Posts Tagged ‘history of ideas’
Rutger Bregman’s Reith lectures – an amateur commentary. Lectures 1 & 2
As I’m thinking of picking Rutger Bregman’s Humankind as my 2025 book of the year, I noticed, through browsing someone else’s youtube feed, that he has delivered this year’s Reith Lectures. I listened to the first lecture today, but due to a surfeit of Christmas cheer I was barely able to make sense of it. I also don’t really know what the Reith Lectures are supposed to be about, so let me start there.
They’re a BBC thing, named for Johnny Reith, first BBC director-general, and a Lord and a Baron and such, though whether he became the BBC’s D-G because he was a Lord and Baron, or vice-versa, I don’t want to know. Anyway the inaugural lecturer was old Bertie Russell back in ’48, so that was definitely a good start. Apparently the topic can be anything that ‘enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation’ – and presumably other nations too.
Humankind had a very international, humanist approach to society and its problems which certainly gave me something to hope for, what with Putin, Trump, Gaza and such, so I’m sure these lectures will be worth listening to. However, he warned that the first lecture would be focussing on the bad stuff – the problems before the possible solutions. So, in this lecture he talks about the survival [and thriving] of the shameless. ‘A time of monsters’, he calls it, after Antonio Gramsci. According to Bregman, focussing on the USA, we’re hearing a lot of BS from private companies as well as the giant, prestigious educational institutions about the great example they’re setting in corporate citizenship. It’s hard for me to make a judgment, as I live on a different planet, but it’s obvious that big tech, big oil and the like spend vast amounts in trying to convince us of their wonderfulness, while global warming accelerates, the rich-poor gap widens, and many basic needs, such as housing and healthcare, are left unmet.
What Bregman seems to be emphasising in this first of, I think, four talks, in which he quite deliberately discusses fascism, a term that I notice is beginning to be used almost favourably by some, is the rise of corporations answerable to nobody, and able to buy and manipulate politicians, and whole political parties, to particular ends. This is particularly evident in the US, while Europe is mostly overwhelmed and dithering, unable to choose between opposing or placating. Bregman puts the situation in neat soundbites regarding the self-serving nature of elites – ‘a meritocracy of ambition without morality, intelligence without integrity’. Those with integrity, he claims, are outnumbered, though I think it’s better to say that they’re outmanoeuvred, due to inequalities of wealth and power. There are many who are so powerless that they simply aren’t counted or considered. In any case, he finishes this lecture with a call to a moral revolution. Of course – we just can’t continue like this. So, on to the second lecture.
The abolitionist movement, something that comes up in my reading of Darwin’s life, notably his disagreements with the great US botanist Asa Gray during the 1860s and their Civil War – Darwin being a fierce abolitionist, not much interested in the nuances of north-south USA politics – that’s the major topic of Bregman’s second lecture.
I should point out here something fairly obvious – that I’m summarising, perhaps badly, these lectures entirely for my own edification. The lectures are available online and it would of course be better to watch them than to read me. Oh, that’s right, nobody reads me.
Bregman does a good line in soundbites – this is about seriousness v laziness, determination v apathy, good v evil, and so on – that’s how he starts each lecture, with a nice optimism, or at least hopefulness. Humanism, no less. So he starts the lecture with the downfall of the decadent Tzarist regime in Russia and the horror of the Bolshies, with the ideologue Lenin giving way to Stalin the nihilist terrorist. But then remember the goodies – Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, the suffragettes, Norman Borlaug and the green revolution. He then quotes Margaret Mead, very nicely:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
I’m writing this largely for my own sake, to focus on the important stuff, as I’m going through some personal difficulties at the moment, and focussing on these global issues is a help and reminder.
Bregman, though, is following up on Mead’s remark, and the individuals and groups who made a positive impact. So while the current ‘unravelling’ of humanism is going on in Gaza, in Ukraine and in the US, he takes us back to late 18th century Britain – the ‘redemption’ part of his ‘three-part sermon’ (his words), ‘misery, redemption and thankfulness’. Interestingly, he wants to focus on those individuals and ‘small groups’ aforementioned, rather than the larger forces such as the ‘scientific revolution’ or ‘democratisation’, and as I come to the end of Janet Browne’s second volume of Darwin biography, The Power of Place, I recognise Darwin as one of those individuals, who risked so much, especially at the beginning, to bring attention to our connection with all other life forms…
So the anti-slavery movement of the late 18th century was essentially British. Britain was for a time the largest slave-owning and trading nation, Liverpool being its major trading centre. This trade rose with the British Empire itself, but the backlash, according to Bregman, was sudden and surprising. Starting with a small London-based group of twelve men, the anti-slavery movement took hold throughout the island surprisingly quickly, and nowhere else, at least at the time. The whole of the US economy was based on slavery well into the 19th century, and Britain was heavily involved in the slave trade in previous centuries, but it was British pressure that ended the slave trade in Europe. Bregman describes this anti-slavery push as weird and unlikely, more or less coming out of nowhere:
In the summer of 1787, it spread up and down the country like wildfire. It was all over the newspapers and in the coffee houses there was talk of little else.
No sure how Bregman knows this, but he goes on to mention how impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, himself an apostle of equality, was by the speed and brilliance of the movement.
In Bregman’s account, it was all about those 12 black-hatted men and their meeting in that year, 1787, to initiate perhaps the world’s first human rights campaign. It’s easy for us, in retrospect, to see slavery as morally repugnant and patently unjust, and yet, clearly, this was not the general attitude in the ‘free’ USA of the 1860s, nor in the thoroughly Catholic Spanish colonies that Darwin visited, and was appalled by, in his Beagle days. Bregman emphasises the lack in Europe of anything like the anti-slavery movement in Britain. It was only British pressure, apparently, that slowly turned the tide. Or not so slowly:
The Royal Navy launched a massive campaign against the slave trade, which would go down in history as ‘the blockade of Africa’. It has been described as the most expensive international moral effort in modern history. Two thousand slave ships were seized and 200,000 enslaved people freed. Researchers have estimated that direct British efforts brought about the eradication of 80% of the global slave trade.
No wonder Chaz Darwin could consider himself at the pinnacle of the most civilised nation on the planet, tut-tutting at his less benign neighbours’ treatment of the world’s savages. But I judge from a world well into the 21st century, changed mightily by the ground-breaking work of Darwin and others.
Bregman feels that today, the west’s best and brightest are generally not driven by solutions to climate change, the next pandemic or democratic collapse, that’s to say, ethical or humanitarian issues – and my own limited experience of the young and bright chimes with this, I must say. And yet the British abolitionist movement, according to Bregman, was largely an entrepreneurial one – with William Wilberforce, something of a Johnny-come-lately, being given much of the credit. Deserving of more attention was Thomas Clarkson, the youngest founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. His involvement started at Cambridge, when he won a prize for his essay on the topic, which may have started as a vanity project, but afterwards consumed his life. Other experts claim that Clarkson was the ne plus ultra of British abolitionism.
So the late 18th century was a time of decline, according to Bregman. There was of course the French Revolution and its subsequent reign of terror, and in Britain, parliamentary drunkenness and decadence was commonplace, and George IV, who became Prince Regent in 1811, was notoriously repulsive. London had gained a reputation as the world’s sex capital – petty theft for young men and boys, prostitution for young women and girls. Public executions were a popular spectacle, and mistreatment of animals was in vogue – foreigners were horrified at the decadence.
So it was within this context that the abolitionist movement – of Quakers and other evangelicals – evolved. And according to Bregman, it was all about practising good behaviour. He ends this second talk by advertising his own project – ‘The school for moral ambition’ – something to raise us out of the mire of selfishness, incompetence, ethnic hatreds, greed, callousness, dishonesty and indifference that makes the news so hard to follow these days.
And so ends his second lecture.
Darwin’s On the origin of species, some reflections
I’m just finishing off my third reading of On the origin of species, and hopefully I’m a little wiser. It’s likely I read it the first time, in Penguin Modern Classics, just to be able to say I’d read it – but unfortunately, nobody asked. Many years, perhaps decades later, I read it again, the same copy. I remember nothing about it, or the whys and wherefores. This time I’ve read it as part of the four-volume set, edited by James Watson, including The Voyage of the Beagle, which I very much enjoyed, and The Descent of Man and The expression of the emotions in man and animals, which I look forward to with some trepidation, due to the wealth of detail he presents, and the archaic language, which I struggle with.
The thesis that Darwin presents, so threatening and generally offensive to the much more religious world of his time, is natural selection, or descent with modification. In presenting the thesis he had to provide a multitude of examples, from his own observations and experiments, to those of colleagues in the ‘naturalist’ world, many of whom – no doubt the majority – were hostile to that thesis. For those of us who aren’t naturalists or biological scientists, or inhabitants of the 19th century with its often out-dated nomenclature, this makes for difficult, though often enlightening, reading. And I’m left impressed with the detail of his analysis, the work he did not only on cirripedes (barnacles) and pigeons, but various plants, beetles, ants and bees, amongst other beasties. Reading his Beagle book, with all its descriptions of the wildlife and geology (and the ‘savages’) of South America in particular, was good preparation for this third reading – just as The Origin will surely prepare me for The Descent of Man, though I’m still feeling a bit daunted, pre-embarkation. First I’ll finish reading Janet Browne’s biography, which is a joy.
I’ve been trying to process this wealth of detail, while being well aware that it’s only a fraction of what has since been discovered. Bats, as he notes, are able to inhabit, to carve out a niche for themselves, in islands far from other lands, due to their powerful flight systems, while other mammals are scarce in such isolated places, or are more unique in their anatomy. Island birds’ wings become vestigial due to a lack of predators and an abundance of ground vegetation, but why did they develop wings in the first place? Darwin hints at what we now know – that the Earth’s activity may have connected or separated today’s islands or continents, over a period of history far greater than was previously thought. His friend Charles Lyell’s geological observations were far from accepted at the time, though Darwin himself (doubtless influenced by the first volume of Lyell’s 3-volume Principles of Geology, which accompanied him on the Beagle voyage) found shell fossils in the mountain regions of western South America. Generally speaking, many of his researches raised more questions than answers, but those questions couldn’t be resolved by the accepted creationist model. Blended inheritance, from what I’ve read, tended to be his explanation for minute differences developing over eons, but this conjecture, I think, isn’t mentioned in The Origin.
Darwin’s thoroughness, the multitude of examples he presents, are the best sign of his realisation that what he was presenting was revolutionary – ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’, as Daniel Dennett termed it. Its impact, as we know, was massive, and somewhat negative at first, but it surely helped in the acceptance of the genetic thesis in the 20th century, and led to the greater scientific grounding of biology and biochemistry. Darwin’s doggedness, his unrelenting recognition of the importance of his theme, while recognising that so much more remained to be discovered, so many questions remained unanswered, gives the work a modern feel, though that’s often undermined by what we now consider archaisms, and the sense, accurate enough, that he was a wealthy amateur aiming his work at other wealthy amateurs (more or less exclusively male), who nevertheless held the future of science in their hands. The situation is better these days – somewhat.
Reference
James Watson, ed, Darwin: the indelible stamp: four essential volumes in one, 2005