My answer to the question ‘What is worth knowing?’ is this: what matters is not just how much knowledge I have, but what I do with my knowledge. The process of creating something useful and beautiful out of what I learn does not resemble building a house out of bricks that have been ordered in advance. It is more like painting a picture which gradually takes shape. As I add and subtract colours and contours, each opens up possibilities that I did not imagine beforehand, and I rush off to deepen my understanding of them, and research new territories, which in turn open up new vistas and new meanings for the too naïve or simple thoughts I began with. I usually end up with a creation quite different from the one I originally envisaged. That is how I select what I want to know, a process that is all the more unpredictable in its outcome because it draws me to places of whose existence I might previously have been unaware. The excitement reaches a peak when the people or places or ideas that hitherto seemed unrelated or irrelevant come together to suggest some new insight to me, and are able to do the same for others.
I owe to my wife Deirdre Wilson an appreciation of the importance of relevance. She is the co-inventor of the theory of relevance which has helped to overturn what people have believed about communication ever since Aristotle. Communication is not a simple matter of sending messages and having them decoded and understood in the way the sender intended. Messages are understood and new knowledge acquired depending on how much relevance the receiver can find in them, given that each person has a limited background of knowledge, and a varying amount of willingness or energy to extract their implications. The more numerous the implications, and the less effort required to find them, the greater the relevance will be. Inevitably, there is an element of guess-work in understanding what implications others intend us to find. Communication is a battle with uncertainty. So I am aware that much of the knowledge I deal with is malleable or diluted. I have no use for dogmatism. This does not mean that I consider all opinions as equally worthy of respect and all truths relative. The discoveries we make are indeed always subject to revision, but we can strive for the truth, even though it is so often beyond our grasp. That endless search on the frontiers of ignorance is as much one of life’s great delights as constantly expanding one’s taste for strange foods.
Though I express my excitement at the imaginative possibilities that knowledge offers by using metaphors from art, I am sustained also by the rather similar attitudes that scientists have recently adopted, abandoning the certainties of the nineteenth century for an almost poetic interaction with the mysteries of the universe. ‘Even the mathematically formulated claims of physics’, wrote Heisenberg of quantum fame (1901–1976) ‘are in some sense only word-paintings in which we try to make the experience of nature known and understandable to ourselves and to others.’ ‘What we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty . . . It is of paramount importance that we recognise this ignorance and doubt,’ added Richard Feynman (1918–1988); ‘the first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself . . . I always live without knowing.’ The Principle of Uncertainty can apparently be interpreted in at least six different ways. The Principle of Complementarity was announced in a lecture that is considered to be a landmark in the annals of physics but also one of its most incomprehensible texts, a ‘juxtaposition of several coexisting arguments addressed to different quantum theorists about different issues’. It was not only Dostoyevsky who wrote ‘polyphonic novels’.
So I do not regard ambiguity as an enemy, nor do I consider disagreement a pest to be eradicated. New ideas almost inevitably excite disagreement. Knowledge is the child of disagreement. I do not expect people to agree with me, which is why I am not preaching to you. When the historian Braudel, whose biography I was once invited to write, said wistfully that there was only one person in the world who fully understood him, he was uncharacteristically forgetting that misunderstanding is the eternal companion of most human relationships.
For long, I did not understand the education I received. It taught me to sharpen my critical faculties, but was less interested in imagination, even though only imagination could turn criticism into a constructive thought. Academia is a zoo where different species of minds irritate and exasperate one another saying ‘I do not think like you’. It is not easy for heads of different shapes, with contrary opinions, to imbibe new thoughts from one another. And yet, ‘Science is rooted in conversation,’ as Heisenberg said. His memoirs, Physics and Beyond, written in the form of dialogues, have as their subtitle Encounters, Conversations. The two greatest discoveries of the twentieth century, in quantum physics and genetics, are now documented as having been the fruit of long, long conversations between people of differing points of view. ‘Science rests on experiments; its results are attained through talks among those who work in it and who consult one another about the interpretation of these experiments.’ Full agreement brings invention to a halt. Niels Bohr (1885–1962) was famous for growing his ideas out of innumerable conversations with students and colleagues, inviting over 400 visitors to his laboratory to stay for over a month. He insisted that ideas acquire life when they are conveyed and understood by others. He even concluded that ‘the task of physics is not to find out how nature is but what we can say about nature. Humans depend on words. Our task is to communicate experiments and ideas to others. We are suspended in language.’ And he devoted the rest of his life to the language of science and the way people communicate.
These revelations strike a chord with me. Though I enjoy suddenly finding something significant in what superficially seems trivial, I only appreciate what I have learnt from a conversation or from a book the morning after. Some ancients have found the solution to problems in their dreams. Not I. It is in the first moments of wakening, after having gone to bed puzzling over information I cannot make sense of, that I have flashes of thought in which ideas that have been floating around in my mind link up and assume a meaning I had not suspected; but these sudden intuitions do not necessarily produce an answer that can be reconciled with all the facts; and I may go through the process many times before I am satisfied that I have something coherent. I do not offer this as a method to be copied, any more than I quote the great scientists as examples to be imitated. I find it comforting to read about the struggles that other minds have had and the many years of rumination that have preceded a discovery.
It is therefore impossible to know in advance what is worth knowing; only when one piece of knowledge meets another piece of knowledge do they discover whether they have anything to say to each other, and the link is made by the unpredictable spark of an individual imagination. As it is, most ideas that spring in human heads never meet what could be their muse. So every morning I would like to include in my breakfast a taster of a new book from any part of the world, in any subject, summarised in a thousand words, whose author has something to say that may be of universal interest, though it might escape the attention of most people because it is imprisoned in the category-cage of a speciality. It would require some effort on the part of the authors who may have spent years writing their fat books to say in a couple of pages what their message is, since it is hard to guess who might find relevance in their work. But those half million books that appear each year are part of humanity’s struggle with ignorance, and they are part of the world I want to connect with. I have put my breakfast idea on my website, and will discover where it leads.
What is very much worth knowing is the shape of the pattern that I impose on the facts that pour into my head, and the shape of the sieve that discards so many of them. That becomes visible only by comparison with other people’s patterns and sieves, which is why I need you to tell me what you have discovered about your predilections, what you see and what you do not, though you will not know that until you compare this with those of many others. But in addition, I can never have enough of the practical know-how which enables me, for example, to grow vegetables or repair broken objects; I del
ight in the company of those who have mastered many such skills and find unexpected solutions for the myriad dysfunctions that afflict daily living. Nothing has been so damaging as the separation between abstract and practical knowledge. The great advantage that people had until about 1830 was they were able to participate actively in numerous branches of science and the humanities, with Leonardo da Vinci’s famously varied inventions demonstrating how beneficial that could be. Now that each branch of learning has become so specialised, demanding that attention should be concentrated for many years on a few minute details, the interaction between amateur skills and expert learning has become more precious than ever. The most influential discoveries have been made unexpectedly, and have depended on freedom from preordained targets and freedom from too much certainty about the inevitability of things being the way they are.
The Lifelong Learning Society may not be the ultimate goal. Endlessly consuming knowledge is highly pleasurable, but to be obese with knowledge can be damaging to mental health. If I get the chance to try out my alternative to academia, I shall describe it in my next book, together with all the other themes on which my thoughts still need to mature, under the influence of practical trial and error.
[28]
What does it mean to be alive?
‘STRANGER, MY MESSAGE IS SHORT,’ says an ancient Roman inscription. ‘Stand by and read it. Here is the unlovely tomb of a lovely woman. Her parents called her Claudia. She loved her husband with all her heart. She bore two sons, of these she leaves one on earth; under the earth she has placed the other. She was charming in converse, and gentle in bearing. She kept house, she made wool. That’s my last word. Go your way.’
Two thousand years later, gravestones say much the same, and usually less, about what having lived means. What else can people say today? This Roman text summarises the ancient common sense view that the purpose of life is life, the survival and transmission of life. It recognises that nature has gone to seemingly irresistible lengths to ensure that life does not stop. Women are born with two million eggs.
Men produce forty million sperm in every ejaculation, or at least did before pollution maimed them. The humble wasp can produce between 800 and 3,500 young from a single egg. It was ‘natural’ for Genghis Khan to believe that his mission was not only to conquer most of Asia, but also to ‘hold the wives and daughters of his enemies in his arms’ and father as many children as he possibly could, so that there are apparently sixteen million individuals descended from him.
But humans are also nature’s heretics. They often devote as little as a quarter of their lifetime to raising children, and delegate many of the tasks of parenting to experts outside their family. They have encouraged their children not to be mere copies of their parents, and every new generation represents a slightly altered version of humanity. From time to time they forget that family is what they care about more than anything else, that children are what has given them the most joy, and that to have brought them up well is what they are most proud of. Throughout history there have repeatedly been huge, sudden and sustained falls in birth rates. Mesopotamia’s population trebled in its days of glory, but then descended to one-tenth of its peak when its inventiveness and optimism were extinguished.
Egypt’s population, which was less than a million in 3000 B.C., rose to five million at the time of Christ, and then fell to 1.5 million by A.D. 1000. Mexico’s population was reduced to one-tenth of its former size after the invasion of the Spaniards, not just by disease but also by despair. China’s one-child policy has been regarded as an assault on natural instincts, but many countries – like Greece, Italy and Spain – have simultaneously and voluntarily reduced their birth rates to well below China’s. In Germany, 30 per cent of women are childless and an even larger proportion of graduate women. Vast numbers of humans have been nuns and monks. The roster of the childless who have chosen to create only spiritual offspring includes Leonardo da Vinci, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Keynes, Handel, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Louis Armstrong, Maria Callas, Georges Brassens, Jane Austen, William Blake, Ruskin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Magritte, Susan B. Anthony, Florence Nightingale, Simone de Beauvoir, Coco Chanel, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, and of course Jesus himself. They found other ways of responding to the warning of the philosopher Mencius, who was sorry for those without a family because they had ‘no-one to tell their grievances to’.
When it rains heavily and the deserts suddenly bloom, so that there is plenty to eat, locusts multiply rapidly. The more crowded they become, and the more physical contact there is between them, the more their legs rub against each other, the more excited they become, changing their colour from their normal drabness to yellow and orange and black, as though discovering fashion and cosmetics. They join in bands when young, and as adults they form swarms, a single one of which can contain sixty billion locusts, consuming every bit of vegetation over thousands of miles, until there is none left and they die of starvation. Humans have also been multiplying while denuding the earth of its forests and the oceans of their inhabitants, but they have never been quite convinced that they will die like locusts when prosperity ends.
The originality of humans is that they (or most of them) have believed that their life only begins with death. When Mozart said that the purpose of life is death, he meant that life on earth was a brief journey to the eternal afterlife elsewhere. Some believe the journey leads to heaven; some that it involves a series of reincarnations in other bodies. For the ancient Egyptians, the dead become space tourists accompanying the sun on its daily ride. The purpose of life, said Buddha, is to escape from life and its inevitable suffering, but it might require several deaths to become free.
The reward of life, said the Jewish prophets, was to be ‘gathered unto their fathers’, and many civilisations have given ancestors the role of watching over their living descendants. Dying became the supreme art, more challenging than living. The Spanish playwright Caldéron concluded, ‘Man’s greatest crime is to have been born’. The focus on procreation and the afterlife had a more powerful meaning when life was a brief candle than when marriage is postponed to the age of thirty and it is increasingly possible to survive for almost a century.
However, humanity’s most subversive rebellion has been to overthrow the notion that the ‘meaning of life’ is fixed for ever by nature or by God, and exists independently of the wishes of ordinary people. It challenges this with a different conviction, that each person has to find an interpretation of the gift of life to suit their own ideals and desires. The question is rephrased: ‘What do you expect from your life, and how do you shape your life?’ rather than ‘What do you have to accept?’ What purpose would you like not ‘life’ but your own life to have? That makes the idea of the purpose of life in general meaningless; it is up to you to give a purpose to your own life. Desire dethrones obedience.
Suddenly, the idea of progress becomes very useful, because it provides a framework into which each can give significance to a personal struggle that can otherwise be very lonely. Previously you expected to do as your parents did, to work, marry, eat and dress as they did. Now you have to better yourself. Life is no longer a journey on slow-flowing rivers that have been there since the beginning of time; instead it is a maze of long and steep ladders, and your future depends on your ability to climb them and not fall off. Instead of seeing yourself as merely a link in a long chain of ancestors and descendants, you have to compete to attain qualifications and achievements beyond the dreams of any member of your family. But how to choose? How to spend the next month, year, decade?
Humans have 135 different goals, according to a precise professor at the University of Southern California. One way of coping with that profusion is to follow the psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) who reduced ambition into a simple picture of a pyramid. You start by satisfying your physiological needs, like food, sex and sleep, which are at the base of the pyramid; the next step up is your need for security, a
nd then you go up one step to love, then self-esteem, and finally at the peak you seek ‘self-actualisation’. That means your ultimate goal is to develop all the qualities hidden within you, but which could not manifest themselves because you were too busy satisfying the preliminary needs. ‘Man has infinite potentiality, which properly used could make his life very much like his fantasies of heaven,’ wrote Maslow. He studied the biographies of famous heroes to discover how they reached excellence. ‘Why are we not all Beethovens?’ he asked. The implication seemed to be that we could indeed all be Beethovens, or almost so, and that is how Maslow’s theory prospered. It was refreshing to hear something more optimistic than Freud’s dire warnings about neurotic memories. Moreover, Maslow was not just a professor in an ivory tower: he was the son of a Jewish Russian couple who had recently migrated to the U.S.A. with little education, but eager that their seven children should do better than themselves, and he could claim some experience of ordinary working life, for his family eventually owned a wine barrel factory in California. His achievement was to compress into five straightforward ambitions that everyone could identify with the vague aspirations for a better life of a generation that did not know what to do with its freedom. Elements of his diagnosis are to be found today in almost every sphere of endeavour, from work and business ideology to education and feminism.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 34