-religious, questions and hence are ultimately about religion. Like all those brought up in the way I have been in a western culture, I am deeply enmeshed in religion whether I am a believer or not. It is not just that there is within me, as one writer put it, a ‘god-shaped hole’. My whole attitude towards life, and the arrangement of the world around me, is still based on the long Christian tradition, however much that has been made invisible in recent years through the growth of alternative ideas and a superficial secularism.
(Can we control the spiritual world?)
Like all of us, I suppose, my life has been rich in small rituals. I collect objects, say words, do action in moments of fear or hope, in the half-belief that they will protect or win the favours of some force I have not clearly specified.
I suppose the desire
to see into the future and to control our health and happiness is universal,
and that, from the time we speak and probably long before, we try to manipulate
the powers in our direction. I have tried prayer, home-spun divination, sacrifice
(of the self-sacrificing variety). But almost all of this, from my early life,
was set within the rather anti-ritualistic world of late protestant, scientific
and technological,
It was not until I started to explore other times (as an historian) and other places (as an anthropologist) that I realized how peculiar my attempts were. The form of quite puritanical Anglicanism in which had been raised had more or less eliminated Ritual. There were some formalities, but God seemed either very close (within my heart), or a long way away. He was not in the middle distance, as he seems to be in many religions, including Catholicism with its saints and holy sacraments. When I addressed God in my prayers he seemed at a vast distance, and unable to hear me. Nor were there any meaningful symbols or sacrifices around me.
So it was a great
shock to live in a society in
As I participated
in shamanic rituals, or watched the elaborate rituals of Brahmin priests,
or observed the numerous daily rituals surrounding daily life, I became aware
of the extent to which really powerful coercive ritual had been expunged from
my daily life in middle-class, protestant, rational,
Of course there has always been plenty of formal ceremonial behaviour in my life, more than for many. The Oxbridge Colleges in which I have spent a good deal of my life since the age of 18, preserve these ceremonies in an unique way. But all of this seemed much closer to etiquette, polite behaviour – formalized, stylised behaviour which communicated status, identity and helped people negotiate the rites of passage. But little of it had anything to do with the control of the spiritual world.
Reading anthropology gave me a framework of famous theories of how humans have tired to cope with the supernatural. And teaching the subject to generations of intelligent undergraduates has deepened my knowledge. I learnt how ritual was akin to drama, how it compelled and controlled and affected humans through its apparently unavoidable structures. The process which uses symbols, inversions and redundancies, to control both mind and body, became clearer to me.
Having begun to understand parts of this, I wanted to explain it to you Lily. To show you how ritual with a small ‘r’ rules our lives, but in a way that is different to the many worlds which are ruled by Ritual.
(How do we learn?)
Discovery and creativity
It seems extraordinary to me now, but I managed to go through twelve years of school without doing a single lesson, as I recall, on biology, chemistry, physics, zoology or any other science. Nor do I recall a single lesson in which we discussed innovation, technology, manufacture or applied science. So all I ever learnt about these things was from my practical activities using technical skills in games, fishing, constructing models.
During the next six years at Oxford studying history it was really no different. I looked at changing production technologies like the shift from agriculture to industrial methods, but questions of how knowledge advanced and what part technology played in all of this were not really subjects I thought much about.
Working as an anthropologist
in
When I started to teach in the Department of Social Anthropology in Cambridge from 1975, the Head of Department was Jack Goody, and over the next ten years he exerted an enormous influence over me, both personally and intellectually. He is one of the most creative and insightful authors on the role of technology in society and has written brilliantly on the role of guns, horses, hoes, ploughs, orality, writing, cooking and many other topics.
Reading Jack’s books, talking to him over the years and watching him in action was an enormous intellectual stimulus. His practical interest in photography, film, microfiche, computers and other tools for anthropologists put the Department at the forefront of technological development in anthropology in the world. He also gave enormous support to various projects in these fields which I was beginning to develop.
I have been interested since I was about 16 in how to increase my own mental efficiency through the use of filing systems. In the early 1970’s this started to inter-act with the rapid development of computing as a way of storing and retrieving information. Cambridge University was at the forefront of developments in this field and in King’s College I was very fortunate to have the support of the mathematician and computer scientist Ken Moody with whom I have worked for nearly thirty years. Through his help I collaborated over the years with a series of first class computer scientists, Charles Jardine, Tim King, Martin Porter, Tim Mills and Richard Boulton. With Sarah Harrison, and for some time Jessica King, we developed with them new generations of database management systems and retrieval software.
I have spent up to three years of my life trying to understand enough about computers and software to collaborate with the rapid developments which have revolutionized our world, from hierarchical, through relational to probabilistic databases, and now to web-site and internet developments. All this made me vividly aware of how what we can know is deeply shaped by the technology of information storage and dissemination.
In parallel I became interested in another communications technology,
namely moving film. I had bought a small 8mm film camera in
Yet it was really only from 1988, when the new lightweight video cameras (video-8, super-8 and then digital) became available that I realized the immense possibilities of filming in fieldwork. Since then I have taken hundreds of hours of film around the world, edited them into teaching films.
I have also been involved in several film and television projects. In particular, the experience of working with David Dugan on six films for Channel 4 on ‘The Day the World Took Off’, was enormously stimulating. It introduced me to the practical work of television production. It also forced me to think in seminars and interviews about the general history of technologies over the last fifty thousand years.
These experiences converged and I became increasingly interested in the possibility of linking computers and film. With the availability of videodisc technology from the early 1980’s, which stored still and moving images and could be controlled by a computer, I began to experiment with multi-media and with a small team of colleagues, Julian Jacobs, Sarah Harrison and Anita Herle we made the first interactive videodisc in anthropology, about the Nagas of Assam.
I was also an advisor to the BBC ‘Domesday Project’, a pioneer project to explore the use of multimedia. Towards the end of the 1990’s I started to look into the potentials of new storage media, in particular DVD, and new ways of disseminating information such as the internet. Mark Turin and I set up the Digital Himalaya Project to store and disseminate anthropological materials. I also set up my own fairly extensive web-site. This has been supplemented recently by collaboration with Xiaoxiao Yan on developing another site, ‘digitalorient.org’.
Given all this activity, it is perhaps not surprising that I have had a growing curiosity about information technologies and their wider influence. I have also been increasingly interested in how break-throughs occur in science and technology. This did not become focused into an explicit academic project until 1990 when my long-term practical interest led me to start lectures on technology and anthropology.
I remember realizing how little I knew about technology and science as I started to prepare the lectures and being overwhelmed when I read my first book by Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization. His general approach, and particularly his observations on the major phases of ‘technics’ and the influence of clocks, printing and glass opened up a new world for me. I gave lectures on this theme for the next ten years and read more Mumford and many other authors on the borderland between science and technology. I became fascinated by the reasons for the development or non-development of reliable knowledge embedded in artefacts.
It was just at this point, in 1990, that the other major influence which brought together my thoughts occurred by chance. This was meeting and working intensively over the years with Gerry Martin. Gerry had already started something called the ‘Achievement Project’ to look at the reasons why there were sudden bursts in creative discovery, as in Renaissance Europe or during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.
As an engineer, inventor,
industrialist and successful company chairman, his perspective was entirely
different from mine. So I learnt an enormous amount from an intensive academic
collaboration with someone from an entirely different background. Gerry also
put me in touch with other people interested in these subjects, including
several leading thinkers in the field of the history and philosophy of science,
in particular Simon Schaffer and Robert Iliffe, and he financed numerous meetings,
seminars and practical forays into further technological gadgetry. Gerry also
participated in seminars at King’s College in which a small group of scholars
from
Gerry was particularly
interested in microscopes and telescopes and hence the general impact of glass
on thought. Pursuing this, we co-wrote a book on
glass in history. He was also interested in the comparison of technologies
and we discussed these concepts as we travelled together through
Gerry was also interested in the work of people who worked on creativity and inventiveness, including Margaret Boden, David Perkins and John Ziman, and I met these people and discussed their work with him. When I encountered the inspiring ideas on knowledge and technology of great philosophers in the past, in particular Montesquieu, Adam Smith, David Hume, Alexis de Tocqueville and Yukichi Fukuzawa, we discussed them together around draft after draft of the books I was
writing.
(Does information destroy knowledge?)
It now seems odd to me that, although I spent a huge amount of time at school learning facts, learning how to make arguments, learning how to remember important things and to write them down, I do not remember any discussion at all about the nature of knowledge itself. That is to say, we never discussed the mechanisms of thinking, the methods of discovery of new things, or the difficulties inherent in knowledge acquisition. We were never introduced to the science of thinking paths.
Yet this is a subject which has always interested me. When I was about eighteen I realized that there was a great danger of losing as much knowledge as one gained every day, of letting the mind become a glass which, as one poured in new knowledge on one side, the same amount would pour out on the other and be lost. I also became aware that I could not depend on my unaided memory and intelligence to help me make discoveries. So I started to assemble materials, books, notes on books, slips of paper with key quotations and facts. I remember that by the age of seventeen my room in the house where we lived in the Lake District was filled with tomato boxes of little index cards.
With this background, when I went to University and met Brian Harrison, who had adapted Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s famous ‘one fact one card’ method so that the cards were very small and fitted into a filing cabinet, I was deeply impressed and copied his system. I was also impressed by his thick folders of summaries of books and articles and rather mechanically typed out a copy of all of them. So I began to surround myself with further paper archives, indexed and cross-indexed, in/pending/out trays and so on.
This desire to try to aid my memory and intelligence, neither of which were very good, continued at a more intense level when I came to write my D.Phil. thesis on witchcraft. By then I was explicitly interested in the art of research and memory. I felt like Descartes (who I only read much later) in his Discourse on Method where he states that proper methods will allow even a moderately capable intellect of achieving outstanding things. So the tools of the mind and intellect became something I thought about and tried to develop throughout the rest of my life. The topic of how one arranges one’s life, including the physical lay-out of archives and notes, has been a central obsession of mine for many years.
It continued when I did my second Ph.D. in anthropology and I gradually built up a database of over 70,000 quotations over the years. In parallel, the development of computers meant that I was deeply involved in thinking about how one arranges and retrieves information by electronic means. This helped in the work with various computer scientists with whom we developed databases and retrieval systems and in the building up my own files within what I began to see as a ‘memory barn’ or intellectual time machine.
Alongside this, I spent a good deal of thought on how one should best try to think in order to solve intellectual problems. How are important innovations in thought made, what are the tools needed for real breakthroughs in knowledge? What are the best paths to take to discover new worlds and, in reverse, what are the traps and dead-ends of the mind?
I studied all of
this somewhat indirectly and in many ways. In work on witchcraft I looked
at the ways in which people become trapped in a circular and closed intellectual
world. In my work on
Probably the most
significant event in my increasing interest in what shapes and inhibits knowledge
was meeting and working with Gerry Martin. We met in 1990 and since then we
have spent many days and weeks together. He comes to the problem of how we
innovate and achieve reliable knowledge from the background of a scientist
and engineer. This jolts me out of my rut as a social scientist and forces
me into areas where I previously knew nothing. We discussed and read and attended
seminars and conferences around the themes of cognition, the history and philosophy
of science, the origins and nature of the scientific revolution, the science
of how we know (epistemology) and so on. In
My half-formed interest and ideas in this field have been enriched and strengthened by this deep conversation and it has led me to work with a number of experts in the history of thought. In particular it led to a book which explores some of the difficulties of acquiring new knowledge and the way in which a particular artefact, glass, made such a difference.
The interest in glass actually stemmed originally from reading Mumford’s wonderful passage in Technics and Civilization. Glass seemed a perfect example of something which Gerry and I have often discussed. As a retired industrialist and manufacturer, his life has largely been focused on inventing new things by embedding ideas into artefacts. So, far more than myself, he has come to understand how knowledge actually works by externalising itself and changing the arrangement of atoms, which in turn come back to alter what we can think.
Glass is a wonderful example of this process. It started very humbly as a substance of beauty (beads), then of usefulness (vessels, windows). Only very late, as the quality improved, did it suddenly emerge that by affecting our primary sense organ, the eye, glass could change the world of knowledge.
I had been dimly
aware that the greatest puzzle behind the history of human knowledge was what
one might call the Needham question. Sir Joseph Needham had written and organized
a massive study of Science and Civilization in China in which
he had shown that by about 1300
From my school
days I had studied and written about the Renaissance and why it occurred.
Later I had studied the scientific revolution of the early seventeenth century,
the world of Bacon, Galileo, Boyle, Newton and others. Yet when I came to
consider these questions again in a series of seminars I held with Gerry in
the 1990’s at King’s College, and talked to my friends in the history of art
and science, it became obvious that there was no convincing theory of why the great break-through of
Renaissance and Scientific Revolution had occurred when it did, where it did,
or why at all. Why had it not happened in the far more advanced civilizations
of
(How well does democracy work?)
For many years I never thought much about how the political system into which I was born worked for many years. I suppose I assumed that it was the best in the world, that it had been invented by the British, and that one day it would, because of its obvious merits, spread all over the world.
I do remember the excitement of an election when I was about eleven and my relief as the results came in that the nasty Labour government was losing. I also remember at about 17 giving a speech at a mock election at school as a prospective conservative candidate and sweeping to a dramatic victory. Friends suggested I should go into politics as my speech was so persuasive. But in fact both experiences reflect the conservative nature of the expensive private boarding schools I was attending.
I also remember during
my last years at school having terribly boring classes on how the American
constitution worked. I also had and rather more
exciting ones about how Cromwell and his armies had saved
At University I began to move towards support for labour, which won a victory under Harold Wilson. I also studied a great amount of political history and began to get a slight grasp of how the British political system had emerged. I even read some political philosophy. In my first term I had to study Alexis de Tocqueville and with the help of an excellent tutor, Harry Pitt, began to appreciate one of the greatest of thinkers. Later I read Aristotle, Hobbes and Rousseau, and a little of Marx.
Yet I was still quite complacent. I had no personal experience of anything except British democracy. Nor did I at any time deeply consider what was needed in order to have an effective democracy, or any of the well-known criticisms of the system.
At the London School of Economics in 1967 it was the time of student protests and the anti-Vietnam marches. I did not take part in the former, but I did start to encounter Marxist and other critiques of capitalist society. And I began to be deeply aware of the strange games which were played in the name of democracy.
I found out that
Democracy had to be protect by secret wars, the toppling
of democratically elected presidents and the installation of dictators like
Pinochet who terrorised his people. Democracy should be installed, so it was
said, on the point of a gun and saved by the burning of women and children
alive with napalm. I learnt, in other words, to distrust power, even in ‘democratic’
countries, and especially when wielded by the greatest empire on earth, the
When I first went
to
Then when I went
to
Yet we all continued
to hope for democracy and still believed in it. My realization of its thinness
even in
I was amazed to hear his forebodings about the lurch to the right in British politics and his fears that Thatcher was very close to establishing a kind of elective dictatorship. He thought she was a real danger to democracy and might easily destroy it. I had never realized what a slender thread British democracy hangs upon, a few individuals and some crusty Law Lords lay between us and dictatorship.
During the benign reign of John Major, these fears went and in the early days of Tony Blair all seemed well. It was only with the election of George Bush that the world seemed to change. It was a great shock to realize that the greatest democracy on earth could allow a man who had gained a smaller number of votes than his rival, and whose agents obviously cheated in the registering and counting of votes, to become President.
Yet this was just the beginning. The extraordinary behaviour of Bush and Blair in relation to terrorism and human rights, their disregard for public opinion, their rule in concert with what looked like a few reactionary and neo-conservative friends was scary. Their palpable deception of their people in trying to justify a war against a sovereign state which was obviously not a threat to either country, suddenly made me aware of how ‘democracy’ was deeply flawed.
So I decided to write you a letter Lily to explain what democracy means, where it comes from, and its strengths and weaknesses. For it is ironic that in the hour of its apparent triumph over its chief rival, communism, it should have become so internally tainted. Whether it can recover, we shall see. But writing this as I sit in a Chinese hotel in Sechuan