“Is that London?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “That’s Big Ben. It’s part of London.”

“But where’s London?” she replied. “I want to see London.”

I tried to explain that you couldn’t see all of London at once unless you went up into space — well outside London — and looked down at it.

“London’s boring,” she declared. “Can we go home now?”

“Boring, Rachel?”, I retorted. “This is where it all happens.”

I was wrong about that.

***

About 45,000 years ago, in the Upper Paleolithic, we became what we really still are: behaviorally modern humans, with hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The whole world was ours — not just the fields, estates, countries or squats we later came to associate with ownership. We wandered. It was choreographic: our legs acted out the Bergsonian process (not progress) by which the cosmos itself unfolds. We went with the grain of things.

To survive we had to pay intense attention — a type of attention most of us now find impossible — to each patch of ground on which we trod. Every patch became the geographical center of our universe; the center shifted as soon as we took another step. It is better to say that we had no centers at all. We lived all the time on the edge of the new world of the next footfall. No doubt there were favorite camps; treasured views; happy hunting grounds; and perhaps, in some places (for instance in the great cultic center of Gobekli Tepe, in eastern Turkey) meetings of small clans for the exchange of skins, flints, ideas and genes. But the exceptional, occasional nature of these festivals just pointed up our main mode of being: itinerant, center-less and thus centered in the place and the moment.

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Iain McGilchrist: AI versus the human soul

By Iain McGilchrist

It was good then, on all metrics. That’s not surprising. We lived according to nature and our nature. That’s how we have been for most of the time (perhaps around 90%) that we have been behaviorally modern humans.

And then we changed. We call that change the Neolithic. It would be better to call it the Centripetal. We conglomerated, coagulated, congealed, corralled and were ourselves corralled. We see it best in the great cities of Mesopotamia (I note that I’ve fallen under their spell by calling them “great”): Ur, Uruk, Eridu, and the others. There we penned ourselves inside walls. The walls defined us. They still do. Instead of being simply human, with the address “The Whole World: Wherever I happen to be”, the self-descriptions became “Ur-ite”, “Uruk-ite” or “Eridu-ite”, and our addresses “Ur”, “Uruk” or “Eridu”. Chauvinism, hierarchy and disease fulminated in the heat of the deltas. Language, used before for love-making, fireside creation myths and discussing the migration paths of meat, was recruited for tax accounting. It had been alive and flowing: now it was fossilized in clay tablets. We became tyrannized by supply and demand. We put our eggs into a few baskets, and when the basket dropped, we either starved or went to war to seize the baskets of others. We became dependent on the success of fields, and looked enviously on the fields of others. The Bible has it right: the first murder took place in a field — the quintessential Neolithic place.

Variety and color hemorrhaged out of human culture. Homogeneity metastasized across the Middle East and into the rest of the world. The imperial impulse — the desire to export and enforce one’s own brand of centrism — became the dominant political force. It still is. Look at any modern high street anywhere, with its identical mobile phone shops and burger joints.

God, in the Judaeo-Christian story, was worried by what He saw in those Mesopotamian cities. His concern is shown in the tale of the Tower of Babel: the hubris of trying to build a tower reaching to the sky: the attempt at globalization, represented by the aspiration of a single, universal language. So He brought the project crashing down. Except that, as the next 6,000 years or so appear to have shown, He didn’t.

Centrism didn’t have a good start in Mesopotamia, and it has got a lot worse since.

Divorce your politics and your sociology from your ontology, and bad stuff will happen.

The ontological landscape is clear enough. Even if you don’t share my romantic view of those nobly savage Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, the world into which we were born — and the way we were born into it — was unmistakably edgy. We were conceived when the edge of our father met the edge of our mother. We were pushed over the edge of our mother to become a discrete human with a perimeter of our own. We’re always teetering on the cusp of eternity, at the mercy of a bad driver, a cancer, or an electrical storm in our heart. One day we will go over the edge of life into something else or nothing else. In the brief period between our birth and death we dutifully mark the edges of seasons.

***

All this edginess is grafted deep into our intuitions about what we are and how we should live. We can’t bear the idea that time is homogeneous, and so we carve it up with clocks, birthdays and festivals. We pay particular attention to the seams of day and night: we watch sunsets, and have special settings on our cameras to catch them. We are obsessive taxonomists, drawing distinctions between species and ideas even when the distinctions are absurd. It can lead to real evil: denigration; tribalism; nationalism; wall-building; defining ourselves not in terms of what we are, but in terms of not being something or someone else. Yet even these kinds of pathologies show how ancient and fundamental is the conviction of our own edginess and the edginess of our natural habitat.

If we’re edge-creatures, designed to walk with each step over the edge of the moment and onto another edge — enacting, I suppose, the grand journey from the dark into the light and back into the dark — you’d expect us to thrive most exuberantly on the edges.

We do. And we all, when we think seriously about it, know it. Which would you rather read: a biography entitled “A life at the center”, or “A life on the edge”? It’s obvious. The edge book wouldn’t only be more exciting; it would be more congenial, kinder, and more normative. It would tell you much more about what you were and how you should live.

It would be an account of events; of change; of creativity. It wouldn’t be about stoutly maintaining the status quo. Because creativity and change happen on edges. They don’t happen anywhere else. There are no important exceptions, in any domain. For tectonic religious change you have to abandon the traditional cult center (as did the heretic Pharoah Akhenaten, when he left Thebes and built a pristine new city, Amarna, in the middle of nowhere; and the Prophet Mohammed, when he left Mecca for Medina), or be executed outside the city walls (as did that turbulent provincial from the Galilean sticks, Jesus). For revolutionary mathematical progress you have to forget about the disciplined, syllogistic process of working it all out: the solution of that infuriating theorem will be handed to you from somewhere well outside your understanding, and you’ll then spend the rest of career proving it in terms acceptable to the journals. To start a seismic artistic revolution you might have to wander — as Salvador Dali did — in the strange no-man’s land between sleep and waking. Only there will you find the dripping clocks which reconfigured our understanding of time. For really extravagant heroism and kindness, go to the edges of life: to the hospices, the trenches, and the bombed-out rubble. The costliest forgiveness comes from those who have most to forgive; the most lavish hospitality from those who have nothing.

It often doesn’t seem like this. It is of course true that some good things happen geographically in the centers. Athens, Rome, Florence, Paris, New York and London have some gilded names on their honors boards. But look closely at those names: they’re all edge people; often from the literal provinces, and always from the metaphorical provinces; paralyzed and propelled, as I am myself, by imposter syndrome; their edginess sharpened by grinding against other edge people in the salons and garrets; looking through, below and above the great edifices; forging languages that subvert the bureaucratic language of the center. Their great works either mock or ignore the conceit and obfuscation of the centrists, or are about somewhere emphatically other than the center.

The Florentine Renaissance? It was bankrolled by those centrist bankers, the Medici. But why? Because the bankers, on high scriptural authority, thought they were poised at the edge of the lake of fire, and wanted to buy themselves out of it; and because, in the febrile millenniallist stew of Tuscany, they thought they might be at the edge of time itself.

Biology concurs. Evolution innovates outside the established silos, prompted by new challenges and opportunities. Remember the baroque sprouting of the beaks of Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos? And the shrinking of elephants and hippos on the Mediterranean islands? Challenge is good: stasis is fatal, in arteries, rivers and minds. We’re physically and mentally healthier if we’re shoved out of our comfort zones. Cold showers are good for us.

***

There is, though, a sort of revolution that does happen at the center. It’s a revolution that overturns all the comforting centrist presumptions. The provincial Galilean disrupter insisted that the persecuted are blessed, and ended up nailed to a piece of wood. His mother announced that the mighty have been put down from their seats, the rich sent empty away, the hungry filled with good things, and the humble and meek exalted. If they were right, it must be dangerous to manage a hedge fund or have a W1 postcode.

***

It is easy to misunderstand all this. I’m no shaggy atavist. We can’t be literal hunter-gatherers: there are too many of us, and not enough caribou. But we can track down ideas and try to spear them. We can learn to notice that every moment is wholly new, and that all knowing is about encounter. We can stare at skulls and acknowledge that soon we’ll be joining the great aristocracy of the dead.

I don’t denigrate or dismiss so-called “high culture”, or pretend that we’ve achieved nothing since the Neolithic. Hunter-gatherers didn’t build Chartres Cathedral or write the Bach cello suites. And I am no anarchist. I’m a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, who realizes that we’ll all get on a lot better if we drive on the left-hand side of the road and proscribe gross violations of the social contract. Institutions have their place, and their place is often, and rightly, geographically and figuratively central. But that place must always be subservient to, and exist expressly for, the edge people, not the edge people for the institutions. This should be trite. Sadly it’s radically countercultural, and the center will fight tooth and nail to preserve its hegemony.

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Raging against the Machine

By Paul Kingsnorth

It fights brutally. But not very intelligently. It is too nervous about losing power to think straight. It bureaucratizes, surveils and slanders, but has only one effective strategy: it knows the lure of the Inner Circle: it knows how many of us will compromise, to the point of misery or death, to be in the center. If that fails, the center will cold-shoulder, cancel, and kill. But it won’t ultimately succeed. It can’t. For two reasons: first, we’re constitutionally edge people, and no amount of violence can re-write a constitution. And second, everything that’s important to us is invisible to the center, and it can’t legislate for what it can’t see. My thoughts, my loves and my aspirations (as long as they’re not aspirations to the Inner Circle), are completely beyond its ken and its jurisdiction.

Despite historical appearances, the contest between the center and the edge is unequal. The edge is bound to win in the end. Babel will fall.

But for the moment the war continues to rage, and it’s dangerous. Watch out. There is one supreme example of the center. It’s the Self, and every wise human, in every age, has acknowledged that it is deadly to live there, and that human flourishing consists in turning your back on it. Etymology, for once, is illuminating. Ec-stasy means standing outside. We will not find ourselves unless we lose ourselves. We will not be properly centered unless we leave the center.

To a degree I’m sympathetic — I am, after all, a professional storyteller. Chaotic times create a desire for innovation, to “think” our way out of our problems. But some of that chaos has very deep roots. And for the first time in my life, I’ve been thinking that we are exposed to too many stories. Stories that sell counterfeit directives, tales to seduce not to court.

Ours is sometimes called a “Hermian Age” — you may remember Hermes is the Greek god of the storytellers and instant communication between people. But, friends, draw closer. We’re not addressing the fine print in Hermes’s contract. His connection is only successful soul to soul. If the soul is not roused, Hermes is simply not present. We are living in a facsimile of that rapidity. Our ears are filled with story — but the stories we need now are not new stories, but the old stories, the ones that turned up about 3,000 years ago. Myths. Over 30 years of telling and teaching folklore and writing many books on the subject have convinced me of this.

Here’s a story about a story. I’m driving a man I know, Gary, back to his house on a Plymouth council estate. He’s off drugs, off servicing men behind the bus station, out of the gang his brother runs. But only just, these things being a magnet he keeps floating towards. Sometimes he wants to talk to me about his life, sometimes not, and the change can be in a fraction of a second. Last time we did he threatened to hurl himself into the fast-moving current of a river we were passing. But today’s different, today he wants a story.

I tell him a tale about a girl leaving a village for good, and not one pair of eyes is on her wishing her well. At this he moans for a bit, rocks a bit, then makes a grab for the gear stick, tries to uproot it from the stem and bring the car off the road. I pull over and he starts pummeling his own head. “Get it out of my head,” he says. “Get the story away from me, it’s in me, I don’t like it, what have you done?” This from a young man who watches horror, porn, and plays violent video games on an almost hourly rotation.

A tiny folk tale has unearthed something in its terrible simplicity that’s gone straight to his heart. “That’s me, the girl is me, no one, no one, is looking out for me.” I hug him for a moment and tell him, I am. To get to you, they have to come through me. Whoever they may be. He cries then opens the car door. It’s January, and it’s dark. A great blast of freezing air gallops into the car. For a moment he’s lit up under a streetlamp before darting into the shadows. I will never see him again.

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How to revive mythic Britain

By Aris Roussinos

There’s no one in this whole wide world that isn’t carrying a story. You could be a president, a yoga teacher, a junkie, and you have this one completely unique thing in your pocket. Your story. And myths help us to move a mere story — an account of something bad that happened to us — from the confessional to the majestic, from persona to presence. Tristan and Isolde is still playing itself out in fraught love affairs, Beowulf is called forth in the sheer guts of trying to piece yourself together after a rough divorce.

I see it as my job — my civic duty, my privilege — to track the myth hanging onto the wingtip of the personal anecdote. When we use myth in this way, we make connections with the little I and the big We — and in doing so, shrug off a little unnecessary loneliness. In place of isolation, we now have the camaraderie of situating ourselves within a bigger story.

This is no small thing we’re doing, anchoring ourselves to the most extraordinary sources of wisdom. Myths are north stars to any culture deserving of the name — culture coming from the Latin, colere, which means to till the ground. To make a culture you dig down into a story. That story needs to be robust enough to explain a few things while also accommodating mystery. Myths hold together heaven and earth, they are a crossroads between the timeless and the timebound. Myths are the connecting tissue between us and the universe. Myths can be the words that underpin a ritual, or actually are a ritual themselves. They often explicate our origins, the gods, the visible and invisible worlds. They have images so emphatic and nourishing that humans can organize their philosophies around them. They afford dignity and purpose to the reactive experience of living. They intrigue us, they excite us, they deepen our understanding of the ordinary. They make luminous.

Myths are the original ecstasies: tales ground down by the gleaming teeth of wolves, containing the whispers of a Ghanaian grandmother; fulsome with the blue longings of the moon. Such stories shouldn’t behave or play nice. They slip the trap of allegory and pad off over the snow, leaving us baffled and delighted. When they fulfill this mystical mandate, you get what could be called a “Sacred Story”. It’s a tale that’s not transactional but transformative, that takes rupture and gives it rapture. It’s what we’ve always done. From the very beginning of things, we’ve tended to imagine in story. Thousands and thousands of years before cuneiform tablets, we stuffed wild, useful ideas into stories so they could be passed from generation to generation.

Of course, everything has its darker aspect. These days we most often associate myths with fiction — a myth is another word for a fib, a lie. For me this is a thin and inaccurate reading. This is modern advertising aggressively selling stories with the aim of possessing your imagination — a toxic mimic. For more on that kind of thing, seek out Roland Barthes, sipping his coffee and scowling at trees.

The other position — shared by cultures across continents — is that myths arise when you go walkabout. When you take off — and shake the civilized off you. If you walk long enough, a mountain may say something to you, a bird may sweep by with some gossip, you may lie down by a river and get dreamt. Humans weren’t the center of the imagining — but we were awfully good at picking up the news. It was the Earth that thought in myth, and we used to have the smarts to interpret that heavenly braille. A myth worth its salt was more than just human. It, in some tangible and mysterious way, spoke across species. A storyteller wasn’t just an entertainer, they were in touch with the ineffable.

Storytellers know that there are many types of time too — indeed, one of the powers of myths is that they pull us out of our hurried sense of time, our sense of not having enough of the stuff. There’s the kind that glows on your phone, the kind that pings and tells you that you have a Zoom call in 10 minutes. The Greeks call that “Kronos” time, and it has its function. But there’s another type — “Kairos”, which lifts us into the dimensions of a myth. The stories we tend to remember have some transformational rather than transactional at their core. As I often say, a combination of the timeless and the time-bound. Too much of the former it can feel perennial but not urgent, too much of the latter it lacks the dignity of the great themes.

Myth is about connotation not denotation; it’s about symbols not signs. People are snooty these days about metaphors, but I’d say that’s nonsense. A metaphor is a symbol that doesn’t tell you quite what it is, allowing an indefinite number of associations to flood in. It’s how poems work. It’s how we find something to nest within when we fall in love. We need wiggle room for our imagination. I could tell you that myth is a beautiful lie that tells a deeper truth; I could tell you that myth never was and always is; I could tell you myth is truth without the use of facts, but actually, no, even those diminish it, make it smaller somehow. After replying thousands of times to the question I will just settle with this: ‘Myth is a Sacred Story.’

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Donald Trump’s ascent to myth

By John Michael Greer

Some of the most sacred of those stories circle around the tale of a dying and resurrected king — a king who carried a great burden for his people and turned that burden into an extraordinary act of love. And some of us believe that the most sacred story crash-bang-walloped into the kind of time we can all register: ours. This is where myth collides with history. I’ve long held the strange idea that the arrival of Christ begins in the middle of Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus visits the Underworld, Achilles tells him: “Sooner be a slave to a poor man than King of the Underworld.” The game is up for the old order. With these words, from the greatest of Greek heroes, the world turns. Kleos — imperishable glory — is the deepest ambition of a warrior. When Achilles says it is without meaning down in Hades, something utterly new is being announced. A shield is hurled on a stone floor. A fresh consciousness. Yeshua, the God-Man is coming. The last shall be first.

So where to begin with the kind of myths I think we need? I want to bring in an idea that I’ve worked with for years as a wilderness guide. We could call it the Old Idea. That idea is that our soul — or most of it — lives outside our body. This is a big break with the Western notion of interiority as the primary poetic truth. Less of the therapy couch, “my truth,” the interior franchise of fairy tales, me, me, me.

This is not the same thing as an ad campaign for Nike telling us we can be anything we want. No. Myths tell us we are to be something quite specific.

In the simplest terms they tell us that we are profoundly connected to the stuff of Earth — storms, roosters, oaks, pomegranates — but that a great withdrawing has taken place. A divorce. It seems the price for commercial expansion is a certain kind of imaginative pulling back, a concerted withdrawing of the wider, wilder, world-soul. With this in place, less consciousness and then less conscience is required from our actions.

I’m not suggesting abandoning science and psychology — but I am sure that our senses are hinting at something bigger. We are meant to take up more spiritual space. Matthew Arnold in his poem “Dover Beach” lamented this evacuation by comparing a melancholy, roaring tide leaving the shore. But, of course, tides come back. In a pre-Copernican world, everything was interior; we viewed our gods in star formations, even our very fates were writ large and circling over our heads. We were enclosed in soul. To see a grizzly bear at the water hole was to encounter a spirit; when thunder boomed it was because our heart was broken — obviously. Everything out there was telling us about in here. Our body was the beautiful, lonesome crossroads between the two. We don’t have unique access to our soul; it rests in condor nests and gambling dens in Russian villages, slipping back into our body with kohl-streaked cheeks just seconds before we wake up. It’s not entirely human.

Far from being untruths, myths have traditionally been forefront in the shaping of human beings. They show us what to defend, what to care about, the need for pluck, sacrifice, and generosity. In the writ-largeness of their narratives we can locate our own stories, like a river finding the sea. They are a home for us. Some say they are our very bones.

***

Liturgies of the Wild is out now. Buy tickets to Martin Shaw’s upcoming UnHerd Academy talk on mythology here.

Biot was a young professor of mathematics working within the newly established scientific method. He examined local rock formations, compared them to the rocks that were claimed to have fallen from the sky, and interviewed witnesses ranging from clergy to coachmen. The new rocks were of inarguably different geological composition to the local rocks. And the locals’ stories matched up. Biot had no choice but to conclude that the elites were wrong, and that the rocks had indeed fallen from the sky.

Today we are much better informed about the threat of asteroids. Thanks to a worldwide network of astronomers and telescopes, our species can keep track of the larger asteroids that might one day collide with Earth. Smaller asteroids hit Earth all the time, but larger asteroids, of the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs or even created the Moon, are unlikely to strike us in the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, Asteroid 2024 YR4 made headlines this year. It is 90 meters wide, and therefore big enough to destroy a city, if not a planet. Asteroids of this size hit us infrequently: roughly every 2,000 years, according to NASA statistics. Those statistics derive from the work of scientists such as Melissa Brucker, principal investigator of Spacewatch at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Brucker’s team looks at roughly 1,300 near-Earth objects a year. Among them number 160 “potentially hazardous” objects, which, like Asteroid 2024 YR4, have a non-zero (though still very small) probability of hitting Earth. Brucker’s lab denotes risk with a scale going from zero to eight, where eight corresponds to “certain collisions”. For a brief time, YR4 was a three — midway in the “meriting attention by astronomers” zone. (Sometimes, we spot asteroids of this size only when they’ve gone past us — when it is too late for us to do anything.)

As Brucker and her fellow scientists gathered data, it temporarily appeared possible that the city-killer might hit Earth. The asteroid was much more likely to blast into the sea than into a city, and NASA has already demonstrated that it can deflect asteroids by hurling a probe into them. We were almost certainly safe from YR4, but the public was nonetheless riveted.

In this regard, modern humans are not unique. Biot’s youth was just about the only period of history for which we have no evidence of human preoccupation by asteroids or comets. Even the Sumerians, one of the most ancient known civilizations, left us a cuneiform clay tablet that records a meteor impact that took place 5,000 years ago. Perhaps 5,000 years from now, our descendants will dust off the VHS tape of Armageddon, a Hollywood hit of 1998. In the film, a crew led by Bruce Willis sets out to drill into the surface of an oncoming asteroid and detonate within it a nuclear bomb.

Whether they are of the past or present, asteroids reflect the neuroses of their time. To the ancients, they were portents of divine disfavor. To those of us living in the 2020s, they can articulate our other existential concerns. In Don’t Look Up, a popular Netflix release of 2022, Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio play astronomers whose thwarted efforts to prompt action are redolent of the frustrations of modern climate scientists.

Humanity’s pan-historical preoccupation with asteroids can be put down, at least partially, to the obviousness of the threat. We can all get our heads around the idea of a large rock hitting the Earth very hard. Hence our fascination with asteroids at the expense of other threats. Human attention sometimes has only a very weak correspondence with danger. It’s easier to focus on the thing that is splashing across headlines than the risks we deal with every day. This is why the fear of flying is far more common than the fear of driving, even though air travel is the safest form of transportation.

Artificial Intelligence, which leaders in education and business want us to use, gives us another example of the miscalculation of risk. In this case, the risk is less salient to human psychology than perhaps it should be. A recent report on the safety of advanced AI warns of “disinformation and manipulation of public opinion” in elections. General-purpose AI could remove most of our jobs within 10 years. Given such forecasts, it is remarkable how much attention is taken up by tariffs. AI could be used to disrupt systems that are over-reliant on it, including those critical to our society like finance — imagine the stock market panic — or healthcare. Self-improving AI, it has been theorized, could threaten the existence or the flourishing of our species.

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By Justin Smith-Ruiu

Despite these circumstances, there is little to no regulation of AI. In California, Governor Newsom vetoed a bill that would have made developers such as OpenAI legally liable for misuse of their models. In the UK, the government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) assesses the ability of new AI models to assist in the creation of weapons of mass destruction — but does not yet have the power to enforce changes to the models. As for the Trump administration, Elon Musk lent his name to an initiative warning of the risks of AI — but that was two years ago, and he has since set up a frontier lab of his own, xAI. In February, Musk’s new colleague JD Vance told world leaders that “the AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety”.

Such pronouncements seem incommensurate with the severity of the threats that AISI is screening for. AI is a hugely complex social phenomenon as well as a technical one, which means that its risks are harder to get our heads around than the threat of an oncoming asteroid. Similarly, it seems that we have learned little from the Covid pandemic, whose first lockdowns were imposed five years ago this month. The disease forecasting company Airfinity suggested in 2023 that a similar pandemic of similar magnitude could emerge in the next 10 years. Climate change makes that possibility worse; a meta-analysis published in Nature in 2022 found that 58% of infectious diseases “have been at some point aggravated by climatic hazards”.

And while the risk posed by asteroids remains static, the risk of pandemics is increasing. Last December, a group of concerned scientists warned in Science of the new phenomenon of “mirror life”. Mirror life are life-forms whose DNA and RNA has been edited such that the organisms are inverted, as if in a mirror. This change would, theoretically, make simple viruses uncatchable by the immune systems of both plants and animals. Referring to falling costs, continuing innovation and lack of regulation, the scientists said that mirror life could be developed within the next decade. A quick glance at dangerous biolabs around the world show that we can’t even predict from where mirror life might emerge. There are dozens of such labs, more than enough to give us uncomfortably high odds of an experimental virus escaping its creators.

Biot, when examining the fallen space rocks nearly 225 years ago, showed us how to scrutinize the evidence. The modern era demands a deeper level of analysis — one that goes beyond the forecasting of particular events, and addresses the root causes of the dangers created by humans. Asteroids will not kill us, but other perils pose us greater risk, especially when they do not make intuitive sense to human minds. Don’t just look up for existential threats; look around.

We assume the information our senses feed us is objective — of course we do, because what else do we have to go on? There is something almost vertiginous, then, about Ed Yong’s new book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which confronts exactly how we perceive what we perceive. “Light is just electromagnetic radiation,” he says. “Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules. It’s not obvious that we should be able to detect any of these,” let alone that they should produce the particular subjective experiences that they do.

Your experience of a beach — the turquoise sea, the warmth of the sun, the screeching gull — isn’t what the beach is. The “real” beach is giving off all sorts of stimuli, only some of which a human brain uses to form a mental representation of its surroundings. There are many, many more stimuli that we cannot sense or even imagine sensing. But other species can.

Take the seabirds on the beach, for instance. Many seabird species are finely attuned to the scent of chemicals that give away the presence of the krill they eat, meaning that far from a flat, featureless expanse, the ocean’s surface has “a secret topography” of “odorous mountains and unscented valleys… invisible to the eye but evident to the nose”. Others are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field, which guides them during migrations. And almost all birds can discriminate between “millions” of colours that humans are unable to imagine — to them, we are colourblind.

Some of the senses Yong details are delightfully surreal. A dolphin is effectively a “living medical scanner”: echolocation allows them to “perceive your lungs and skeleton… shrapnel in war veterans and foetuses in pregnant women”. Incredibly, beaked whales, which also echolocate, have “a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps” on their skulls, which might be a form of “internal antlers” that could allow them to signal to others while retaining a sleek, hydrodynamic form.

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Feminism has a biology problem

By Ellen Pasternack

What these alien senses might feel like, we can only guess. Philosophers have long grappled with this problem of subjectivity. Thomas Nagel, in his 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be A Bat?, argued that it is impossible to capture the experience of one sense by analogy to another: for example, “red is like the sound of a trumpet”. “That should be clear to anyone who has both heard a trumpet and seen red,” he wrote. It may be tempting to talk about dolphins “seeing” the inside of each others’ bodies, but in reality, it’s possible that what they experience via their sonar sense may be so different that trying to imagine it as a kind of “seeing” is as futile as describing the colour red in terms of its musical qualities.

Similarly, images meant to show us how ultraviolet looks to the many animals that can see it often render it as a kind of glowing purple. But to birds and bees, ultraviolet is an entirely different colour, one that no human eye has ever seen. These images are chasing the same impossible dream of children who try to invent a new colour by mixing their felt-tips. The only way for humans to see an entirely new colour, as different to our existing palette as red is from blue, would be to evolve a new colour receptor.

The biological term for these unique perceptual landscapes belonging to different species is Umwelten — German for “environments” — in this case meaning not just an animal’s physical environment but the environment as it appears to that animal. The Earth’s magnetic field is not part of our Umwelt as humans — it’s there, but we don’t sense it. A barnacle might exist on the same beach as us, but is oblivious to the peachy clouds in the sky as the sun sets: it lacks the capacity to perceive them. They are not part of its Umwelt.

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You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

The German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, Yong tells us, coined this usage of Umwelt in 1909, comparing an animal’s body to a house “with a number of windows… a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows”. It is totally impossible for a mind inside the house to gain information about the outside world except via its windows; from vantage points in different houses, with windows made from different materials or placed at different angles, the same view would appear totally different.

Except, of course, we cannot switch vantage points. Every conscious being is permanently and inevitably stuck inside its own lonely house, through which all experience of the outside world is filtered; all communication with other minds must pass through the windows of their own houses before it can reach them. Our windows aren’t just limited by our bodies and physical senses, but also by our culture and past experiences. I can guess but I can never know what it would be like to have been born blind instead of sighted, or male instead of female, or in Tokyo instead of in London.

I am moderately high in neuroticism: one of the “big five” personality traits that describes a person’s tendency to worry and ruminate. Speaking to (mostly male) friends who are much lower in neuroticism (women are significantly more neurotic than men, on average), I am struck by how alien both ways of thinking are to each other: to have an inner monologue that points out hundreds of possible but unlikely hazards every day, or to be someone to whom these thoughts would never occur. How many more features of our temperaments and histories must there be that give each individual an inescapably different perspective on the same experience?

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What vegan propaganda ignores

By John Lewis-Stempel

Nowhere is this more apparent than in today’s culture wars, when political opponents seem to inhabit entirely separate realities. Despite living through the same pandemic, those who think face masks in schools are a form of child abuse appear to be living on another planet from those who don’t allow their teenagers to leave the house for fear of long Covid. This is true, in a sense: we are all living in our own private Umwelten, with a slightly different view of the world filtering in through our unique windows. Perhaps the surprising thing, in a way, is that there’s so much agreement.

A century ago, we knew far less about the sensory capabilities of animals. Bat echolocation, dolphin sonar, and bird magnetoreception were all unknown — barely even guessed at — before the 20th century. These discoveries are testament to the awe-inspiring power of science, but they are also a much-needed dose of humility, reminding us of how much is out there beyond our perceptions. We hear a lot about the need to understand and defeat our “cognitive biases” — but in reality, our biases can never be escaped. They are our only window to the Immense World outside our own minds, whose full form remains permanently and tantalisingly out of our grasp.

My impression is that this is no longer true, that approach, while it still happens, is now much more fraught.

I first thought about this in 2014 when I was in a dance class and there was a woman maybe 20 years younger than me who I really liked as a dancer (great sense of humour, super expressive). We’d talked in the dressing room and one day she turned around on the dance floor and spontaneously hugged me. So one day after class I asked her if she’d like to get a drink sometime. She looked startled, so much so that, even though we exchanged numbers, I wondered if I’d done something mysteriously but definitely wrong.

I told a younger friend about it and she said: “She’s probably just not used to someone asking her in person. That usually happens on Facebook if you don’t know the person.” We went out several times, we became casual friends, but I still remembered that first strange moment. I don’t know if my friend’s take was right, but it means something that she even had that take in the first place.

Five years later, I thought about it again when I was doing a phone interview with novelist Rebecca Watson (author of Little Scratch) in connection to a story I’d written about a man cut down to size #MeToo- style (This Is Pleasure). In our complicated conversation about #MeToo was another complicated conversation about tech and how it has changed the way people relate to each other. I had told her that I hate the new normal of making an appointment to call a friend — that while I have become used to constant texting, it can feel like a false connection, a fragmentation of my experience, both of the texting friend and of my own life.

I had separately told Watson that I think part of #MeToo has been that women and girls are now so used to being approached through electronic mediums that physical approaches, especially by strangers, feel vaguely threatening even when they’re not. That didn’t sit right with her and after our Zoom call she emailed me to say that being approached on the street by a stranger was to her as fragmenting and false as getting texts is to me because “it picks at our time alone… it can feel uneasy, like a performed powerplay that disrupts and takes you out of your own head”.

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The deracination of literature

By Mary Gaitskill

I found this a puzzling analogy. A text is an abstract electronic message that you can get when you really are alone, say, in the bathroom or getting ready for sleep. It’s enough stimulation to take you slightly out of your private environment and your bodily response to it, yet it doesn’t give anything comparable; it’s disembodied. If you’re out on the street, you’re not in your private environment and, really, you shouldn’t be “in your own head” because you have to be at least minimally aware of what is happening around you. If someone comes up to you for any reason, it’s a full human experience and you have to make the effort to deal with the reality of this other person, even if the effort is to ignore them. To me this was a natural socialisation process.

I emailed her back saying all of this. I also admitted to her that when I was young, I didn’t like being approached on the street. I was quite shy, I was living on my own during the time of maximum street attention (between 16 and 21), and while at first I found it flattering, it quickly became annoying, even excruciating. I didn’t like having to smile when I didn’t mean it and if I didn’t I was criticised. It seemed like there was no right way: if he was clever, I felt stupid; if he was dumb, I felt irritated; if I was nice, he wouldn’t go away; if I was reserved, he’d (often) call me a bitch. It took me a long time to realise how vulnerable the experience is for men and when I did, that just added to the discomfort.

But it was a socialisation process and a mixed one, rather than good or bad. I had to learn to set boundaries, feel my way through whatever level of politeness or self-assertion was required. Given that I really was shy and more insecure than average — I’d left high school early and was socially awkward even in that environment, let alone a more varied adult world — this was a challenge. But at least, unlike high school, there wasn’t a group of insiders scorning me every time I made a mistake. And my lack of knowledge about social rules may have helped me because I was forced to find my own feeling responses and trust them.

As noted, this was not always fun. Mostly when men said things to me it was compliments or generic greetings. Sometimes it was a funny experience or friendly or irritating or weird; sometimes it actually was threatening.

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Louis CK won't be cancelled

By Kat Rosenfield

There was the time late at night in the Seventies when I was selling flowers on the street in Toronto outside a bar. A group of drunk boys walked past me and one of them loudly said “Rose are red violets are black, you’d look good with a cock up your back”. His friends laughed as they walked past; I said, also loudly: “And you’d look even better like that.” A mild come-back, but he turned around and came towards me, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand the way men do when they’re thinking about hitting someone. His friends stopped, watching. He said: “What was that, girl?” At first I was scared. But then I saw something in his eyes that made me know he did not want to hit. I said: “You insulted me. So I said it back.” He paused for a few seconds. “Oh,” he said. He turned and walked back to his friends.

Yes, what he said was gross, especially saying it to a teenage girl by herself on the street late at night. But under the grossness something else was present and I think we both felt it; our rightful animality.

A few years later, still in Toronto, I was walking home in the middle of the day. A man came up behind me, quite close, and began telling me in a low voice what he wanted to do to me. He didn’t just say a few nasty bits and vanish; he followed me for maybe a block, mumbling non-stop. I was scared because I was going to my apartment and, it being Canada in the Seventies, the building actually didn’t have a locked door, meaning he could follow me in. And, it being mid-day, my neighbours might all be at work. It took me a long moment to translate my fear into anger, to make my eyes and body hard, to turn and jab my finger in his face and say — but I didn’t get to say anything. As soon as I confronted him he turned on a dime and retreated. I was shaking as he walked away, but I also felt good. I’d dealt with it.

But another time, when I turned to curse someone who’d grabbed me hard between the legs, instead of backing down, the guy glared at me with a face of such hate that I retreated and quickly moved on rather than wake up in the hospital.

Many years later, when I was living in Houston in my 40s, I was at a convenience store buying an ice cream sandwich when a man looked me in the eye and said: “Lady, you scary, the way you look at people.” I was trying to figure out what to say to that — it was a majority black neighbourhood; did he think I was a creepy stealth Karen? — when an older man came up to us, put his arm around my shoulder and said: “This lady is alright! I’ve seen her come out every night, religiously, to buy herself an ice cream sandwich.” And we stood there and talked for a little bit. It was nice, even though a stranger touched me without permission; plainly, it was an asexual gesture of friendly inclusion.

Another time in Houston, I was walking home in the early evening carrying two grocery bags. It was unusual to see anyone walking in that area besides homeless people and that’s probably why a guy pulled up to me in his car — I assumed he was asking for directions. He spoke so low that I couldn’t hear him; I asked him to repeat himself twice. Realising his mistake, he looked down, sighed melancholically, and said “I thought you might want some company.” I laughed, and said something like “No thanks, I’m good.”

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The cost of sexual liberation

By Mary Harrington

There is one time I still remember over 25 years later. I wasn’t young, I was 40. The guy who approached me was handsome, about my age, with an open, honest aura. He said he never walked up to women like this but he had seen me walking around a lot and he thought I looked really interesting and wanted to talk to me. He asked for my number. I did some shameful bullshit; I asked him for his address and told him I would write to him. He was surprised but he gave me his address — he even seemed to like the idea. But I never wrote him. I intended to, but I was obsessed with someone else who didn’t like me all that much and had no bandwidth for some random person, even one who was so attractive and seemed so nice that to this day I wonder what would’ve happened if I had written to him.

I don’t recount any of this to idealise these experiences. They are just stuff that happened. But they don’t square with the vision people seem to have of such exchanges now. I hear a lot that younger people think my generation has been conditioned to accept men acting like assholes. But what I just described did the reverse. These and many other experiences taught me to identify assholes, to know when they were actually a danger and when they were not really, and to be assertive in dealing with them or fast in escaping them if need be. It perhaps taught me to be more wary than necessary most of the time. But it also taught me how to connect with people in motion, to feel their spirits in a variety of ways that were not always sexual.

Last week, I was in Moynihan Hall (Penn Station) in NY, standing in front of an exit door eating a cookie before going out on the street. An angry middle-aged woman was there too, mumbling into her phone. As I finished my cookie, she screamed at her device: “Answer the fucking phone!” I looked at her with deep sympathy, but she mistook my expression and actually bared her teeth at me. I smiled and made the WTF gesture with my arms; she scowled though with less conviction.

I said “I’m empathising with you! I agree!” In a tone of sincere amazement she said “Really?” And I said “Yes! I feel it too! Answer the fucking phone!”

With that I walked out the door, smiling. Talking to her had made my day a little bit better; I hope it did the same for her.

***

A version of this essay first appeared on Mary’s Substack, Out Of It. You can subscribe here.

Obviously, you don’t think this is the only problem in the world, and you don’t think that all of humanity’s resources and ingenuity should be dedicated to finding ways of getting lynx and wolves released into north-west Scotland; we should still worry about carbon emissions and so on. But you think some of humanity’s resources and ingenuity should be devoted to it. Say you think that 0.01% of society’s time and effort should be spent thinking about lynx, instead of none at all.

But you’re only one person, representing one 70-millionth of the British population. Shifting society’s behaviour even by that small amount means convincing thousands of people to agree with you. You would need to dedicate all of your time, all of your effort, if you are to have any chance whatsoever of moving the dial even a little bit. 

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Who really controls fertility?

By Mary Harrington

So you end up looking obsessive and weird – “why are you shouting about lynx all the time? Don’t you know there are other problems in the world?” – even if you’re completely right that the lynx-shortage is a bad thing. Scott Alexander calls this the “fallacy of reversed moderation”. The lynx-advocate might even be tempted to overstate the scale of the problem and the efficacy of the solution: “Deer overpopulation is causing children’s brains to shrink; only introducing lynx can restore normal-sized cortices to our nation’s young!”

This is, I think, part of what is going on in Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperilling the Future of the Human Race, by Shanna Swan and Stacey Colino.

In 2017, Swan, along with other scientists, published a meta-analysis, an aggregation of existing research. It said that since 1973, the average sperm count among men in Western countries had fallen by 59%, and by somewhat less in the developing world. It seems to have been a well-carried-out study, and it caused quite a stir.

The question, of course, is what caused (or is causing?) this decline. Swan and her co-authors suggested that it is, in large part, the modern chemical industry, and in particular a family of products called “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” (EDCs), which interfere with hormonal processes in the body, especially those involved with development and reproduction. One group of EDCs found in plastics, known as phthalates, are the particular enemy. They get into the water system, they’re in our takeaway containers, they’re in our cosmetics, and they’re damaging our precious bodily fluids. 

Count Down is essentially the book of that study. It expands on the problem, to talk about fertility in general, not just sperm counts; it talks about other causes, like smoking and obesity; and it offers individual advice and policy recommendations for how to ameliorate it. 

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No one has the 'right' to have a baby

By Louise Perry

All of which probably sounds pretty sensible. Swan thinks we have a growing fertility problem; she thinks she has identified the main cause; and she wants to help solve it.

But the book does not seem sensible. Because for Swan, everything causes fertility problems, not just phthalates. Sugar, beef, cycling, stress, watching TV, doing too much exercise, doing too little, eating the wrong diet; you can barely get out of bed in the morning without sabotaging your chance of having a baby. Undergoing stress and trauma will not only make you less fertile, they’ll affect your children’s fertility (should you remain capable of having them). You ought to “ban plastic from your microwave” and throw out your non-stick pans because they’re killing your sperm. I half expected her to say we ought to wear ray-shielded underpants.

And phthalates and other EDCs don’t just damage your chance of having a baby – they seem to be the cause of everything wrong in the world. Declining bird and fish populations. Abnormal development in alligators and sea snails. Reproductive failure in dolphins and grey seals. The apparent worldwide decline in insect populations is, for Swan, the fault of chemical pollution. She even suggests that the growth in intersex conditions and perhaps the rise of gender dysphoria, and even changes in gender identity, could be because of EDCs (and taking paracetamol in pregnancy!). She does say, in what feels a bit like an act of arse-covering, that it has led us to become more open-minded towards gender expression, which is a “silver lining”.

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No one has the 'right' to have a baby

By Louise Perry

What’s more, she hints, it’s causing the worldwide slowdown in human reproduction. The world’s “fertility rate” has dropped, she says; halved, in fact. And “the average twenty-something Danish woman today is less fertile than her grandmother was at thirty-five”.

And — and this is the big one — this could literally drive humans extinct. Our sperm could wither and die; we will become unable to have children. She refers several times to Children of Men and The Handmaid’s Tale, even saying that modern gestational surrogacy is a “consensual version of the [Handmaid] scenario”. (I feel like the non-consensual nature of the Handmaid scenario was fairly central to the story, whatever your opinions about surrogacy, but that’s by the bye.)

I can’t confirm all these different claims[1. Not least because there aren’t any footnotes, just a list of references for each chapter, which makes it bloody hard to check. Authors, please use footnotes, they don’t “break up the flow” or anything and it means pedants like me can have a look at your sources.], and perhaps many of them are entirely true; it is hardly as though chemical pollution hasn’t caused many environmental catastrophes in the past. Leaded petrol and asbestos are two obvious candidates that took decades to be fixed. And a few quick glances do suggest that there is something real here: EDCs seem to be implicated in the collapse of bald eagle populations, and in an apparent rise in intersex conditions, for instance.

But some parts seem on shakier ground. As it happens I’ve been speaking to entomologists recently for some other work. They thought that insect populations probably were declining (although the data was shaky), some much more than others; and they thought that pesticide pollution was probably a driver, and many pesticides are indeed EDCs. But they also mentioned climate change, eutrophication, light pollution, invasive species, habitat loss. Swan doesn’t outright say that EDCs are the main cause of insect loss (or of declining seabird populations), but she certainly implies it.

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Why bother having babies?

By Louise Perry

There’s also the fact that, as she says, smoking in pregnancy seems to be a huge cause of infertility in male offspring, but expectant mothers smoke much less now than they did even 15 years ago and that is dropping all the time. You’d hope that would go a long way to offsetting environmental influences.

And her take on the human fertility issue just seems entirely backwards to me. The Danish woman being less fertile than her grandmother sounds dreadful, until you realise that fertility is literally measured by how many children you have. The Danish study found that 20-somethings in the 2000s have fewer children than 35-year-olds in the early 1900s. But that’s because Danish women, like women almost everywhere in the world and especially the developed West, are just having fewer children and having them later. The study had nothing to say about whether these women (or their partners) were less capable of having children.

In fact, the decline in total fertility rate – that is, the number of children born per woman — has indeed been going down worldwide; from more than five in 1950 to less than 2.5 last year. But usually I see that portrayed as a good thing. As Swan acknowledges, it correlates with, and is normally said to be partly driven by, female education: the more years of schooling women get in a country, the fewer children the average woman has. 

Fertility also correlates with child mortality: as the number of children dying in childhood goes down, so does the number of children born. There’s also the fact that women still tend to have more, rather than fewer, children than they would ideally like (although I should admit that the data all comes from poorer countries, which have more children and which are less affected by sperm-count decline). That doesn’t mean there isn’t a fertility problem, but it does suggest it’s hardly time to start making comparisons with Children of Men.

Swan says that this reduction in global birth rates will lead to a “demographic crisis”, and she’s probably right: having lots of old people and fewer young, working people will make it harder to support pension schemes, raise taxes, and so on. But unless you want to keep growing the population forever, you’re going to have to go through it at some point. More important, whether it’s good or bad, I don’t think you can reasonably blame it on phthalates or EDCs. You could easily convince me that there is a growing problem of infertility in the developed world, but I doubt it’s the main cause of declining family size, or that it’s mainly caused by EDCs, given the tendency to have children later.

Most important, though, it seems bizarre to suggest that this is going to lead to human extinction. This isn’t me over-interpreting Swan: she really drums it home. Scientists suggest, she says, that fertility decline “could threaten the survival of the human race”; she quotes a researcher saying it is “possible” it could lead to “extinction of the human species”. Her last chapter ends with the phrase “we and other species could end up marching toward the brink of extinction”.

And she says that humanity should be considered an “endangered species”, by the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s definition of the term: “Of five possible criteria for what makes a species endangered, only one needs to be met; the current state of affairs for humans meets at least three.” (Those three criteria are destruction of habitat, inadequate regulatory mechanisms, and man-made factors affecting our existence.)

But there are at least 7.7 billion of us. Our population has increased by more than 10% in the 10 years since I wrote this. You can argue about whether or not we’re damaging our habitat or inadequately regulating ourselves, but surely the key criterion for whether a species is endangered must be that there aren’t very many of them.

Sure, Swan might reply, but the main reason the population is still going up is because we’re living longer. If the world fertility rate drops below replacement, then the population will decline, and eventually we’ll run out of people.

But that is, still, obviously nonsense. We’ve all learned about R in the last year. Of a virus, it’s the average number of new infections that one infected person will cause. If R>1, exponential growth and epidemic; if R<1, disease dies away. But it can apply to anything that reproduces itself: yawns, computer viruses, internet memes. Or humans.

A fertility rate of 2 would be an R of 1 (two people creating two new people), if we ignore deaths in childhood for now. So if the world’s fertility rate dropped below 2, the population of the world will indeed decline, just as the virus does.

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Why aren't women having more babies?

By Mary Harrington

But there are different strains of the virus, some of them more infectious — with a higher R — than others. They spread more easily. So the more infectious ones become more common in the population, and even if the “average” virus has an R below 1, it only takes one strain with an R above 1 to eventually become the dominant version and then cause a new wave of the epidemic.

Similarly, there are different fertility rates around the world. Even if R is below one, on average, worldwide, some countries will have higher rates of reproduction. Unless the phthalates are literally rendering us all infertile, which so far they don’t seem to be doing, then humans will continue to reproduce, and those human groups which have the most children will end up being the most common. The future is Amish!

(Plus, if we really do get a Children of Men situation, total global infertility, then efforts to create viable gametes from somatic cells will be increased pretty damn quick; they’re almost there now. We may go extinct some day, but it won’t be fertility loss that does it.)

This hyperventilating about human extinction, and rolling everything bad into a ball labelled “fertility and phthalates”, makes no sense if you think Swan (a respected epidemiologist) is trying to give a dispassionate assessment of fertility issues. But she’s not. This is a polemic. Swan thinks the world doesn’t pay enough attention to the problems of EDC-influenced fertility loss and environmental damage: so she’s upping the stakes as much as she can, making it as big a deal as she can, trying to shift the dial a little bit. The fallacy of reversed moderation declares that you can only do so by dedicating your whole being to the problem (and perhaps overstating it here and there) and looking like a crank.

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Is egg-freezing a scam?

By Zoe Strimpel

In a way, I hope she’s right, and that phthalates and other EDCs really are as big a problem as she says. If they are, then — just as we did with leaded petrol, asbestos and CFCs — it is possible that we could simply ban them, find some non-harmful replacement, and watch our alligator, dolphin and sperm populations spring back (although she does point out that the chemical industry, when some harmful chemical is banned, often replaces it with some not-banned but equally harmful equivalent). If all these problems are actually caused a huge, interwoven web of habitat loss, overfishing, air pollution, climate change, diet, and EDCs, then while getting rid of EDCs will help, we’ll still be staring at a severely depleted, damaged world with a lot of complicated problems to fix.

And in one important sense, her book is a success. I’m not going to follow all the advice in her book and replace my shower curtain or my pans — the convenience of non-stick pans seem to me to be worth it for a presumably small risk of reduced fertility (if it weren’t small, we’d have noticed it).

But I am going to turn the little dial in my head, the one labelled “Importance of endocrine-disrupting chemicals”. She has convinced me that they may be a real problem, and I hope someone more dispassionate and less polemical takes a long look at the risks (and benefits) to humanity of using them, and decides whether and where they are worth it. I’m still going to use Tupperware in the microwave, though. 

What is especially troubling about this genre, though, is its disturbing use of morality. The initial act of savagery is there to provide a moral justification for the otherwise cruel and immoral things the protagonist goes on to do. And it justifies our Schadenfreude. Or, to put it another way: morality is dangerous. It can easily exist to exonerate great harm.

Which brings me, slightly obliquely, to Jeremy Kyle and his now cancelled TV show. I absolutely share in the moral condemnation of the programme: putting poor people on trial, holding them up to public ridicule, exposing their faults and family grievances, all for the titillation of a baying audience. The psychological damage the show did to contestants was long-ignored. And I choose the word ‘contestants’ deliberately – because not only was the show all about contestation, but also because it adopted the format of a game show, recycling private misery into the financial gold of light entertainment.

But the really terrible thing about the show is how it allowed itself a veneer of moral justification. It sought ‘the truth’ – hence its routine use of lie detectors. And under the pretext of this moral justification visited great harm upon those foolish enough to submit themselves to the cruelty of Kyle’s hectoring interrogations.

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Why is punishment so popular?

By Giles Fraser

Perhaps Jeremy Kyle saw himself as performing a public good. That by exposing the truth at the centre of a dysfunctional family he was bringing about some much-needed restitution. That he was the righter of wrongs. But as I said, morality can be dangerous. Here, it quickly became an alibi for bullying.

The relationship between truth and cruelty is a long and complicated one. In their brilliant little book, On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor chart the history of kindness from its Christian and pre-Christian roots, through a radical transformation at the end of the English Civil War, and especially through the massively influential work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

“With Hobbes, selfishness and aggression were transformed from moral vices into psychological facts,” they explain.

Later with Adam Smith, selfishness was re-purposed as a moral good – a driver of the economy. By the end of the 18th century, apparently tough-minded truth-seekers understood human nature to be a form of enlightened self-interest. Kindness was just well-hidden egoism.

The historian David Wootton in his recent book on the Enlightenment has added further scholarly heft to this analysis, carefully charting the ways in which selfishness came to be justified as a basic truth of human nature. What we all really seek is Power, Pleasure and Profit, as the book’s title has it. From here on in, getting to the truth of human lives was always going to involve some kind of exposure, unmasking apparent virtues as little more than a nest of lies and self-interest. With Nietzsche, Marx and Freud – the so-called  “masters of suspicion” – human nature is again variously revealed as all about (will-to-) power, pleasure (sex) or (economic) profit.

Further reading

When did empathy become so dangerous?

By Gerard Degroot

So, by the beginning of the 19th century, as Phillips and Taylor put it:

“Kindness was steadily downgraded from a universal imperative to the prerogative of specific social constituencies: romantic poets, clergymen, charity-workers and above all women. By the end of the Victorian period, kindness had been largely feminized, ghetto-ized into a womanly sphere of feeling and behaviour where it has remained, with some notable exceptions, ever since.”

My beef with The Jeremy Kyle Show is not just with its swaggering machismo, but also – and not unconnected – with its total lack of kindness and human sympathy. It imagined working-class life as a Hobbsian war of all against all, a clash of grubby selfishnesses just waiting to be exposed by the fearless truth seeker. Kyle was never kind because kindness is a mug’s game, a sentimentalised simulacrum of benevolence that does nothing to uncover the grubby motives that are at the heart of human motivation.

And Kyle is hardly alone. With the advent of social media, we have experienced an epidemic of unkindness. The public sphere has come to be dominated by a digital swamp of Hobbesian contestation that presumes little good in our adversaries, forever seeking to expose the fundamental mischief that the other is up to.

Likewise, justified by the desire to expose, the political columnist is forever seeking to tell a grubby truth about opponents. According to a recent Nick Cohen column, for instance, The Brexit party candidate Claire Fox is “one of the most immoral people in public life”. I know her pretty well. She is clearly nothing of the sort. But Cohen just throws out this sort of nasty pseudo-exposure under the guise of a blanket assumption that he is exposing some hideous deceit. This is just flat out nastiness. As if kindness has no place in copy.

Why is the ascription of good motivations to people so often regarded as something credulous? When, for instance, do we ever seek to unmask people as being surprisingly good-natured?

I am delighted that The Jeremy Kyle Show has been axed. But there is something more to consider here than the demise of a popular daytime TV show. For so much of our public life has become dominated with Kyle-like presumptions.

Further reading

Whatever happened to TV's working-class heroes?

By Fiona Sturges

Philosophically, we have been led into a trap. On top of the basic necessities, what most of us want out of life is kindness and fellow feeling. Yet we sabotage our own desire for a kinder world because we have all been sold the idea that human beings are all at war with each other.

It is a theme that Adam Phillips regularly returns to in his writing. We all want a kinder world, but are often just too frightened by the demands that kindness makes upon us – the demand that we expose and acknowledge our need for, and dependency upon, other people. For by admitting that we have a lack that only other people are capable of meeting, we acknowledge a great vulnerability within ourselves.

We are so frightened by this vulnerability that we prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Thus we make war on the very thing that could ever make is genuinely happy: the love and kindness of others and our need for it.

So perhaps ITV should be persuaded to develop the very opposite of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Not one in which people are exposed as nasty and selfish. But one where people who pretend to be hard and unconcerned are coaxed into admitting their own need for other people, their own love and kindness. Now that would be a show worth watching.

How Jeremy Kyle undersold humanity

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