Humans have the capacity to imagine - to see that which is not there. In his book "Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It" (Oneworld), Felipe Fernández-Armesto argues that it is this startling ability that has fuelled human development and innovation through the centuries. The book takes in science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy and history, to examine imaginative leaps from the first Homo sapeins to the present day. Here, Fernández-Armesto - author of many books and currently William P. Reynolds Chair in the history department at the University of Notre Dame - discusses his arguments.
What brought you to this subject matter?
For historians, the big question is, "why do we have history at all?" Why are humans the only cultural species to experience the rapid, convulsive changes we call "history"? Traditional answers appeal to some weird and improbable force that’s external to history: providence or progress or scientific laws. I’ve given a lot of attention in past work of my own to evolution, environment, and energy as drivers of historical change. But I give the biggest, most conspicuous, and most astonishing role to ideas. We are culturally mutable creatures because we keep thinking of new ways of regulating our lives, renewing our relationships, managing our environments – in short, seeing the world differently from the way it is and labouring to re-craft it to match our ideas of how we’d like it to be.
How do you define the human imagination?
It’s the power of seeing what isn’t there. It’s not exclusively human, but it’s a faculty enormously bigger in humans than in any other species we know of. It’s compounded chiefly of two evolved faculties: first, anticipation - the ability to see what isn’t there yet - which favours survival because it enables predators and prey to guess what might be round the next bend or over the next crest. Humans have a lot of it to make up for the deficiencies of our hunting and predator-avoiding equipment – such as speed, agility, talons, and fangs – compared with rival species. The second vital ingredient is memory – the power of seeing what isn’t there any longer. Paradoxically, it helps to have a bad memory, because an experience misremembered becomes a new idea. Humans usually congratulate themselves on superior mental faculties. However, our memories are, as common experience informs us, deceitfully unreliable, and (typically) measurably worse, in some quantifiable tests, than those of non-human apes. In partial consequence, thanks to a combination of good anticipation and bad memory, we have relatively rich imaginations, which generate world-changing ideas.
How do you define ideas, and where did you draw the parameters for the ideas you examined here?
For purposes of the book, I stick to merely mental facts, and focus on thoughts with world-changing power – the new ideas that drive other changes. I don’t try to catalogue all potentially world-changing thoughts but select – and try to trace to their origins, however remote – ideas that are still around today, making and re-making our world.
You write: “Probably no more than a dozen subsequent ideas compare, in their power to change the world, with those of the six centuries or so before the death of Christ." Could you expand?
I can go further and say that the most stunning and most influential ideas pre-date the “age of sages”. The origins, for instance, of the idea that there are realities undetectable by sense-perception are untrackably ancient. To what genius did that inexplicably strange yet vastly creative notion first occur? Think, next, of infinity or eternity – ideas too huge to be products of experience. Or my favourite idea: that of nothing. It’s so elusive that as soon as you think of it, it ceases to be itself and becomes something. It’s literally beyond experience. Yet it occurred to profound thinkers among our remote ancestors. Obviously, in specifying the six centuries or so before Christ, I was thinking of the Hundred Schools of China, classical Greece, and the worlds of the Jewish and Christian scriptures – where great sages ran out the grooves in which our thinking is still largely confined. Aristotle’s an irresistible example. I tell the story of how Walter Guthrie was amazed as a boy by how “modern” the great philosopher seemed. Only in manhood did Guthrie realise that it wasn’t that Aristotle was modern, but that moderns are Aristotelian: we still broadly rely on his descriptions of how to tell truths from falsehoods.
What are the origins of modern science?
Depends what you mean, but if what we usually call the “scientific revolution” is in your mind – the early-modern paradigm-shift that put observation and experiment at the top of the elite’s scale of truth-values – I’d pick out four key influences: first, magic, because magic and science overlap; both are attempts to control (and therefore to understand) nature. So alchemy becomes chemistry, astrology astronomy, quackery medicine. Then I’d cite the changing social context of the time in Europe, when science became a suitable occupation for gentlemen no longer obliged to prioritise war. The result was a tremendous release of talent and patronage into scientific endeavour, which, previously, had been left, on the whole, to clerics and artisans. Firepower in war had a lot to do with the switch of the knightly class into peaceful and productive work, as battlefields could be largely consigned, more cheaply, to fire-armed hoi polloi. Then, crucially, the global interactions that ensued from long-range commerce and imperialism enriched learning, especially in Europe, where most world-girdling voyages began and ended. Collectors’ Wunderkammern were proto-museums in which samples and specimens from all over the world became available for study. Explorers’ reports of previously unknown environments and life-forms made scholars re-write the encyclopaedia inherited from antiquity. Finally, Christianity helped nurture science by stimulating a search for divine order in an apparently chaotic world and, more generally, by exalting the study of nature as God’s work. People prate about Galileo, without realising how his religious convictions emboldened his stance, or how important church people – especially Jesuit educators – were in spreading his ideas. Far from being a benighted influence, Catholicism has venerated science as a gift of God. As a famous priest who formerly led my university used to say, “If there’s a conflict between religion and science, there’s something wrong with the religion, or the science, or both.”
Of course, you can take a different approach and ask, “Who first privileged empiricism”? That question, I think, will lead you to early Taoists, scanning earth and sky from their sacred watchtowers. If you worship Nature, you have a very good reason for observing it accurately.
You write: “If I had my way, we would drop the word ‘Renaissance’ from our historical lexicon." Why?
It dates from a time before historians realised that classical antiquity didn’t have to be reborn: people in Europe always looked back to it with reverence, as did those in other parts of the world to supposed golden ages of their own. What we call the Renaissance in the West was, rather, one in a series of episodes – from the “5th-century Renaissance” on through the Northumbrian, Carolingian, Ottonian and subsequent Renaissances – of accelerated interest in Greek and Roman ways of doing and thinking. I think the really big new thoughts of the early modern period - what Michelet called “the discovery of the world and of man” came at least as much from looking out to the rest of the world as from looking back into Europe’s past. I might mention, for instance, the new economic thinking of the School of Salamanca, or new developments in the scope of international law, or the new understanding of sovereignty, or Las Casas’s claim of the planet-wide unity of humankind, or the challenge to Christian complacency from interactions with Brahmins, Mandarins, and their ilk.
How does racism fit into this view of history as being driven by ideas?
Racism is an excellent example of one of the themes of my book – the power of bad ideas, as well as or rather than good ones. I define racism as the doctrine that one person is superior to another solely by virtue of membership in a group identifiable by supposed or real inherited physical or moral characteristics. It’s nonsense. No objective test can justify it. But from the late 18th century, until well into the 20th, a lot of apparently respectable scientific evidence supported it, especially in serology, craniology, and what at the time was called anthropology. In some reputable opinions, the theory of evolution provided a strong theoretical framework in which racism seemed to make sense, as white people established ascendancy in the “struggle for survival.” Scientists’ obsession with classification and with ranking “higher” and “lower” forms of everything helped. Of course, there were and are lots of non-intellectual reasons for being a racist – the self-interest of dominant elites or embattled communities, the fear of alterity, the abuse of racism in defence of cultural traditions or economic interests, the imperial agenda of the white man’s burden. But Out of Our Minds is strictly about the intellectual context, without which we can’t fully understand the phenomenon, or the scale of its menace.
