Letters To Lily: On how the world works

Letters to Lily

ALAN MACFARLANE trained as a historian and is Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge. He is the author of The Glass Bathyscaphe (Profile, 2003) and is currently working on his next book, Japan Through the Looking Glass (to be published by Profile in 2007).

Letters to Lily

ON HOW THE WORLD WORKS

Alan Macfarlane

This paperback edition published in 2006

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by

Profile Books Ltd

3A Exmouth House

Pine Street

Exmouth Market

London EC1R 0JH

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright © Alan Macfarlane, 2005, 2006

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Typeset in Palatino by MacGuru Ltd

[email protected]

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978-1-84765-088-7

For Lily and, with her agreement,

for Gerry Martin, a real friend

Contents

What are these letters?

1 Why write to you?

2 Who are you?

Love and friendship

3 Why are families often difficult?

4 What is love?

5 Who are our friends?

6 Why play games?

Violence and fear

7 Is violence necessary?

8 What is war and why do we fight?

9 What is witchcraft?

10 Who are the terrorists?

Belief and knowledge

11 Who is God?

12 Can we control the spiritual world?

13 How do we learn?

14 Can education destroy knowledge?

Power and order

15 How well does Democracy work?

16 Where does freedom come from?

17 What is bureaucracy for?

18 How do we get justice?

Self and others

19 Why is there inequality?

20 What makes us individuals?

21 Why do many people work so hard?

22 What made our digital world?

Life and death

23 What are the limits to growth?

24 Why do so many people starve?

25 Why are we diseased?

26 Why have children?

Body and mind

27 What makes us feel good?

28 What is sex and is it good for you?

29 What controls our minds?

30 Why are we here?

What are these letters?

1

Why write to you?

Dear Lily,

Let’s imagine what a visitor from some distant planet would think of human history. Let us look down on the museum of human history from afar, with you, Lily, as one of the exhibits.

The visitor would almost certainly conclude that humans are very topsy-turvy. They are obviously just animals, yet they seem to think that they are special. They cannot decide whether to prefer their minds or their bodies. They cannot decide whether to prefer their senses or their thoughts. They think of themselves as immortal, yet they die. They think of themselves as lords of creation, yet they are a prey to very many other species. They have excellent minds, but this just leads them into folly and unreason. They claim to be the sole judges of truth, but spend much of their time lying. They are loving, yet they spend much time hating and undermining each other.

Humans are co-operative creatures, yet they are also intensely selfish. They can create great art, but leave the world an ugly mess. With their amazing technologies they generate great wealth, yet most of them live in degrading poverty. They enjoy peace but constantly kill. They strive to be equal, yet invent and sustain endless inequalities between classes, religious groups, and men and women. They preach tolerance and understanding, yet they torture each other for their beliefs.

The distant observer might well be confused, agreeing that ‘Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.’ Especially puzzling is the huge gap between human potential, the ability to make a rich, lovely and fulfilling life on earth, and the actual miseries human beings create for themselves and other species.

As your grandfather I would like to help you to understand this confused and confusing world. Since I will not be here for ever, it is important to put something on paper for you now.

I have spent my life as a historian and anthropologist trying to understand how the world works. I have written many academic books. However, as I get older, I have become increasingly interested in trying to understand and explain the bigger picture in a simpler and more concise way.

I write from a particular viewpoint, that of an elderly, white, British, male academic. Yet I hope I have escaped enough from these limitations to say something that applies more widely. Furthermore I am writing to a specific person – you, my granddaughter, an English girl. You are now only seven, but I imagine you in ten years’ time. Yet although this is specially for you, I hope that people who are older and younger than you, and of other countries and backgrounds, will also be able to appreciate what I say. For I would like Spanish, French, Russians, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Americans and others to be able to compare their experience with yours.

I have deliberately written the letters quickly and without referring to lots of books. It seems best to speak as directly as I can from my experience. So there are bound to be gaps and there are ideas that you will question. These are personal letters, written to tell you what I feel and think about certain issues. They are based on a lifetime of travel in Europe and Asia, of teaching several generations of students at Cambridge University, of reading and writing about the past and the present.

I can fit these thoughts into a set of short letters because, in the end, there are just two questions behind all of them. The first is: what are humans really like? Are they basically violent or kind, selfish or social, creative or dull? The second is: what are the origins, and what is the nature, of the world we live in?

We know from everyday experience that, while we cannot absolutely predict the future, we can make fairly useful guesses which usually turn out to be roughly accurate. If there were no patterns in the past that continued into the future, all of the existence of humans and other animals on earth would be impossible. It is on the basis of what we have established about human motivation and what we have seen in the pattern of past events that we make endless decisions, big and small. There are no invariable laws, but there are likelihoods and tendencies.

You and I expect to hear the fish-and-chip van on a Wednesday evening – and it almost always comes. You couldn’t undertake the smallest action, from eating a meal to playing a game or riding a bicycle, if this predictability based on past patterns recurring could not be relied upon.

In these letters I would like to try to describe some of the patterns that I believe I have found. I hope that you will then be able to stand on my shoulders and see further than I have. This is not easy. It is undoubtedly true that, as the poet John Keats wrote, ‘Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced’. It is practically impossible to imagine what love or hunger is like until you have experienced it. Yet I hope that if you have this book beside you as the experiences occur, it may help to put them into context and to make you aware that you are not alone.

Since both you and I, Lily, are British, the focus is often on our particular experience and history. Some may think that there are times when I extol the virtues of British civilisation too highly. Yet because I sincerely believe that the story happened in the way in which I tell it, I have left the apparent bias as it is.

Furthermore I want you, Lily, to know something about your roots. These can be explained only by my drawing attention to some of the oddness of British history. And I believe this is important to others too. For, by chance, much of the modern world went through the funnel of British history. A great deal was contributed from all over the world, but by chance Britain became the largest empire on earth at just the time when the industrial and scientific revolutions were shaping our modern world. This has left its stamp not only on America, Africa, Australia and India, but on many other places.

We often take this present world, and our own lives, for granted because it is all around us. It is difficult to imagine any other. You may believe that the science you learnt at school, the tools you use in your house, the paintings you look at, the language you speak, the wealth, freedoms and rights you enjoy are ‘natural’ and ‘universal’. It’s difficult not to believe that our world was bound to end up like this and that it’s the natural thing. Yet is this the case?

The visitor from the distant planet would certainly not think you were normal when set against people around the world in the past and present. You are not typical at all. If you were, you would be married and would very soon have several children. Your marriage would have been arranged; romantic love would not have been the basis for the choice of your husband. You would have spent your childhood from the age of five or six working in the fields.

Now you would be trying to cope with your pregnancy while also spending many hours slaving in the cold and wet or heat and dust. You would be sick almost all the time, suffering from worms in your stomach, septic sores, coughs, diarrhoea. Probably you would have had other more serious diseases such as malaria, or AIDS. Many of your close relatives would have died when you were a child.

You would lead a desperately insecure life. Powerful people would constantly be demanding things from your family. Marauding soldiers might often cause havoc in your village. The law would give you no protection. You would be malnourished and often very hungry. You would be uneducated and have no chance of bettering your life. You would be considered inferior to every male you met, including your younger relatives. You might well be shut away behind a wall or a veil, your feet broken when you were a child or your genitals mutilated. You get the picture.

Then think of yourself. You have education, lovely clothes, good food, doctors, dentists and hospitals freely available, loving parents, political and religious freedom. You do not have to slave with your body and you can choose what you want to do in your life, when and whom you will marry, whether to have children. You believe you are equal to any man and that you will live to a ripe old age, benefiting from a pension in a country where there are no secret police and no extortionate landlords to live off you. Above all, you live in peace and free from serious violence and fear.

Yet even with all this, you are often anxious, lonely, confused, undecided about what to do. I hope these letters will give you a new understanding of the ever-so-human animal that you are, quite special but with all the fears and uncertainties that are part of being us, the people of one smallish planet circling a dying sun.

I was always taught to read books from the start to the end, and with equal attention to all parts. I was therefore very surprised to come across a remark by the philosopher Francis Bacon who suggested that ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested’. This applies equally well to the individual letters here.

Some you will find are already largely familiar or seem simple, and can be skimmed through. Others are deceptive: I’ve tried to keep the expression of the ideas as clear as possible, yet beneath the surface there are often concepts that are quite complex and may be totally unfamiliar. They take time to absorb. Some letters you’ll need to read slowly, and just one at a time and no more. The ideas are very condensed; like powder or liquid, let them mix in your mind and expand outwards.

There is no need to read the letters in the order in which they appear in the book. Start with whatever question most interests you and dot around. As a new puzzle or query occurs to you, see if I’ve written about it. You may also sometimes find it helpful to read a letter, then read other things or talk round the subject with friends, and then reread the letter later when it will have a different meaning.

Although this may look like just another book summarising things, I hope it will be more than that for you. I want it to be a companion on future mental walks. Together we can explore the world in a continuing conversation long after I am old or dead. I walked and talked to you and to Gerry, with whom I went for many such walks and to whom the book is dedicated. I would like to continue our walks through the woods, over the hills, along the rivers and through gardens and museums.

2

Who are you?

Dear Lily,

Who are you? Where did you come from? What has made you what you are?

You may be surprised by these questions and reply that I know perfectly well who you are. ‘I am Lily Bee; I am a girl who was born in Australia, but my parents are English and I now live in England and think of myself as British.’

It all seems very simple, but let us investigate a little further.

When I was at school I used to write pretend letters to myself as follows:

Alan

Macfarlane,

Field Head,

Hawkshead,

Lancashire,

England,

Europe,

The World,

The Universe.

From this you can see already that I thought of myself as many people crammed into one. A named person, a member of the Macfarlane family, an inhabitant of a house, of a village, a county, a country, a region, a world, a universe. Let’s look at who you are by following this same movement from the individual to the world level.

Are you a separate person?

You take it for granted that you are ‘Lily’ and that Lily is a person who is different and distinct from other people. You have a very strong concept of yourself as an individual. You probably assume that this is how all people think of themselves. Yet while it is true that most people have some sense of their separateness, being English you belong to perhaps the most individualistic society in history. So your concepts of your separateness and individuality are especially strong.

In most societies the family comes first, and the individual is submerged within that group. This means that it is really impossible to think of yourself without thinking of others. There is little meaning to the words ‘I’ and ‘me’. This is shown in the very restricted use of such words in some languages. You would in many societies have a meaning only in relation to others. Your identity would come from being a daughter in relation to parents, a mother in relation to children, a wife in relation to a husband, a serf or servant in relation to a lord, a living person in relation to the ancestors.

This is why in a Nepalese village where I have spent a lot of time you would not be called or addressed as Lily, but as ‘eldest daughter’, or, when you had your first child, as ‘mother of so-and-so’. In many other societies your name would change many times in your life. Imagine being called Lily until you were ten, then Jane for a few years, then Alice and so on, with your second name also changing frequently.

You, on the other hand, feel free and float around as a complete person with all kinds of inner powers and potentials. You may be a daughter or a mother, but these are not the things that make you who you are. You are Lily, and the other things are just aspects of yourself. The first basic assumption that you have, of your strong individual identity, with special and personal feelings, rights and freedoms, is very unusual.

Are you a woman?

You describe yourself as a ‘girl’ or ‘woman’. You probably mean that you are not a man, that you have certain physical characteristics (breasts, womb) which give you certain potentials (nursing and childbearing) that are different from those of a man. This is all true. Yet as well as the physical differences you have characteristics that you have absorbed, largely unconsciously, from the day you were born, which we may call ‘gender’. This is what the feminist Simone de Beauvoir was referring to when she wrote that ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes one.’

You may let your hair grow longer than most men, wear make-up or perfume, carry a handbag, prefer particular colours, wear certain clothes, read girls’ magazines, play only some games (hockey rather than football, for example), think of specific careers (media, education) rather than others (the army, the stock exchange). Yet the selection of all these as feminine ways and goals is a matter of chance and teaching. There is nothing ‘natural’ or genetic about it.

In some societies it is men who grow their hair long, while women shave their heads; it is men who wear perfume or makeup, and dresses (I was teased at school for wearing a ‘skirt’, i.e. a kilt), and who sit around gossiping while the women do all the hard physical labour. Nowadays ideas of the female gender are changing very fast, and women are becoming soldiers in the front line, taking on many of the roles and attributes of men.

In particular if you add ‘English’ to ‘woman’, you become even more unusual. An English woman is the heir to a Christian society, living in a certain country and fitting in with its laws and customs. Most of your ‘womanhood’ is a construct of a particular history.

For example, ‘being’ a woman in England today entitles you to equality before the law, control over your own body, the right to own property, the right to vote, the right to choose your own husband, equal respect and an equal chance of going to heaven, if you believe in such a place. Yet ‘being’ a woman in almost all civilisations in history has automatically denied a woman all these things from birth.

You speak a language that has fewer gender differences built into it than most other languages. For instance, all nouns in languages such as French or Italian have to have their gender specified, while in traditional Japanese the notion of the superiority of men and inferiority of women was built into the language.

So you are not just a woman, but a very particular and historically unusual kind of woman, who has been constructed by millions of random decisions and accidents over thousands of years. You are not an artificial robot, but you are certainly the product of huge random variations. This process occurs in every interaction you have with every living person, in every moment you spend reading, watching television, in every sentence you speak and every thought you have.

What race are you?

You say that you are an English girl, but what does that mean? You may think that it means that if you went back through your ancestors you would find only Angles and Saxons. But in fact your great-grandfather’s family was probably Viking (Danish) and a number of your ancestors were Celts (Scots and Irish). A DNA test on you would probably reveal all sorts of traces of interbreeding. We are discovering how mixed up our ancestry is.

Yet even before DNA testing, anyone who understood English history would know what a particularly mixed or mongrel race the ‘English’ are, with Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, French, Dutch mixtures up to the seventeenth century, and since then all sorts of peoples from the Empire and post-Empire. So the idea of being ‘English’ is just a constructed identity. It defines you in relation to others, the French or Germans or even Scots, for example. Yet it really means very little.

Are you British?

You might describe yourself as not only ‘English’, but also ‘British’, that is to say that on your passport and in your own feeling of yourself your nationality is British. Behind this is the idea of the nation, that is a bounded political, linguistic, cultural and territorial unit. You might assume that your idea of belonging to a nation-state is common, indeed universal, and has long been the situation of most people on earth. This can be questioned.

Many people now argue that, in most of the world, the nation-state is really an invention of the last two hundred years. There were no nations in India or Africa, or in the Near or Far East, in 1800. There were states and empires, but if you asked people ‘What nation do you belong to?’ they would not have understood your question. If you had changed the question to ‘What is your people?’ or ‘What do you call yourself?’, you would have got surprising answers. Even in France, Italy, Germany or Spain, people did not think of themselves as French, Italians, Germans or Spanish, but rather as Bretons, Gascons, Lombards, Basques, Andalusians and so on.

Most of the inhabitants of France didn’t begin to think of themselves as primarily French until after about 1870, and the same is true of all the countries of continental Europe. The change occurred even later in other regions of the world such as Eastern Europe or the Middle East. In many parts of the globe it is only just happening. When I went to the Himalayas in the late 1960s the people I worked with in the central hills referred to the Kathmandu Valley alone as ‘Nepal’. They thought they lived outside Nepal, in their own village and group and region, though on the map it was all ‘Nepal’.

Nations are invented or imagined communities, where people who do not know each other and often have little in common come to think of themselves as ‘the British’ or ‘the French’. Some say this is the result of the spread of printing and hence of newspapers and books in the national language. They also argue that the spread of an economic system which binds people together through a common currency and set of money exchanges is behind this – relatively new – way of thinking. Others see it as the result of factories and cities, or of new educational systems. Whatever the cause, it is true that nation-states have dominated the world only during the last two hundred years.

Yet, by chance, you happen to live in a somewhat older nation. Because we live on a small island that early adopted a common language, law, economy and set of political institutions, the English have been becoming a nation from as early as King Alfred in the eighth century. Five hundred years ago, if you had asked someone what nation he belonged to he might well have said ‘England’. Then the English became British when the King of Scotland also became the King of England in 1603, and Scots and English people settled in Ireland from the seventeenth century. Now they are becoming English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish again.

We fight wars and discriminate against outsiders and immigrants as if there were such things as nations, but they are just lines on a map. Nations are constructed and deconstructed. There is nothing natural or given about them. They are imagined, invented concepts and there is no British nation, no English nation, except in our imagination. Some even say that they are short-lived fictions and that the age of the nation-state will soon be over as we merge in a global world. And not before time, according to many of those who have suffered the vicious effects of nationalism, like the refugee Albert Einstein who wrote that ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’

Certainly what it means to be ‘English’ and ‘British’, as you will find, will fluctuate over your lifetime and your feelings of national identity will alter enormously. As it shifts back and forth, is aroused by war cries or lulled by talk of European integration, it is good to remember what a constructed thing it is. The same is true of those who live in most of the nations of the world, whether in Cyprus, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Vietnam or elsewhere. The pulse of national identity slows and quickens, and the very meaning of ‘being’ of a certain nation changes deeply as the world changes around a group of people.

Where do you come from?

We also invent our origins. We easily