Alongside memory and anticipation, language is the last ingredient of imagination. By ‘language’ I mean a system of symbols: an agreed pattern or code of gestures and utterances with no necessarily obvious resemblance to the things signified. If you show me a picture of a pig, I get an idea of what you want to refer to, because a picture is representative, not symbolic. But if you say ‘pig’ to me, I do not know what you mean unless I know the code, because words are symbols. Language contributes to imagination to this extent: we need it to turn imaginings, which may take the form of images or noises, into communicable ideas.
Some people think or claim to think that you cannot conceive of anything unless you have a term for it. Jacob Bronowski was among them. He was one of the last great polymaths and believed passionately that imagination is a uniquely human gift. ‘The ability’, he said, shortly before his death in 1974, ‘to conceive of things which are not present to the senses is crucial to the development of man. And this ability requires the existence of a symbol somewhere inside the mind for something that is not there.’41 Some kinds of thinking do depend on language. Speakers of English or Dutch, for instance, understand the relationship between sex and gender differently from people who think in, say, Spanish or French, and who therefore have no words of common gender at their disposal, and yet who are used to designating male creatures by feminine terms and vice versa. Spanish feminists, in partial consequence, coin feminine terms to designate, for instance, female lawyers and ministers, while leaving other designations untouched, whereas their Anglophone counterparts, equally illogically, abjure such feminine words as they have, renouncing, for instance, ‘actress’ or ‘authoress’.
Yet scholars used to exaggerate the extent to which the languages we speak have measurable effects on how we perceive the world.42 On the basis of currently available evidence, it seems more commonly the case that we devise words to express our ideas, rather than the other way round. Experiments show, for instance, that human infants make systematic choices before they make symbolic utterances.43 We may not be able to say how thought can happen without language, but it is at least possible to conceive of a thing first and invent a term or other symbol for it afterwards. ‘Angels’, as Umberto Eco once said, summarizing Dante, ‘do not speak. For they understand each other through a sort of instantaneous mental reading, and they know everything they are allowed to know … not by any use of language but by watching the Divine Mind.’44 It makes just as good sense to say that language is the result of imagination as that it is a necessary precondition.
Symbols – and language is a system of symbols, in which utterances or other signs stand for their referents – resemble tools. If my case so far is valid, symbols and tools alike are results of a single property of the creatures that devise them: the ability to see what is not there – to fill gaps in vision, and to re-envisage one thing as if it were something else. That is how a stick can become a proxy for an absent limb or a lens transform an eye. Similarly, in language, sounds stand for emotions or objects and evoke absent entities. My wife and dog, as I write these lines, are four thousand miles away; but I can summon them symbolically by mentioning them. I have finished my cup of coffee, but because the image of it, brimming and steaming, is in my mind, I can conjure the phantasm of it in writing. Of course, once we have a repertoire of symbols the effect on imagination is freeing and fertilizing; and the more abundant the symbols, the more prolific the results. Language (or any symbolic system) and imagination nourish each other, but they may originate independently.
Language was, presumably, the first system of signs people developed. But how long ago did that happen? Fallacies – or, at least, unwarranted assumptions – underlie almost all our thinking about language. Disputes over the configuration of jaws and palates have dominated controversy about the dating of the first language; but vocal equipment is irrelevant: it can affect the kind of language you use but not the feasibility of language in general. In any case, we tend to assume that language is for communication and socialization, creating bonds of mutual understanding and facilitating collaboration: the human equivalent of monkeys picking at one another’s lice or dogs exchanging sniffs and licks. But language may have started as mere self-expression, uttered to communicate one’s pain or joy or frustration or fulfilment only to oneself. Our ancestors’ first vocalizations were, presumably, physical effects of bodily convulsions, such as sneezes, coughs, yawns, expectorations, exhalations, farts. The first utterances with deeper significance might have been purrs of satisfaction, smacks of the lips, or pensive murmurs. And when people first consciously used noises or gestures or utterances to make a point, it is surely as likely to have been a hostile point, warning off predators or rivals with a snarl or scream or a display of prowess, as an attempt to set up a partnership of more than a merely sexual nature.
Besides, if language is for communication, it does not do its job very well. No symbol exactly matches what it signifies. Even signifiers specifically designed to resemble objects are often obscure or misleading. One day, I noticed a fellow-diner in search of the lavatory in a pretentious restaurant. He poised uncertainly for a moment between doors marked respectively with pictures of a strawberry and a banana, before realization dawned. I often blink uncomprehendingly at the icons designers scatter over my computer screen. I once read a perhaps fanciful newspaper report of the writer’s attempt to buy a small gold cross pendant as a baptismal gift. ‘Do you’, the shop assistant asked, ‘want one with a little man on it?’ Since most of the signs language deploys are arbitrary, and have no resemblance to the object signified, the chances of misleading multiply.
Misunderstanding – which we usually condemn for breaking peace, marring marriage, occluding the classroom, and impeding efficiency – can be fruitful; it can make ideas multiply. Many new ideas are old ideas, misunderstood. Language contributes to the formulation of ideas and the flow of innovation, through distortions and disasters as well as through successful communication.
Producing Cultures
Memory and anticipation, then, with perhaps a little help from language, are the factories of imagination. Ideas, if my argument is right so far, are the end products of the process. So what? What difference do ideas make to the real world? Don’t vast forces – climate and disease, evolution and environment, economic laws and historical determinants – shape it, beyond the reach of human power to change what is bound to happen anyway? You can’t think your way out of the clockwork of the cosmos. Or can you? Can you escape the wheels without getting crushed among the cogs?
I propose that ideas, rather than impersonal forces, make the world; that almost everything we do starts in our minds, with reimagined worlds that we then try to construct in reality. We often fail, but even our failures impact on events and jar them into new patterns, new courses.
The oddness of our experience is obvious if, again, we compare ourselves with other animals. Plenty of other species have societies: they live in packs or herds or hives or anthills of varying complexity but – species by species and habitat for habitat – uniform patterning marks the way they live. As far as we can tell, instinct regulates their relationships and predicts their behaviour. Some species have culture – which I distinguish from non-cultural or pre-cultural kinds of socialization whenever creatures learn behaviours by experience and pass them on to subsequent generations by example, teaching, learning, and tradition.
The first discovery of non-human culture occurred in Japan in 1953, when primatologists observed a young female macaque monkey, whom they called Imo, behave in unprecedented ways. Until then, members of Imo’s tribe prepared sweet potatoes for eating by scraping off the dirt. Imo discovered that you can wash them in a spring or the sea. Her fellow-macaques had difficulty separating food-grains from the sand that clung to them. Imo found that by plunging them in water you can separate them easily, scooping up the edible matter as the heavier sand sinks. Imo was not just a genius: she was also a teacher. Her mother, her s
iblings, and, little by little, the rest of the tribe learned to imitate her techniques. To this day, the monkeys continue her practices. They have become cultural in an unequivocal sense: rites practised for the sake of upholding tradition rather than for any practical effect. The monkeys still dip their sweet potatoes in the sea, even if you present them with ready-washed specimens.45
Over the last seven decades, science has revealed ever increasing instances of culture beyond the human sphere, first among primates, subsequently among dolphins and whales, crows and songbirds, elephants and rats. One researcher has even suggested that the capacity for culture is universal and detectible in bacteria so that, potentially, any species might develop it given time and appropriate environmental pressures or opportunities.46 However that may be, on present evidence no animal has gone nearly so far along the cultural trajectory as Homo sapiens. We can measure how cultures diverge: the more variation, the greater the total amount of cultural change. But only humans display much material to study in this respect. Whales have pretty much the same social relationships wherever they graze and blow. So do most other social species. Chimpanzees exhibit divergence: in some places, for instance, they crack nuts with stones; in others they wield sticks to fish for termites. But human differences dwarf such instances. Baboons’ mating habits cover an interesting range from monogamous unions to sultanic seraglio-gathering and serial polygamy, but again they seem unable to match the variety of humans’ couplings.
Other animals’ cultures are not stagnant – but they seem so by comparison with ours. There is now a whole academic sub-discipline devoted to chimpanzee archaeology. Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary and his colleagues and students dig up sites chimps have frequented for thousands of years; so far, however, they have found remarkable continuities in the selection and use of tools, but not much evidence of innovation since the animals first began to crack nuts with the help of stones. Chimpanzee politics, too, are a rich field of study. Frans de Waal of the Yerkes Institute has made a speciality of the study of what he calls Chimpanzee Machiavellianism.47 And of course, chimp societies experience political change in the form of leadership contests, which often produce violent reversals of fortune for one alpha male or another, and for the gangs of toughs who surround and support candidates for the role of top ape.
Occasionally, we can glimpse chimps’ potential for revolutionary change, when, for instance, an intelligent chimp usurps, for a while, the role of the alpha male. The classic case is that of Mike, a small and feeble but clever chimpanzee of Gombe, who seized power over his tribe in 1964. Enhancing his displays of aggression by clashing big cans that he filched from the primatologist’s camp, he intimidated the alpha male into submission and remained in control for six years.48 He was the first chimpanzee revolutionary we know of, who not only usurped leadership but changed the way a leader emerged. We can assume, therefore, that similar revolutions could occur deep in the hominid past. But even Mike was not clever enough to devise a way of passing power on without the intervention of another putsch by a resurgent alpha male.49
A remarkable transformation of political culture occurred among some baboons in 1986, when the entire elite was wiped out, perhaps as a result of eating poisonous trash from a human midden, perhaps because of tuberculosis. No new alpha male arose to take over: instead, a system of wide power-sharing emerged, with females playing major roles.50 Chimpanzee tribes sometimes split when young males secede in the hope of finding mates outside the group. Wars between the secessionists and the vieille garde frequently ensue. But these fluctuations take place within an overall pattern of barely disturbed continuity. The structures of chimpanzee societies hardly alter. Compared with the rapid turnover and amazing diversity of human political systems, variation in other primates’ politics is tiny.
The Power of Thought
So the problem historians are called on to solve is, ‘Why does history happen at all?’ Why is the story of humankind so crowded with change, so crammed with incident, whereas other social and cultural animals’ lifeways diverge at most only a little from place to place and time to time?
Two theories are on the table: the first, that it is all to do with matter; the second, that it is all to do with mind. People used to think that mind and matter were very different types of thing. The satirist who coined the Punch joke that appears as an epigraph to this book expressed the perfect mutual exclusivity of the concepts – mind was no matter, and matter never mind. The distinction no longer seems reliable. Scholars and scientists reject what they call ‘mind–body dualism’. We now know that when we have ideas, or, more generally, whenever thoughts arise in our minds, physical and chemical process accompany them in the brain. The way we think, moreover, is trapped in the physical world. We cannot escape the constraints of our environments and the pressures and stresses from outside ourselves that encroach on our freedom to think. We are prisoners of evolution – limited to the capacities with which nature has endowed us. Material drives – such as hunger, lust, fear – have measurable effects on our metabolisms and invade and warp our thoughts.
I do not think, however, that human behaviour can be explained only in terms of response to material exigencies, first, because the stresses that arise from the physical framework of life also affect other animals, and so cannot be invoked to explain what is peculiarly human; and, second, because the rhythms of change in evolution and environment tend to be relatively slow or fitful, whereas the turnover of new behaviour in humans is bewilderingly fast.
Instead, or additionally, I propose mind – by which I simply mean the property of producing ideas – as the chief cause of change: the place where human diversity starts. Mind in this sense is not the same thing as the brain, nor a part or particle embedded in it. It more resembles, perhaps, a process of interaction between cerebral functions – the creative flash and crash you see and hear when memory and anticipation spark and scrape against each other. The claim that we make our own world is frightening to those of us who fear the terrible responsibilities that flow from freedom. Superstitions ascribe our ideas to the promptings of imps or angels, demons or gods, or attribute our ancestors’ innovations to extraterrestrial whisperers and manipulators. For Marxists and other historicists, our minds are the playthings of impersonal forces, doomed or destined by the course of history, to which we may as well assent as we cannot restrain or reverse it. For sociobiologists, we can think only what is in our genes. For memeticists, ideas are autonomous and evolve according to a dynamic of their own, invading our brains as viruses invade our bodies. All these evasions seem to me to fail to confront our real experience of ideas. We have ideas because we think them up, not thanks to any force outside ourselves. To seek to accumulate and juxtapose information may be an instinctive way we have of trying to make sense of it. There comes a point, however, when the ‘sense’ we make of knowledge transcends anything in our experience, or when the intellectual pleasure it gives us exceeds material need. At that point, an idea is born.
Human ways of life are volatile because they change in response to ideas. Our species’ most extraordinary facility, compared with the rest of creation, is our capacity for generating ideas so powerful and persistent that they make us seek ways of applying them, altering our environs, and generating further change. Put it like this: we re-envision our world – imagining a shelter more efficient than nature provides, or a weapon stronger than our arms, or a greater abundance of possessions, or a city, or a different mate, or a dead enemy, or an afterlife. When we get those ideas we strive to realize them, if they seem desirable, or to frustrate them, if they inspire us with dread. Either way, we ignite change. That is why ideas are important: they really are the sources of most of the other kinds of change that distinguish human experience.
Chapter 2
Gathering Thoughts
Thinking Before Agriculture
If what I have said so far is right, the logical conclusion is that the history of thinking should i
nclude non-human creatures. We have, however, little or no access to the thoughts even of the other animals with whom we interact most closely. Extinct species of hominid predecessors or hominin ancestors, however, have left tantalizing evidence of their ideas.1
The Moral Cannibals: The Earliest Ideas?
The earliest instance I know of lies among the detritus of a cannibal feast eaten about 800,000 years ago in a cave in Atapuerca, Spain. Specialists bicker about how to classify the feasters, who probably belonged to a species ancestral to our own but preceding ours by so long an interval – of some 600,000 years – that anything they had in common with us seems astonishing. They split bones of their own species to suck out the marrow. But there was more to the feast than hunger or gluttony. These were thinking cannibals. We have trained ourselves to recoil from cannibalism and to see it as treason against our species: a form of sub-human savagery. The evidence, however, suggests the opposite: cannibalism is typically – you might almost say peculiarly, even definingly – human and cultural. Under the stones of every civilization lie human bones, snapped and sucked. Most of us nowadays, like chimpanzees beholding occasional cannibal aberrations among their peers, react uncomprehendingly. But in most human societies, for most of the past, we should have accepted cannibalism as normal – embedded in the way society works. No other mammals practise it so regularly or on such a large scale as we do: indeed, all others tend to avoid it except in extreme circumstances – which suggests that it did not come ‘naturally’ to our ancestors: they had to think about it.
It is consistent with just about everything we know about the nature of cannibalism to assume that the Atapuerca cannibals were performing a thoughtful ritual, underlain by an idea: an attempt to achieve an imagined effect, augmenting the eaters’ powers or reshaping their natures. Cannibals sometimes eat people to survive famine or deprivation or top up protein-deficient diets.2 Overwhelmingly, however, more reflective aims, moral or mental, aesthetic or social, inspire them: self-transformation, the appropriation of power, the ritualization of the eater’s relationship with the eaten, revenge, or the ethic of victory. Normally, where it is normal, cannibalism occurs in war, as an act symbolizing dominance of the defeated. Or human meat is the gods’ food and cannibalism a form of divine communion.
Out of Our Minds Page 5