Graphic from “Shifty”, a documentary by Adam Curtis. (BBC)
My five-year old daughter, Rachel, was very excited about going to London. We got the train there from Oxford, and went to Parliament Square. She looked up at Big Ben, which she recognised from a biscuit tin, and was underwhelmed.
“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 Palaeolithic, we became what we really still are: behaviourally 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 centre of our universe; the centre shifted as soon as we took another step. It is better to say that we had no centres at all. We lived all the time on the edge of the new world of the next footfall. No doubt there were favourite camps; treasured views; happy hunting grounds; and perhaps, in some places (for instance in the great cultic centre 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, centre-less and thus centred in the place and the moment.
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 behaviourally 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 fossilised in clay tablets. We became tyrannised 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 colour haemorrhaged out of human culture. Homogeneity metastasised 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 globalisation, 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 Palaeolithic 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 centre”, 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 centre (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 centres. Athens, Rome, Florence, Paris, New York and London have some gilded names on their honours boards. But look closely at those names: they’re all edge people; often from the literal provinces, and always from the metaphorical provinces; paralysed 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 centre. Their great works either mock or ignore the conceit and obfuscation of the centrists, or are about somewhere emphatically other than the centre.
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 centre. 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 realises 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 centre will fight tooth and nail to preserve its hegemony.
It fights brutally. But not very intelligently. It is too nervous about losing power to think straight. It bureaucratises, 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 centre. If that fails, the centre 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 centre, 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 centre 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 centre. 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 centred unless we leave the centre.