Muesli and other grumbles

For years I made my own muesli.  It was easy:  to a base of rolled oats, wheat bran, and wheat germ I added raisins, sultanas, and sometimes cashews.  At the beginning, I used to sprinkle pollen on top of the mix, which had marinated in milk (even from the night before), in the belief it would help reduce hay fever, but the pollen was added all the year round.   Over the years I became more adventurous and would sometimes add chopped-up dates and blueberries on top as well.  Eventually I gave up on the pollen.

All that changed in the 1990s, when I met David Southwick, a Melbourne entrepreneur, and though him Carolyn Cresswell, another innovative business developer.  I should let her tell her own story:

“It’s amazing where life can lead you…One day I was told that I was to lose my job as the business was to be sold. I immediately thought, “You could buy this little business! You love the muesli and you make it already!” My offer of $1,000 was eventually accepted and Carman’s was born. It was a life changing decision. Finishing my degree proved challenging as I made deliveries before morning lectures and balanced the books in the library during lunch breaks.”  I was to change from making my own muesli mix to buying Carman’s.  There are many reasons for this:  but principally it was delicious, and it was easier than making the mix myself. “

At the same time, Carolyn was committed to sustainable principles.  To quote again:

“Good food shouldn’t have a harmful impact on anything.  That’s why to us sustainability is about so much more than just the environment. It’s about caring for our suppliers and employees, nourishing local communities, and serving up delicious, nutritious goodies for you.  Over the past 30 years, we’ve achieved some remarkable things on our sustainability journey. But our next chapter promises to deliver even more goodness as we support the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”  

So, where’s the grumble?  In relation to Carman’s Muesli, it has to do with buying it in the supermarket.  The process should be simple.  All I have to do is go into the local supermarket, and to the aisle that contains cereals.  There are all of Carman’s varieties, including Untoasted Muesli – Natural Bircher.  Great.  Oops, that is the only variety that doesn’t come in the 1.5 kg pack!  It used to be available, but it hasn’t been the case for some weeks now.  The ‘toasted’ alternative is there, as it always is, but never the untoasted.  Smaller packs are there, but at a higher price per 100 g.  Grumble …

It’s not just Muesli.  For years I have typed blogs, articles and other notes and letters quite happily, using Microsoft Word.  For fifteen years (after a slightly fraught swop over) I have been an enthusiastic Apple user.  I’ve kept my software up to date, and – but only when I had to – I have upgraded the system software.  In the past year I graduated to a better Mac, a MacBook, and a new iPad.  The oldest item right now is my iPhone.  All good, all working seamlessly together.  Happy.

Almost happy, but just recently, I carried out my usual software update on my lovely desktop Mac, following the prompt from Apple.  I didn’t notice there were two options, one the next in the usual progression of versions, and the other something different with a much higher identifying number.  I pressed the button to start the upgrade.  That had two consequences.  The first was, as they say, just bad luck, as the computer froze in the upgrade process, and I wasn’t able to ‘unstick’ it.  The helpful people at the Apple Store managed to get it going again, with almost nothing lost.  However, the second problem was a hidden snag!

In the process of getting my desktop computer going again, I discovered programs had been updated.  One of these was Microsoft Word (I also discovered I had some strange new software packages, which I have tried to ignore – and I no longer use PowerPoint or Excel).  I opened Word and was instantly baffled.  Where were all those nice items across the top of the screen – those columns of options usually labelled ‘Home’, ‘Insert’, ‘Draw’ and so on.  Some items were still in place as I clicked from one are to another – like format, text size, bold and italics, numbering – but others seemed to have disappeared.  I couldn’t even find the icon to save my work!!  Later I learnt that some of those options were available to the side of the text I was producing, and after a few very tense days I discovered you could get many other options back by resorting to Classic View (makes me think of old cars in one of those Concours D’Elegance …).

What was this about?  It seems, if I’m not mistaken, that the program has been ‘simplified’ for the sake of the average user.  I realised that I was being encouraged to use one of the set formats.  There was a layout for a job application, a letter to the boss, a recommendation for action by a company member, and even a layout for a recipe and a travel diary.  I couldn’t find one for the 4-page Sheldrake blog.  Why not?  Well, I slowly realised that the latest version of Word is meant to be easier to use, simplified, reducing confusing choice.  I suspect that is another way of saying ‘dumbed down’.  You can restore an alternative version with most of the options I’ve come to love, but it seems unfamiliar users want it all made simple.  Until one of the choices is ‘Peter’s 4-page blog’ format, I am back to grumbling.

People in their 80s do grumble a lot.  I am aware of that weakness.  However, I don’t need to have it pointed out to me that I leave two spaces between a full-stop and the beginning of the next sentence, littering my text with many gaps with warning lines below.  Spelling corrections – fine.  Some basic inelegant forms of expression identified.  Fine again.  Trying to push me into conformity with other users’ over use of spaces.  No way.

Then the penny dropped.  The troubles I’d been facing over Carman’s Muesli, and the challenges of the ‘new Word’ are the same.  This is all about meeting the needs of the supplier, not the shopper.  Leaving the shelves of the supermarket laden with slow selling options, cramming all the Word options onto the row of icons above the page you’re typing, this is wasting the company’s time and energy, when they should be focussing on maximising returns and reducing costs.  All that stuff I used to explore in workshops about ‘the customer is king’ has gone, past history, archaic thinking.  Now the company is king, and the shopper in the store is merely a slightly annoying element at the end of the line.  I’d been aware of how this was changing the lives of suppliers, whose product sizes, shape, and colour usage had to fit what the store wanted (alone with increasingly complex product and cost codes).  Now those at the other end of the retail cycle are expected to meet the company’s needs.

I should have seen what was happening.  A prescient warning sign had the fate of product returns.  There used to be a place in the store where you could return a faulty product and talk to a staff member over what the problem was – giving helpful feedback to pass on to the suppliers.  A few years ago, I notice that these ‘Returns’ spots were occupied by a single person and a large waste bin:  too much trouble to return any items to a supplier or fix whatever was wrong.  Now the Returns counter has just about disappeared.  Why waste money and space on that.  Much easier to simply get the checkout and shelf filling staff to take whatever is at fault and that they can throw it away.  The ‘wastage rates’ at many businesses are extraordinarily high, and only a part of that is the so-called natural wastage of years ago (stealing) as more of it has to do with helping ‘overworked’ staff.

As I was getting rather tetchy about muesli and various computer programs, I decided to eat a banana. Good, but it reminded me of another example of the impact of companies. This is the story of bananas in the Western Hemisphere. While plantains and bananas have much more to be said about them across the world, one part of that complex story begins in the 1870s in Jamaica. There a sea captain, one Lorenzo Dow Baker, bought 170 stems of bananas which he had acquired in the hope he could sell them back in his home town, Philadelphia. It was a gamble that worked, and soon he had a growing business, eventually setting up the Boston Fruit Company (which later became the United Fruit Company, and then Chiquita Brands International, one of the big two fruit companies in North America, along with Fyffes).The success of his venture relied on refrigeration, keeping the fruit from ripening while being transported.

From that small beginning, a mammoth business emerged, with two companies developing a series of monopolies that ensured they controlled the banana business, and the economies of several Central American countries. The two businesses obtained land concessions and growers, took over the subsidiaries of some shipping companies, and built and controlled the rail infrastructure. In the end they dominated the economies of several countries, actions that became the source of the phrase a ‘banana republic.’  As holdings grew, they acquired more and more control of land, and more and more control of the governments and their policies in the places where they operated.

They faced challenges. The dominant banana variety in the first half of the 20^th Century was the Gros Michel Banana, but the variety slowly succumbed to the virulent Panama disease. As a result, the two companies switched to the Cavendish banana, which was a resistant strain, and which now dominates banana growing in the West. They also used their economic strength to ensure advantageous deals in the producer countries, keeping costs, transport, wages, and other expenses low. Market power was unrelenting, and soon most other banana varieties disappeared from grocery and supermarket chains. Today most chains, like Coles and Woolworths in Australia, only sell Cavendish bananas.

In seventy years, the Cavendish reigns supreme in the region. Producers make small profits (and for many producers their economic situation is marginal), but the big two companies continue to make extremely healthy profits, aided by steady improvements in transport, refrigeration, and disease mitigation strategies. At the other end of the supply chain, shoppers find that bananas seldom go down in price, spite of all the innovations and the latest technologies adopted by the two big suppliers.

It seems a common story. Just as with the software industry, where it is Microsoft and Apple, or the very profitable supermarket industry in Australia, with Coles and Woolworths, it is neither the suppliers nor the customers that reap the benefits, but the giants in the middle. Is this the economic world of the future? Those at either end of the economic system are largely excluded from the benefits of latest technologies in such areas as production, logistics, marketing, and finance:  customers continue to pay what the large companies demand, producers sell to those same large companies at close to production costs. The riches are gathered by the intermediaries, controlling both supply and distribution.

Does this mean the staff of these intermediaries are well paid, that they, at least, get the benefits of this distorted supply chain? Well, you know that is a trick question. Companies keep staff costs low in warehouses, manufacturing, and service areas. The people who benefit most from the current system are the managers at the top of the major companies, and the investors. What they want to do is ensure continuing dominance, by excluding as much competition as possible. Just in case you haven’t realised this, it is especially easy in a small distant country like Australia, where two major supermarket chains are to be found, Coles and Woolworths, which are said to have their most successful subsidiaries ‘down under.’

Perhaps I should stop coming up with examples and draw a rather long bow. It appears we are heading towards a very asymmetrical society, in countries like the USA, Australia and several others in Europe. That society comprises a small elite of extraordinarily rich people, running and owning shares in increasingly protected major enterprises. The elite employs a significant number of staff, on far less attractive salaries, who run and support the elites various companies:  those staff are under three types of pressure, as the companies seek to keep their wages under control to replace them by automatic systems and robots, or, if absolutely necessary, outsource the work to people in low income, third world countries.  The rest of society falls into two groups:  those working in low paid service roles of one kind or another, and self-employed workers who carve out areas where they offer support and help, in roles that range from gardening, plumbing and electrical work, through to tutoring, child minding and cleaning; and those that rely on charity.

Is this the new world? We have scrapped the old form of society with its four classes – aristocrats, upper class, middle class and working class (with various grading within each sector) – for a new structure – comprising the ultra-rich, the marginally paid workforce, the self-employed and the rejected poor. At the same time, we have scrapped the sense of community, of common concerns, where integrating activities from church to clubs and societies have been replaced by mass spectacles, with participation carefully structured with each group in its place, and no sense of common interest.

Just to complete this gloomy perspective, it seems we have lost our sense of the relationship between generations. The Boomers are slowly fading from view, now resorting to spending their saved money on booze, holidays, and electronic toys for the home. The next three generations are fighting hard to survive (unless they are members of the ultra-rich). That leaves the youngest generation, where they confront yet another challenge. As they mature more rapidly than generations before, often physically mature by the time they reach their teens, they simultaneously confront social development and learning needs that continued on into their twenties. All this, of course, rests on the presumption of continuing growth.

If you stand back from this situation, you would conclude we are facing collapse or radical change, as the present model appears unsustainable. History suggests that collapse is more likely than radical change. Those at the top will hang on for as long as they can, and those at the bottom seem to have lost revolutionary fervour. If the West collapses, will the East save us? Not Russia, for certain. China perhaps. Maybe India. Born just before the Boomers, my path is clear – drink gin and tonics and red wine while I can, and watch Rome burn. Oops, I mean watch the coming chaos with interest, aware I am completely powerless to do anything to stop the disaster in front of me.

PS:  I am not running for parliament, seeking to establish a new political party, nor am I able to advocate a path out of the mess. Just another person sitting in the Coliseum, watching.

Are you resolved?

Here we are at the beginning of the year, the time when convention suggests we should begin again by wiping the slate clean and setting a new agenda.  This is justification for that strange annual activity: the proposal and implementation of New Year’s resolutions. The idea of using the start of the year as a time to make an explicit commitment to a series of future actions is an old one.  It can be dated back by at least 4,000 years to the time of the ancient Babylonians, who made promises to their gods during the Akitu festival (starting in March) to return borrowed items and pay debts for good favour.

Given the importance of making promises to the gods, we can see this approach was one which almost inevitably was going run into trouble, the kind of trouble that comes from making future promises given humanity’s persistent failing to keep them.  Despite the evidence being against them, this hopeful practice has continued as a aspiration and a target for many groups since then, evolving through a series of similar activities, including the Roman tradition of honouring Janus (the god of beginnings) right through to the time set aside for Wesleyan Christian covenant renewal services and finally continuing right up to today’s largely secular focus on establishing future targets for the coming year largely comprising self-improvement plans on a variety of topics including health, finance, and personal habits.

Well, that’s what we are advised is the case when we read the relevant article in Wikipedia which adds the somewhat salutary observation that people still continue to make New Year’s resolutions despite overwhelming evidence that success rates have and remain rather low.

Apparently, it has always been the case that these personal commitments seldom last longer than the end of January and very few resolutions are sustained to the end of the year.  I couldn’t find much about the success rate for promises made by Babylonians or Romans, but John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, recognised more success in sustaining future plans could be achieved by making these resolutions public.  He developed the institution of “Covenant Renewal Services” on New Year’s Eve/Day, involving Bible readings and hymns, influencing later watch night services. That was one way to increase commitment as there is a lot of evidence that embarrassment has a better chance of working than private commitment.   However, the level of achievement for covenant renewals hasn’t been revealed, so the success of that particular approach isn’t known.

Today the commitment to New Year resolutions has become victim to it having been made into yet another ‘business’. In the 21^st Century there are a plethora of schemes and systems to be discovered (and paid for) to ensure commitments made at the beginning of the year are recorded and monitored, even though in recent decades the focus is increasingly secular, having shifted from religious vows to individual targets concerned with personal self-improvement goals like tasks and recurrent practices related to health, career, and relationships.  It is claimed around 40-45% of people today make resolutions, but only about 8% succeed, in examinations on the success of focusing on goals like weight loss, finances, and exercises.  Those figures come from various studies reported in a variety of popular magazines including Psychology Today and Forbes.

Those figures seem rather hopeful, however.  If resolutions are personal, there is little to encourage adherence. Those Babylonians understood the importance of public commitment when they tied their future plans and commitments into the celebrations in honour of the new year, although it should be noted that for them the year began not in January but in mid-March, when the crops were planted.  During a massive 12-day religious festival known as Akitu, the Babylonians crowned a new king or reaffirmed their loyalty to the reigning king. This was the time when they also made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed. If the Babylonians kept to their word, they believed their (pagan) gods would bestow favour on them for the coming year. If not, they would fall out of the gods’ favour—a place no one wanted to be.

There is another perspective on this, one which is less about the importance of offering a goal to be achieved as evidence of commitment – and to impress a leader.  To some degree New Year’s resolutions can be seen as one part of our attempts to lead a good life.  However, a good life is concerned with a great deal more than annual promises. The idea of aspiring to live a good life has as long a history as committing to some resolutions for the coming year, but trying to live a good life is concerned with a process that is far more demanding than developing and failing to sustain annual resolutions.

I have written on the task of leading a good life over the course of many years in articles, books and talks. However, they have only been exegeses and elaborations on the thoughts of great philosophers, and especially the Ancient Greeks. Among these, Plato remains supreme.  Some 2,500 years ago he explained his view was that the good life involved achieving inner harmony by aligning your soul (your reason, spirit, and your desires or ‘appetite’) with the demands of virtuous living, using “reason to understand the importance of the virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, and at the same time mastering your desires”  Plato explained that following this path would result in leading you toward true happiness (eudaimonia) rather than focussing on the short term, pursuing fleeting physical pleasures.

Plato was advocating an approach that required self-knowledge, moral reflection, and living virtuously, with reason guiding actions towards truth, not just external rewards or sensory gratification.  As he explained it, living a good life is one in which ‘Reason governs, while allowing your Spirit to support you, and your Appetites to be satisfied appropriately, creating a life of inner balance between these three practices’.

Plato went much further and argued that Virtue is based on Knowledge, and that understanding the ‘form’ of “the Good” comes through reason which leads to wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, which are essential for well-being.  However, while Plato’s perspective rested on a carefully articulated philosophical framework, he noted that this approach wasn’t just about a complex set of ideas about ideas, but that it also requires Self-Mastery by overcoming and controlling impulses and desires to act in accordance with reason.

Plato was really demanding. True happiness he suggested comes from within, not pursuing extrinsic rewards like wealth, power or fame.  For me, one of his most telling concerns was with meaning and purpose, with the intention and the feeling you are making real progress, and you are working toward goals aligned with your values.  Nor is this just about nurturing relationships, but it also requires a commitment to personal growth through continuous learning, exploring new ideas, and developing resilience.

There is a problem in all this in the 21^st century which is that in our ‘modern’ world we are easily distracted and eminently distractable. Web sites, television programmes and other broadcasters work hard to grab our attention. The clamour of the news, the allure of the new and the babble of the world around us all conspire to pull us away from a commitment to upsurge a good life. Why not just enjoy what is happening around us?

2025 was a demanding year for many people.  Given that, it might be sensible to recognise the best thing they – and we – can do is to abandon ineffective striving, and settle for some modest goals, but not for anything more than that. If we follow that approach, then perhaps it is a good idea to have a few New Year Resolutions after all.  They are unlikely to prove onerous, especially as they will almost always be forgotten by the middle of the year:  lead a good life by some voluntary work;  make some donations to worthy causes. Sadly, that is the easy and inadequate approach we tend to adopt.

To do more than that is to take our lives and our responsibilities seriously. One determined and persistent guide is Peter Singer.  He makes it clear that doing good is essential and demanding work. In an interview with Graham Reilly in the Sydney Morning Herald back in 2015, he explained his views on living a good life which he explained is “trickier and yet simpler than you might think”. In his book The Most Good You Can Do, he suggests we haven’t really thought properly about how we can do the most good it is possible to do in this life.  He calls his approach “effective altruism”. How do you live your life in the most ethical way to make the world a better place and in a way that benefits the greatest possible number of people, most of whom you don’t know?

As an example of his approach, Singer aims to get more people to change their ideas about world poverty and what we as individuals can do to alleviate it through his proposal for pursuing effective altruism.  He describes his approach as a growing philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason, rather than emotion, to working out the most effective ways to improve the world. This is not about donations that give you a “warm glow”. This means living less selfishly, living more modestly and embracing a culture of giving to people less fortunate than you are.

“I think a lot of people do have a sense that they want to make the world a better place. And then you have to think about how I am going to do that. Not only how can I make it better but how can I do as much good as I can with the resources that I have.”. Singer says being a bystander is not an option. “It’s not an ethical option anyway. If we don’t do this, we are doing something wrong. We have an obligation to act.”

In his book, Singer writes of the ways people become effective altruists. He writes of those who deliberately choose to pursue careers that are highly paid, so that they can give more money away and help the most people they can over their lifetime.

In the chapter aptly titled ‘Giving part of yourself’, Singer discusses those effective altruists who donate one of their kidneys to save a stranger.

In his article, Graham Reilly wondered if this might be going a bit far? He responds to Singer by asking if an approach like this wasn’t putting your own life at risk? Singer ‘s response is telling.  He notes that it’s been calculated that there’s just a one in 4000 chance that a person will die as a result of giving away one kidney. But even at those odds he says he is not prepared to do it himself, although he admits it would be the right thing to do. I tell him I also prefer my kidneys to remain as a pair.

“I would do it if my daughter needed it and I think many people would,” Singer says. “But to give it to a stranger, nup. I don’t know if I can really defend that decision except to say I don’t like going into hospital and having operations. But that’s not a good reason.”

It is an important, yet challenging reservation.  Here, Singer makes a further distinction between what he advocates as a reasonable approach to helping people in need and what he is prepared to do himself.  “I see morality as not a black and white thing that either you do what’s right or you’re to be condemned for being a terrible person. I see it more like being on a grey scale and virtually everybody is on that scale.

He firmly believes everybody can and should be on this scale. The rich give more, the less rich, less. You can do a lot of good without earning a lot. You could use public transport instead of owning a car, stop buying stuff you don’t really need, stop measuring your success as a person by how big your house is. “The most solid base of self-esteem is to live an ethical life, that is a life in which one contributes to the greatest possible extent to making the world a better place.”

Crucially, he says, effective altruism needs to use the heart and the head and to be well-directed to be successful.  “Many people who give to help poor people in poor countries sponsor individual children, a practice that indicates the need to focus on a particular individual who they can get to know in some way. But it is not as likely to benefit as many people.”

Singer is a powerful advocate for the importance of living a good life and sets a standard most fail to achieve.  As he explores in his book, The Most Good You Can Do, (published by Text Publishing in 2015), there are many ways in which we can lead a good ethical life and pursue important and demanding resolutions.  It might be a good New Year’s resolution to read his book (and some of the others he has written) as a way to encourage a fuller examination of the life we lead and the value we create for others.

Obviously, not all of us have the determination to match Peter’s standard and adopt his specific approach.  At times, it is hard not to think he sets an impossible standard, but at least his comments are provocative and can help his readers rethink and reconsider, even if in only small ways.  That doesn’t mean we should abandon making a commitment to leading a good life.

At the beginning of this year, I have been thinking about doing good. As it happens, I have an excellent opportunity to explore this further. The theme for Canberra’s Philosopher’s Cafe in 2026 is identity. In the two groups that meet over the year, we take part in a series of interesting discussions but ones without real consequences, sometimes examining issues that could have real implications for the way we live, even suggesting possible resolutions.  However, our focus is on ideas, philosophical topics to consider as the year progresses.  They are rewarding, sometimes even provocative, but we could do more.

Given this, could the two groups in 2026 ask ‘How can we, individually or together, take our examination of the philosophy of identity further, to be more than academic, but instead to help each one of us develop insights and practices that will have a real impact on our lives?’  Should we do more than this?   Perhaps we could shape our discussions to include adopting Plato’s approach where “Reason governs, while allowing your Spirit to support you, and your Appetites to be satisfied appropriately, creating a life of inner balance between these three practices”.

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Cruising

In an age when words take on increasingly diverse meanings, it can be challenging to make the nature of your intended topic clear.  Take the word ‘cruising’ as an interesting example. It can refer to driving slowly or repeatedly along a popular road route for fun, to see and be seen, and to socialize, a practice popular in many towns and cities.  Another meaning is that it refers to walking or driving around looking for a sexual partner, often in specific locales, and in this use, it is a term that became historically associated with gay male culture in the second half of the 20^th Century.  In my use of the term, I am taking up another common use of the term, referring to ‘ocean cruising,’ which describes taking a vacation on a large ship, and calling in at different ports for sightseeing, entertainment, and relaxation.

The ocean cruise market has grown dramatically, and in 2025, an estimated 37 million passengers enjoyed a holiday travelling by ship for a number of days.  Industry projections suggest the global cruises market revenue is expected to grow from $44 billion today to reach r around $54 billion by 2029.  There are around some 323 cruise ships currently in operation globally, managed by 51 ocean cruise lines, and a further 27 river cruise lines.  It isn’t just a growing area of business, but the ships are growing, too!  Today, on average a cruise ship can host around 3,000 passengers.  One final statistic:  it is an activity somewhat focussed on older passengers, with an average age of around 47 years old.

In practice, cruise ships are really rather large passenger ships, and they are run in a way that suggests the best way to think of them is basically as floating hotels, with a large number of hospitality staff in addition to the usual ship’s crew. Given what are often significantly high passenger numbers, ships restaurants often organize two dinner sittings per day, and besides having one or two formal dining rooms, most cruise liners also have one or more casual buffet-style eateries.  Total meal outlets on a ship can number eight to fifteen of more.

Cruising began to be a serious vacation pastime in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, but the industry experienced fluctuations in popularity over the next hundred years, almost ceasing in the 1970s and 1980s.  However, this began to change in the late 1980s with the appearance of  “megaships” built specifically for the mass cruising market.  Cruise ships appeared with such innovations as having multi-story lobby, often  with a glass elevator and one or more decks with cabins each with a private balcony.  In more years, cruise ships have been designed to maximize the range of passenger amenities including several different kinds of cuisine in the various restaurants and other meal venues, meeting spaces, cinemas and cabaret venues.  They have been described as ‘balcony-laden floating condominiums’.  It is not uncommon for the more luxurious ships to have more crew and staff than passengers.

Since the 1980s, the pace of change has been amazing.  One clear indicator is that between 1988 and 2009, the largest class cruise ships have grown a third longer from 268 to 364.7 metres, (879 feet 3inches in 1988, up to 1,196 feet 8 inches), they have doubled their widths (going from 32.2 to 65.7 metres, (105.5 feet up to 215.6 feet 7), nearly tripled the total passenger count (2,744 to 7,600), and more than tripled in volume (going from 73,000 to 248,000 gross tons).  In addition they have changed from offering  a single deck with verandas to all decks having cabins with verandas.  However, to offer a sense of perspective it remains the case that hotels still dominate, with the total number of cabins on all of the world’s cruise ships amounting to less than 2% of the world’s hotel rooms.

Cruise ships are organized much like floating hotels, with the numbers of hospitality staff equal to exceeding those for the ship’s crew.  They’re needed, as most cruise ships offer a wide variety of facilities, including:

• Buffet restaurants
• Card room
• Casino – Only open when the ship is at sea to avoid conflict with local laws
• Childcare facilities
• Cinema, and/or theatre with Broadway-style shows
• Fitness centre
• Hot tubs
• Indoor and/or outdoor swimming pool with water slides
• Library
• Lounges, often including an ‘Observation lounge’
• Indoor activities including karaoke, ping pong and pool tables
• Shops – usually only open when the ship is at sea to avoid merchandising licensing and local taxes
• Spa
• Teen lounges

Some of the huge ships travelling on the oceans today can also include such features as bowling alleys, ice skating rinks, rock climbing walls, sky-diving simulators, miniature golf courses, video arcades, ziplines, surfing simulators, water slides, basketball courts, tennis courts, ropes obstacle courses, and even roller coasters.  They are floating cities!

Most cruise ships sail the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, but some travel to other areas including the Arctic and Antarctic oceans (pack-ice free areas, of course), the South Pacific, the Baltic Sea and New England, among others.  There are also ‘Expedition ‘cruise lines, which usually operate small ships, and visit certain more specialized destinations such as ports in the Arctic and Antarctica, or the Galapagos Islands.

The Caribbean region is one of the largest cruising areas in the world, responsible for over $2 billion in direct revenue to the Caribbean islands in 2012, employing over 45,000 locals.  An estimated 20 m cruise passengers visited the islands annually, with The Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Jamaica and other locales seeing at least 1 m visitors a year.  Alaskan cruises see more than  5 million passenger and crew visits, annually, but Europe is the world’s second-largest cruise market, only a little behind North America. Over 8 million European passengers cruised globally in 2024, with around 18 million passengers going  through EU ports in 2023.  Today, there may be 100 million people going ocean cruising annually.

All this data leaves to one side the nature of life aboard a cruise ship.  If these huge ships are often described as similar to a small – and exclusive – town, that description slips past many of the interesting interpersonal issues.  Perhaps that takes us to another meaning of the word ‘cruising’, in this case referring to spending time with a previously unknown group of people, where there are no continuing ties to be considered (even if people often create friendships).  This gives the people on a cruise ship a novel kind of freedom, both between themselves and other passengers, and between themselves and crew.

There are a number of aspects to this – including the much discussed ‘shipboard liaisons’ in popular literature.  However, a rather different perspective comes from looking at matters to do with class, status and social deference.

Social status issues on ocean liners historically involved stark class divisions (steerage vs. cabins), crew-passenger hierarchy, national/ethnic segregation among crew, and challenges for marginalized groups like female seafarers facing gender bias, all affecting access, amenities, and respect, and creating distinct social classes or segments which mirrored or even exacerbated real-world inequalities.  In many ways it might seem ocean liners offer a microcosms of society, reflecting and sometimes amplifying existing class structures, a function of ticket prices, crew demographics, and operational structures.  Together these can create distinct social worlds within the same vessel.  For many ocean liners, their business model is to identify top-of-the-line customers and, for a minimum of $10,000 a week, to pamper them with special amenities like a full-time butler, house them in an elegant suite with two-story views of sunsets over the waves, with access to a private swimming pool and the guaranteed company of  elite people like themselves.

Is that also true for cruise lines?  Some of the research suggests that there is some softening of these distinctions.  Modern cruise lines target a middle-class audience, creating contained “metaspaces” that can ameliorate existing social hierarchies, although there is always a clear distinction between the passenger experience of luxury and escapism, and the working conditions of the crew.  The workforce is often segmented by nationality and race, with workers from the “global South” (particularly the Philippines and the Caribbean) frequently occupying lower-waged, service-oriented roles like cabin cleaning.  In many ways, it is the divisions between crew from different backgrounds and in lower level positions that most clearly mirror global economic inequalities.

Another criticism of the cruise line industry is that it presents ‘Europeanised’ representations of destinations, which some have compared to ‘plantation tourism’. Some have built private destinations (like Royal Caribbean’s Labadee, Haiti, and CocoCay, Bahamas), and most vertically integrate their services, ensuring passenger spending generally stays within the company’s ecosystem rather than significantly benefiting local economies.  However, cruise operations can bring some revenue to local governments through port fees, which have been increasing in recent years, and through the commercialization of local culture to meet tourist expectations, creating a potential disconnect between the insulated onboard experience and the realities of the destinations visited.  However visits can be so well managed, using carefully chosen transport and tour guides, that the local experience is essentially curated.

All this is true, but part of the ‘luxury’ on being on a cruise is that, albeit briefly, passengers can forget about the realities of daily life.  The overall broad homogeneity of the people on the ship in terms of relative social status is reinforced, by some cruises lines, in making certain there are no obvious class-based activities or areas.  In that sense, the cruise is an ‘out of the everyday world’ experience, an escape.  Isn’t this the intention of a holiday, to get away from normal work, tensions and social issues, and indulge in a fantasy by living in a way that is unlike everyday life.  The guest on the cruise ship knows this, just as the same form of artificial living is evident by enjoying hotel and resort experiences, experiences that are costly and special and thereby quite different from and ‘outside’ normal activities.

Perhaps this is like going to the cinema or reading a book.  You are being ‘transported’ to another realm, albeit briefly, where you can enjoy a series of experiences that you know aren’t ‘real life’.  This alternative is far more expensive, of course, but people will save for that ‘once in a lifetime’ chance to escape and enjoy a life that is otherwise inaccessible.  As with reading, there is a distinction between being merely entertained and learning.

It is helpful to distinguish between two aspects of ocean cruising.  These are the experiences on the ship itself, and then the visits and tours of the places that are included on any cruise itinerary.  The ways these two aspects of the cruising experience are managed are very revealing.

Some cruises are almost exclusively focussed on the on-board experiences.  Ships offering this approach are often full of entertainment options, with cinemas, gambling, functions and even libraries to give the passengers alternative activities. Of these, there is one, the swimming pool, that is an attraction for many.  All these experiences are focussed on the same underlying purpose:  you eat, sleep and enjoy yourself on board, an approach that can easily turn into mindless relaxation.  This is the ‘indulgence’ side of ocean cruising.

The alternative focus in cruising is to call at many ports on the itinerary, and arriving at some ports there can be ten or more different onshore visits available for ship guests.  Some support that theme of indulgence, offering  a day at a spectacular beach, or dining at a special  restaurant.  Many provide opportunities to learn and explore, visiting sites in famous cities, museums, stately homes and other attractions.  Here, the explicit aim is educational, inviting those passengers going on land tours to learn, and broaden their understanding of past events and present communities.  This is the ‘learning’ side of ocean cruising.

Another perspective on cruising is to step aside from cruise lines and ships and focus instead on the varieties of passengers.  As noted at the beginning of this essay cruising can refer to “driving slowly or repeatedly along a popular road route for fun, to see and be seen, and socialize, a practice popular in many towns and cities.  Another meaning is that it refers to walking or driving around looking for a sexual partner  …  [but] another common use of the term, referring to ‘Ocean Cruising,’ which is taking a vacation on a  large ships, visiting different ports for sightseeing, entertainment, and relaxation.”  What are those cruise line passengers seeking when they go on a cruise?

The challenge sits in that word ‘cruising’.  It implies entertainment and relaxation.  Certainly, many of the passengers seem to be focussed on those two, perhaps with the addition benefit of eating and drinking without preparation or washing up!  For them, the cruise ship is one big service provider, and all they need to do is to sit back, relax and enjoy, although they may indulge in some sightseeing, taking videos or photographs to show to family and friends back home.  Key in for many people who go on cruises is to avoid housework, cooking, washing clothes and bed linen, and bedmaking.  It is like going on a beach holiday, but in this case the bedroom goes with you, along with facilities and staff to meet your needs.

For others, the cruise is an adventure, not a merely a way to relax.  They want to see new places, to go on trips to visit towns and buildings all the way from hamlets to palaces and cathedrals, and look at novel vegetation, landscapes and mountains.  Not just to see, but to learn, to tour with an expert who will point out the obvious and the hidden, and who will provide a historical overview to sights on each trip.  For them, the ship is more like an elegant caravan, principally a place where they can eat and sleep.  Their moving hotel is taking them to places they really want to explore.  While they enjoy having meals prepared for them, sleeping and resting in a cabin kept clean by staff, while being able to look out of their window and see the passing scenery, they want more than the ship and its facilities .  It is possible this might be a minority of cruise passengers today, these are the people for whom it is the places they visit, rather than merely what is on the ship that is at the core of their enjoyment.  They are in a hotel that takes them to fascinating new places every day!

Brick by Brick

It must be a strange sight for a young child, to be confronted by a pile of plastic bricks, with no instructions as to what to do.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, many small children find the big and brightly coloured blocks fun to play with, and pile on top of one another.  Then they begin to fit them together and eventually find there are ways to connect wheels to their creations.  Moving toys!  Around 6 or seven years of age, they find there is another, smaller set of blocks, still interlocking and still using primary colours (although some other shades are included).  Soon, they discover they are being given bigger boxes, and each contains an assembly of component blocks with which they are able to build much larger structures, ranging from houses and commercial stores through to racing cars and familiar places, a diverse range including models to build of such places as the Eiffel Tower, Neuschwanstein Castle, and the Antarctic exploration vessel Endurance.  Of course, not all children as they grew up abandon their hobby and continue to use their Lego collection to become AFOLs, Adult Fans of Lego, thereby remaining as lifetime Lego builders (LLBs?).!

Lego first appeared in 1932, and at that time it comprised wooden toys made in the workshop of a carpenter from Billund, in Denmark.  By 1934 the founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, had named his company ‘Lego’, a name which was based on the Danish phrase leg godt (meaning ‘Play Well’).  Several years later Lego began producing plastic toys, and by 1949 it commenced a new product line, an early version of the now familiar interlocking bricks, and called them “Automatic Binding Bricks”.  They were initially manufactured from cellulose acetate, offering an enhancement of traditional stackable wooden blocks of the time.  The company adopted Christiansen’s motto, “only the best is good enough”, a comment still reinforced by the company today.  The motto was to serve as a way to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value in which he believed very strongly.   By 1951, plastic toys accounted for half of the company’s output, even though many had initially believed  plastic would never be able to replace traditional wooden toys.

Lego was first sold in Denmark in 1957, and the company expanded its sales across Europe towards the end of the 1950s, before expanding outside the European continent from the 1960s.  It was Christiansen’s son, Godtfred, who saw the immense potential in Lego bricks in becoming a system for creative play.  However, the bricks still had problems:  their locking ability was rather limited, nor were they particularly versatile.  In 1958, a new modern brick design was developed; using ABS for manufacturing, which allowed the company to make use of an attractively coloured manufacturing material five years later.   ABS, Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, is a durable, tough plastic which Lego has used since 1963 for most of its bricks.   Duplo, an alternative for younger children based on larger bricks was introduced in 1969 becoming a range of blocks whose lengths measure twice the width, height, and depth of standard Lego blocks and are aimed towards younger children.

Lego pieces of all varieties constitute a universal system. Despite variations in the design and the purposes of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces.  Bricks from 1958 still interlock with those made today, and sets for younger children are compatible with those made for teenagers.  As an aside, it turns out that six bricks with 2 × 4 studs can be combined in 915,103,765 ways.  This ‘simple’ system makes massive manufacturing demands:  when two pieces are engaged, they must fit firmly yet be easily disassembled.

Despite various mis-steps and challenges, overall the company grew and grew.  On 7 June 1968, Legoland Park opened in Billund, featuring elaborate miniature towns built entirely from Lego bricks. The three-acre (12,000 m²) theme park attracted 625,000 visitors in its first year alone. Over the next two decades, the theme park grew to more than eight times its original size and eventually attracted close to a million visitors annually. Sales of Lego sets also reached more than eighteen million units in 1968.  This pattern of growth was increased in the following year, 1969, when the Duplo system came into shops.

Designed to be used by younger children, Duplo bricks are much larger than Lego bricks, safer for young children (preventing them from eating them!), and the two systems are compatible: Lego bricks can be fitted neatly onto Duplo bricks.  Indeed, the name Duplo comes from the Latin word duplus, which translates literally as double, meaning that a Duplo brick is exactly twice the dimension of a Lego building brick (2× height by 2× width by 2× depth) so that a Duplo brick is eight times the volume of the Lego brick alternative.

Despite overall growth, like any business Lego has had its ups and downs over the years.  However, The Guardian reported that by August of this year Lego had recorded sales of £4bn and sales rose by 12%.   Their Chief Executive suggested this recent surge in growth could be the result of parents’ desire to keep children – and themselves – away from smartphones, helped by strong sales of its Botanicals and Formula One grand prix-themed sets.

CEO Christiansen said:

“We see ourselves as competing for children’s time. The most important thing is to provide relevant and exciting experiences” and has seen the company signing deals to produce toys linked to the Bluey and Pokémon cartoon series and launching the She Built That campaign to encourage girls to use Lego creatively. The company has seen success with its Botanicals range of plant-inspired building sets for adults, especially for Valentine’s Day and Easter.

Lego is clearly a global business.  Recently, sales have begun to grow in China, after a tough start to 2024, and the company expects worldwide sales to continue to rise by about 9% in the second half of the current year given the existence of “strong consumer demand”.  The company now has six factories in operation, in Denmark, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Mexico, China, Vietnam, with a further addition planned to open soon in Virginia, USA.  It uses an international business model, with several facilities focusing on molding and others on decoration and packaging.  The production process involves injecting molten plastic into molds to create bricks, with rigorous quality control checks to identify defects and ensure colour accuracy. The company has to aim for high precision; with the result their approach ensures bricks made today continue to fit with those made back in 1958.  The manufacturing process starts with plastic granules heated and injected under high pressure into molds to form bricks.  Today, Lego recycles almost all its plastic waste from manufacturing, with non-reusable plastic sold to other industries. 

The group has benefitted from its strategy of having manufacturing facilities as close to markets as possible, and also adopting a lean production approach whereby it seeks to produce only what is needed and simultaneously keeping stocks tight.  Lego has talked about taking steps such as making  some of its toy tyres from a material derived from recycled fishing nets, ropes and engine oil. The company is also introducing e-methanol, a material made from mixing renewable energy and CO₂ from biowaste, to create rigid Lego elements such as wheel axles and minifigure hands.

Actually, it is much more than that.    According to an article in Sustainability, it seems ‘Lego is Building Towards a More Sustainable Future’ (in a report by James Darley, 7 September 2024), as Lego expands its supply chain, smart choices and thinking are helping the Danish toy company meet its sustainability targets and achieve growth.  Surprisingly in a toy industry grappling with market downturns, Lego has not only maintained its position at the top of the tree but has also posted record-breaking results for the first half of 2024.  However, Darley reports the Danish toymaker’s success goes beyond profit margins. It is commitment to sustainability, particularly within its supply chain, which is setting new standards for the industry and providing a blueprint for responsible manufacturing.

James Darley writes that a key to this approach is using sustainable materials as the foundation for operational changes.  Recently Lego has made major increases in the proportion of sustainable materials it uses in its bricks. During the first half of 2024, the company reported that 30% of all the resin it purchased was certified under the mass balance principle, translating to an estimated 22% of material sourced from renewable and recycled sources.  This is a substantial improvement from 2023, when only 18% was certified mass balance, equating to 12% sustainable sources for the full year. Sources suggest that if it  continues to make similar year-on-year progress, it could reach the point where its products could be 100% sustainable within the next two decades.

Carsten Rasmussen, COO at the LEGO Group, says:

“We continue to invest in expanding our global supply chain network, maintain a strong focus on harvesting productivity and have made significant progress on our sustainability ambitions by increasing the amount of sustainable raw material used in our products.”

The company has set ambitious targets for the coming years, aiming to purchase more than half of its raw materials from sustainable sources, seeking to reduce its use of virgin fossil materials.  At the same time, a key initiative in this area is the launch of a Supplier Sustainability Programme, which mandates that suppliers set emission reduction targets by 2026 and further targets by 2028. Lego has even linked annual carbon emissions reductions to employee bonuses, creating strong incentives for its sustainability team.  While Lego seeks to focus on expanding its supply chain, they locate production and distribution facilities close to major markets.  Recent developments include opening factories in Vietnam and Virginia.

It’s sustainability initiatives are not just good for the planet, they’re also good for business. The company reported revenue growth of 13% and consumer sales growth of 14% in the first half of 2024, significantly outperforming the toy industry. Operating profit grew by 26% and net profit by 16% compared to the same period in 2023.  Niels B Christiansen, the current CEO, emphasises sustainability in the company’s strategy, achieving double-digit growth while significantly increasing sustainable materials in our products.”

Perhaps it is almost superfluous to say it, but the other strength of Lego is design, of course.  The company’s product development cycle is focussed on ensuring adherence to the Lego approach and  style.  Proposals go through a rigorous assessment process before they move to testing and production, ensuring the attractiveness of the kits isn’t compromised .  Their CEO notes “We used our solid financial foundation to further increase spending on strategic initiatives, which will support growth now and in the future to enable us to bring learning through play to even more children.”  He might have added ‘through offering compelling and engaging products to delight our customers’.

Oh, and one more comment.  My partner is a long term AFOL, and I’m a recent convert.  It offers a great range of buildings and vehicles to construct, using an astonishing range of building components.  Our local Lego store is a place we visit frequently, trying to decide which model we ‘ll build next.  Surprised  to learn we’re fans?

Barges

When I was at school, I discovered and loved Cargoes, a poem by John Masefield:

Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

(Salt-Water Poems, © 1902).

How could you not love the images.  A cargo for distant Ophir with ivory, peacocks, sandalwood, sweet white wine.  A galleon returning with diamonds, gold and other jewels – probably plundered for another ship, out there on main.  And then that lovely British coaster, dirty, carrying dirty industrial materials – and fighting its way up the English Channel.  Nostalgic, vivid, and somehow pulling off the trick of making that British coaster just as noteworthy as a quinquereme or a galleon.

The sailing ships of old were romantic and exciting., especially when they appeared in films packed with swashbuckling sailors.  There’s the Black Pearl,  the pirate ship from the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, captained by Jack Sparrow.   The Black Pearl was originally a merchant vessel named the Wicked Wench, sunk and  resurrected by Davy Jones, renamed, and with its new name became infamous for its black sails and hull.  It was a symbol of freedom for Jack Sparrow, known for being “nigh uncatchable, and a symbol for freedom on the high seas.

The Black Pearl was far more exciting than the captain of that legendary ghost ship The Flying Dutchman, who once found himself struggling to round the Cape of Good Hope during a ferocious storm.  He swore that he would succeed even if he had to sail until Judgment Day. The Devil heard his oath and took him up on it; the Flying Dutchman was condemned to stay at sea forever.  Even the Hispaniola, the ship on which Jim Hawkins sailed to Treasure Island, plays a minor part in that adventure.  In contrast to these, the Black Pearl was rather more exciting as it kept sinking and reappearing!

Against such alternatives, Masefield’s short poem provides us with a brief but vivid commentary on the history of ships, shipping, consumption, and empire.  Much had changed. If Masefield is to be believed, once ships had exotic names and sailed through idyllic climes to and from faraway destinations with strange and marvellous cargoes. However,  by the turn of the 20^th Century, dirty, polluting ships made their way through bad weather in the English Channel, with a cargo not only produced in the same country it was shipped to, but was cheap and plentiful—a cargo for the masses instead of the kings and queens of yesterday. These three snapshots offer us both the lushness of poetry, and an insight into change.

I suspect that even that British coaster is just about lost to change.  Today, if you travel by sea, one of the more familiar sights among the huge cruise liners are container ships.  Massive, slow-moving, they always seem top-heavy.  Cargo ships provide the essential underpinning for trade, and these ships can be separated into two broad categories by the goods they transport:  bulk cargo and break bulk cargo.  Bulk cargo refers to material in either liquid or granular form, and includes such goods are crude oil, grain, coal, and gravel.  Bulk cargo is usually dropped or poured into a ship’s hold.  Break-bulk cargoes, in contrast, are transported in packages, and are generally manufactured goods.

Much has changed since Masefield’s day.  Up until the 1950s, break-bulk items required manual loading, lashing, unlashing and unloading from the ship one piece at a time.  The only interesting variations prior to this time came through the development of standardized load units, which I learnt were first used in the late 18th century for shipping in England. In 1766, James Brindley, an engineer, was asked to assist in the transportation of coal, and designed the box boat “Starvationer” with 10 wooden containers, which operated between Alford and  Manchester via the Bridgewater Canal.

The idea was slow to catch on, but by the 1930s ships were used to carry the baggage of luxury passenger train customers in containers from London to Paris on flat rail cars.  In February 1931, the first container ship in the world was launched; the Autocarrier, owned by the Southern Railway, with 21 slots for containers.  Slowly the idea progressed, and the earliest recognised container ships appeared after the Second World War.  They were  converted oil tankers.  In 1951, the first purpose-built container vessels began operating in Denmark and in the USA between Seattle and Alaska.  Wikipedia records the first commercially successful container ship was the Ideal X, developed by Malcolm McLean, which on its first voyage on April 26, 1956, carried 58 metal containers between Newark, New Jersey and Houston, Texas.

It marked the beginning of a revolution in modern shipping, and from then on, progress accelerated.  By 1964, Adelaide Steamships had launched the world’s first fully cellular, purpose-built container ship.  This was the critical step in eliminating requirements for the individual hatches, holds and other storage dividers. The hull of a typical container ship is similar to an airport hangar, or a huge warehouse, which is divided into individual holding cells, using vertical guide rails. These cells are designed to hold cargo containers, typically constructed of steel, though some are made from aluminium, fiberglass or plywood.

Today, about 90% of non-bulk non-worldwide goods are transported by container, with around 50,000 container ships. Containers vary in size, carrying anything from, 1,000 to 3,000 cubic feet (28 to 85 m³) of cargo, with the result each can move up to about 64,000 pounds, (29,000 kg), at a time.  Global maritime container traffic is now around 160 Million TEUs (estimated to be more than 3 bn tons of goods).  TEU, the Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, is the standard unit of measurement used for cargo capacity in shipping, particularly for container ships and ports.  It is based on the volume of a standard 20-foot long container.

All very interesting, but my fascination isn’t with ships of old, pirate ships, British working ships or with container ships.  No, it’s with barges.

Just recently, I saw some Rhine barges.  Many of these are flat-bottomed, non-self-propelling vessels that are pulled (and can be pushed) by tugboats.  The ones I saw  were the powered versions, the flat bottomed design allowing them to deal with falling river levels.  Many of these barges are very large, far from easy to manoeuvre, and often rather slow moving.  They don’t share the immediately attractive features of many other varieties of shipping, but they are curiously hypnotic.

However, my enjoyment in looking at barges is really an exercise in nostalgia.  My childhood home was close to the Grand Union Canal.  Barges, known in those days as ‘narrowboats’ were the vehicles for  commerce on the canal from the late 1700s until the 1970s.  Initially horse-drawn, they were one of the most important ways to transport raw materials and finished goods .  It was competition from railways and the growth of  road traffic in logistics that led to the decline of traditional commercial barges in the mid-20th century, but when I was young I was just in time to see the horses disappear, and the transition to motorized and steam-powered vessels take place

That transition had begun in 1934 on the Grand Union Canal, when a company was formed to modernize the waterway, allowing the introduction of new, larger boats and modernizing locks to accommodate these wider barges, an initiative supported by the government in the hope of making the canal more competitive with railways.  There was some respite from the. decline in usage when the canal and its barges played a vital role in transporting war supplies during WWII.  Women even took on the work of operating the barges, as many men were in the armed forces.  Despite this, traffic continued to decline after the war ended.  The last regular long-distance cargo service ended in 1970. While some traffic continued into the 1980s, mainly sustained by the transport of aggregates, the rise of containerization and growth in road transport led to the commercial decline of the Grand Union Canal.

Today Britain’s canals are no longer the functional working canals of former centuries.  Instead, these water highways provide visitors and holidaymakers an opportunity to enjoy the tranquillity of the countryside, taking a barge holiday.   A few professional boatmen still live in communities on canal boats throughout Britain – gliding easily through the locks, keeping their self-decorated boats in good nick and going about their daily lives.  This is documented in Life on Britain’s Canals and Waterways  : a history of the canals of Britain and their people, (denhamhistory.online).

A part of my childhood, I wasn’t aware back then that waterways and canals had been a lifeline for British industry and agriculture for a very long time.  Indeed, canals can be traced as far back as Roman times when the Romans used canals for irrigation purposes and to connect existing waterways with one another.  Indeed, Romans built the Foss Dyke in Lincolnshire for drainage and navigation and the Caer Dyke around AD 50, shortly after the Roman invasion of Britain in 43AD by the armies of Emperor Claudius.

What did I see?  I was watching the so-called “slow” boats on the canals, which often worked twelve to fourteen hours each day, and only in some cases tied up on Sundays. On the narrow canals these boats were operated by one man and a boy, occasionally two men, and later one man and his family. Slow boats were slow in another sense, as they didn’t operate on a strict timetable and would often wait until they had a full load before starting out.  They were distinguished from from the faster, lighter so-called “fly” boats which were first introduced in Scotland in 1830 to provide and “express” service for some commodities. No, I liked the slow boats!

The narrowboat was less than 7 feet in width and could be pulled by a single horse. They were designed for the waterways,  traditionally 21 m (70ft) long, just short enough to fit in the locks, which were usually 22 m (72 ft) long.  Most carried a load of approximately 25 tons.  They were usually horse drawn up until around World War I, and the steam engines which some boats used were considered to take up too much space.  However, diesel engines began to take over boats in the 1920s, and after the Second world war, horses were hardly ever seen.  The fly boat trade tended to be concentrated in the hands of big public carriers such as Pickfords who operated large fleets of boats and employed many men and horses.  After 1840 much of this trade was lost to the railway companies, and the last company, Fellows, Morton & Clayton failed  in 1948 – though its name and livery can still to be found, rather nostalgically, on boats on the canals today.

To protect and deliver the cargo safely and as quickly as possible, the boatman captain needed to steer a barge and keep a horse moving on the towpath.   The faster he got the cargo to its destination, the quicker he got paid.  The boat captain could earn extra money if he (and/or his family) could unload the cargo as well.  A woman who lived on board the barge would be expected to steer the boat occasionally and sometimes lead the horse on the towpath.  Reformers sought to remove female and child labour from the boats,  concerned with sanitation, morality and education rather than working conditions.  The number of women working on canal boats increased during the First World War to make up the gaps in the labour force which were created by men leaving to join the armed forces.  The number of men working independently on their own account appeared to double after the first World War.  At the same time the female labour force increased by 50 percent, and the proportion of women remained high until after WWII.

For a boy, the barge and life travelling along the English canals seemed attractive (and perhaps I thought it would have meant I could avoid going to school.  Did I think about the downside – no Meccano, no Eagle comic, little free time, and cramped living quarters?  I think what attracted me was the idea of freedom, always travelling.  I never whent on a barge, not even when barge holidays began to become available, but I suspect that sense of wandering that appealed to me was part of the source of the desire to move often in my adult life.

DD60 – Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test

Sometimes I read something that comes to me from ‘out of left field’.  It’s an odd phrase, and, resorting to Wikipedia, I learnt the term was first used in the idiomatic sense of ‘from out of nowhere’ to refer to a song that unexpectedly performed well in the market.  Back in  1998, an American English professor reported that the phrase ‘out of left field’ was in use by 1953.  However, he added that it was clearly related to baseball, and according to the 2007 Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the phrase refers to a play in which the ball is thrown from the area covered by a ‘left-fielder’ to either home plate or first base, surprising the runner.

Things come out of left field when we least expect them, and the challenge we face is that our expectations can widely differ from those of others.  I might consider a lightning or meteor strike as truly amazing, something so rare as to be almost impossible.  An astronomer or climatologists might have a very different appreciation of their likelihood, and some other people might regard such activities as only to be expected when we live in troubled times, especially if they are fond of finding evidence of extra-terrestrials intervening in our world.

Marlene Zuk came to me from out of left field.  She’s an American academic, a biologist and a behavioural ecologist. I wouldn’t have known about her if I hadn’t picked up a book in the Public Library, titled Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test.  Who wouldn’t be tempted by a book with a title like that!  Once I borrowed it, I discovered from the inside cover she has had a distinctive focus on the unusual.  Given her interest in insects from a young age, when she went to university, and after majoring in English, she decided to switch to Biology.  Now an academic, she is based at the University of Minnesota.

Her approach is refreshing.  She works in a lab focused on emerging questions in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology:

“We use invertebrate systems to study the evolution of mating behaviour and secondary sexual characters in natural populations.  I and others in my lab seek to understand how natural and sexual selection pressures shape the behaviour, life history, and morphology of animals.  Currently, we are studying the conflict between sexual and natural selection in Pacific field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus, which are subject to an acoustically-orienting parasitic fly.  The fly uses the male cricket’s calling song to find a host, which means that natural selection favours reducing the same signal that sexual selection is expected to enhance.

What can a cricket do?  In some of the populations of the crickets, 50-90% of the males now exhibit a wing mutation that renders them silent, protecting them from the fly but posing a problem in mate attraction.  The mutation spread in fewer than twenty generations, remarkably rapid evolution.  How do the crickets deal with the loss of their sexual signal, and how was the trait able to spread so quickly?  This work has also led to a more general interest in rates of evolution and the role of behaviour in the establishment of novel traits.”

Interesting?  She goes on to comment that “In addition, like others who study sexual behaviour in animals, I have noticed that people like to apply what we learn to their own behaviour.  I am often contacted by journalists and other people asking questions like, ‘Is monogamy natural?’ or ‘Does homosexuality exist in non-humans?’   Clearly, she enjoys both interacting with other scientists as well as with the public on a broad range of topics.  She has written several books for a general audience about animal behaviour and evolution.

That’s not all this busy academic does.  In addition, she spends time in promoting women in science, on which she has made some very pertinent comments. In 2018, Zuk published an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, ‘There’s nothing inherent about the fact that men outnumber women in the sciences’.  The article countered recurring suggestions that women are underrepresented in scientific fields due to inherent preferences toward the humanities.  By highlighting the inextricable relationship between nature and nurture, she points out the impossibility of attributing female underrepresentation in science to any inborn cause. Citing studies based on essential scientific integrity, she argues that “until boys and girls are raised under identical circumstances one could not possibly prove any inherent female leanings towards or away from the sciences.”

Once I had read Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, I was hooked.  Helpfully, it has an overview which explains her interests in relation to five key ideas.  In these blogs I usually avoid quoting another writer at length, but I can’t put her arguments better than she does:

1. The nature-nurture controversy is a zombie idea.

“When people think about behaviour in either humans or animals, they often want to know if that behaviour is genetic or whether it’s learned. That’s especially true when headlines are full of declarations like “Our politics are in our DNA.”

“This is the old nature-nurture debate. Traits as complex as intelligence or aggression have to be affected by both genes and the environment. And yet, we keep resurrecting this notion of it being nature or nurture. The nature-nurture controversy has become a zombie idea that keeps springing back to life but deserves to die once and for all.  The problem is that if people genuinely believe that, for example, men will always grow up with dominating tendencies because it’s in their genes, then interventions to prevent aggression are worthless. In reality, it’s the interplay, the entanglement, between genes and environment that’s important.”  …

2. Having a small brain doesn’t mean you are dumb.

“Many people have tried connecting brain size and intelligence, with the assumption that a big brain is a prerequisite for complex or flexible behaviour. But few have drawn this comparison out to its logical conclusion: are there animals that are so tiny that they are almost too stupid to live or do complicated tasks?”

“To figure this out, a scientist named William Eberhard studied extremely small spiders (including one kind that weighs less than a milligram) or about as much as an inch of sewing thread. Yet the spiders still produce orb webs, the silky wheel that entraps their even tinier prey. Eberhard measured whether the difficult process of weaving and adjusting a web was more of a challenge to the minuscule spiders than to three other kinds of spiders that weighed anywhere from 10 – 10,000 times more. The small spiders are just as capable as larger ones.”

3. Dogs are not exceptional.

“Dr. Stephen Lea is a brave man. An emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in England, he published a paper with Britta Osthaus titled, “In what sense are dogs special?” The conclusion was that they aren’t.  The reception to their work was not appreciative. “Your Dog Is Probably Dumber Than You Think, a New Study Says,” smirked a typical headline from Time magazine. Lea tried to pacify the dog people in an interview by saying, “Dog cognition may not be exceptional, but dogs are certainly exceptional cognitive research subjects.” No one seemed placated.  “All nervous systems, and all brains, are success stories.”  The study didn’t show that dogs were stupid. It asked whether they were smarter than you would expect.”

“To answer this, Lea and Osthaus picked three groups for comparison. First, they looked at other species that are related to dogs evolutionarily—members of the group Carnivora, meaning meat-eaters, including African wild dogs and cats. Then, they considered dogs as social hunters, alongside dolphins and chimpanzees. Finally, they examined horses and domestic pigeons, both of which are domesticated like dogs and which share characteristics like being subject to training. The result was that dogs do well at discriminating complex visual patterns, like telling human faces apart, but so do chimps and pigeons. Dogs are good at smells, but they are bested by pigs, which can even distinguish between the odours of familiar and unfamiliar people. Dogs are not especially skilled at what Lea and Osthaus term “physical cognition”—recognizing the consequences of manipulating objects like strings attached to food. Despite the heartwarming nature of movies like Homeward Bound, dogs aren’t particularly good at navigating over long distances”. …

4. 4. Animals can treat their diseases.

“Early humans used medicine and treated injuries such as fractures, but where did their knowledge come from? Do animals help themselves feel better when they are sick?

Yes. Chimpanzees in Africa eat a variety of plants, but some individuals have been seen to select the young shoots of one particular plant, stripping the stems of their bark, and chewing the bitter pith and juice. These individuals often seemed sick with diarrhea, weight loss, and a lack of energy. Researchers found that the use of the plant was associated with a drop in intestinal parasites. Chimps will also swallow entire leaves from a different plant whole (without chewing) and here the leaves had tiny hairs that seem to scrape worms from the gut and allow them to be expelled.”

“This kind of behaviour doesn’t necessarily require a sophisticated level of cognition. Animals have many ways of changing their behaviour to deal with infection, and not all of the animals that do so are those we consider “smart,” as we do apes. For instance, goats supposedly eat anything, from tin cans to laundry off the line, but they are remarkably sensitive foragers. If infected with roundworms, they will eat more of a shrub containing a chemical that fights the worms.” …

5. Animals get mentally ill too.

“Darwin thought that insanity in animals demonstrated how all living things are related, so he thought they did get mentally ill. On the other hand, some scientists think that animals can serve as models for us to understand mental illness, but don’t get the disorders themselves. Yet others think animals are only mentally ill when they are mistreated by humans.”

“I agree with Darwin, and one of the best places to see the continuity of mental disorders in humans and animals is in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD. People have noticed for many years that some characteristics of OCD are also seen in animals, particularly dogs. The disorder means doing normal behaviours—hand-washing, turning in circles before lying down—too much. In dogs, we call it CCD, Canine Compulsive Disorder, because we can’t know what dogs are or aren’t obsessing over.”

“A scientist named Elinor Karlsson and her team have identified genes that affect a dog’s risk of showing the disorder. These genes govern the way nerve cells communicate. But knowing a dog’s genetic makeup won’t tell you definitively whether or not they will exhibit the disorder. Dogs, like humans, inherit one copy of any particular gene from their mother and one copy from their father, so both can be the same or they can have one normal and one abnormal gene. Of the dogs with two normal copies, 10% have CCD anyway; of the ones with one copy of each type, 25% have it; and of the dogs with two abnormal copies, 60% show CCD, but not all of them. Knowing the dog’s genetic profile doesn’t tell you for sure whether the dog has the disorder.  This shows us two things. First, entanglement of genes and the environment because the gene doesn’t cause the disorder unless the environment favours it. Second, mental disorders can illustrate the common evolutionary roots in our brains and bodies that give rise to amazingly different behaviours.”

OK!  Have I convinced you her books are worth reading?  Here are a couple of quotes that help me make a different point:  often her writing is funny as well as informative.  On her theme that most changes are not exclusively ‘nature versus nurture’, but usually some combination ,of both, she quotes Patrick Bateson ”whole organisms survive and reproduce differentially and the winners drag their phenotypes with them”.  Well, if that seems a bit esoteric, how about another observation:  “Has a gull ever snatched a French fry from you, or made a dive at your sandwich?  Would you have been more, or less, annoyed if you found out that the bird knew exactly when you would appear and was in effect lying in wait”. This was from an English study on Lesser Black-backed Gulls.  Oh, and the researcher noted those same gulls knew at what times there would be fresh dumped garbage at waste centres.”

She also has a mischievous side.  :”Sea slugs are the rather more glamorous cousins of the shell-less molluscs you find in your garden.  Often beautifully coloured, they move sinuously through the water in oceans around the world.  Two species, called sacoglkossan sea slugs, were recently found to have an extraordinary ability:  they can decapitate themselves , and then grow a completely new body, including the heart and digestive organs, from the head alone.  The detached body does not respond in kind, and instead moves around in presumed bewilderment for several days to months before it expires, a scene that should surely be incorporated into a horror film at the earliest opportunity”. Yup, good idea?!   Weird?  No weirder than Mel Pennant’s recent murder mystery, A Murder for Miss Hortense, about a “retired nurse, avid gardener, renowned cake maker and fearless sleuth’ who lives in a quiet Birmingham suburb, and whose black West Indian) dialect is challenging, so say the least.  Zuk is like Pennant:  the subject might be different but the writing is unusually compelling.

Is she coming out of left field?  Certainly Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test presents many observations that are quite different from what I might have expected.  I’m not a biologist or a behavioural ecologist.  However, even if her observations are not quite about what I might have predicted, they aren’t surprising.  The reason why Dancing Cockatoos is such a compelling book is because it is  reassuringly sensible.  By the time I reached the end, I found myself constantly saying “of course”.  If you want to be reassured how alike we are to many members of the animal world, even to gulls seen spying on apparently available French fries, Marlene Zuk is very convincing.

DD69 – The Alchemist

There is a vast literature devoted to the business of ‘finding yourself’.  One way is to overcome some demanding tests, to confront challenges to realise your key nature.  This is the path of explorers and adventurers, people who push themselves to extremes, to achieve, but at the same time wanting to know themselves and their limits.  There are others who see the path to knowing yourself is internal, that the truth that really matters is inside you, waiting to be uncovered and understood.

I recently wrote about Ernest Shackleton, one of the many amazing people whose adventures are one of the highlights in the so-called ‘age of exploration’, that ran from the middle of the 19^th Century to the middle of the 20^th. Shackleton’s expedition in 1914-17 was intended to be the first to cross the Antarctic but it faced huge and often almost overwhelming challenges at every stage.  It began when the expedition’s ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice and eventually was crushed and sank.  After camping on moving ice floes, and unable to march across to the mainland, the explorers launched three lifeboats for Elephant Island.  Then Shackleton and five others set off in an open boat for South Georgia some 800 miles away.  As if they hadn’t faced sufficient disasters, they reached the island only having to cross it on foot to reach a whaling station.  Amazingly, some three years after the expedition began, he returned to collect the others without loss of life.

The polar regions acted as a magnet for explorers.  Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was Norwegian, who began his career as a polar explorer as first mate on a Belgian Antarctic Expedition.  From then, in 1903 to 1906, he led the first expedition to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage.  As if that were not enough, he planned to reach the south  pole in October and  became the first to reach the South Pole on 14 December 1911.  Next, he wanted to reach the North Pole, and after a first failed attempt, he began planning an aerial approach. On 12 May 1926, Amundsen and 15 other men in the airship Norge became the first to have reached the North Pole.  .

The two poles have always drawn explorers!  Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen, a Norwegian, led the team that made the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888, traversing the island on cross-country skis.  He wasn’t just an explorer  After 1896 his main scientific interest switched to oceanography, making scientific cruises, mainly in the North Atlantic, and then devoted himself primarily to the League of Nations, as its High Commissioner for Refugees from 1921-1930.  He was determined.  His crossing of Greenland was hampered by disasters, but he overcame them and later claimed a record for reaching the northernmost latitude in a North Pole expedition (1893–96).

If the Arctic and Antarctic were two key destinations for explores, they weren’t the only ones in this age of adventurers.  David Livingstone was an African explorer.  He was obsessed with finding the sources of the Nile, especially as he thought this might help him end the slave trade.  His travels through central Africa proved to be the culmination of the European geographical discovery of Africa and the colonial penetration of the sub-continent.  Livingstone was hailed in England with having “opened up” Africa, (although there was a long-established trans-regional network of trade routes, and Portuguese traders had reached the middle of the continent from both sides).  However, the near-mythical status held by David Livingstone is not without merit. He’s probably best known for more than crossing the African continent (in 1852-56), he also navigated the Zambezi river (1858–64) and sought the source of the Nile (1866-73).

It wasn’t only men, of course.  Isabella Bird left Britain in 1872 at the age of 41, first going to Australia and then Hawaii.  Next, she moved to Colorado, travelling  over 800 miles in the Rocky Mountains in 1873.  In 1878 was travelling again, to Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaya.  Nearly a decade later, in  February 1889, Bird visited India, the borders of Tibet, Iran, Kurdistan and Turkey.  A mere two years later she travelled through Baluchistan to Iran and. Armenia.  Was that the end?  No, in 1897, when she travelled up Yangtze and Han rivers in China, before she went to Morocco.  Not bad for a 67 year old!

If we consider explorers from times other than the 19^th Century, others equally famous preceded them.  Captain James Cook was known for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 to the Pacific and Southern Oceans. He completed the first recorded circumnavigation of the main islands of New Zealand and was the first known European to visit the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands. He mapped coastlines, islands and features from New Holland to Hawaii, on a scale not previously charted by Western explorers. He contacted numerous indigenous peoples and claimed various territories for Britain.

In the same way, and a little later the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition, was a United States expedition to cross the newly acquired western portion of the country.  President Jefferson had purchased the territory of Louisiana from France (for about 4 cents per acre). He needed the newly acquired land explored and mapped as well as fixing a route across the western half of the continent.  Captain Lewis and Clark followed the Missouri river westwards, overcame rapids and hostile conditions, establishing (often tense) relations with indigenous populations as he went. They arrived at the Pacific Ocean in late 1805.

Time for Australia?  The Burke and Wills expedition was organised by the Royal Society of Victoria in Australia in 1860–61. Initially comprising nineteen men led by Robert Burke, with Wills as a deputy commander, its objective was to cross of Australia from Melbourne in the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north, a distance of around 2,000 miles.   They left in winter, made slow progress, and only reached Cooper Creek at the beginning of summer, and never arrived at the northern coastline.  The return journey was equally dreadful, and when Burke and Wills reached Cooper Creek, it had been abandoned just hours earlier:  they died on or about 30 June 1861. Seven men died, and only one, John King, crossed the continent and returned alive to Melbourne.

Going back even further, Marco Polo the Venetian merchant, explorer and writer travelled through Asia along the Silk Road in the latter part of the 13^th Century, with his father and his uncle.  In an  epic journey to Asia, he explored many places along the Silk Road until he reached ‘Cathay’.  Later he went on many missions in Kublai empire and Southeast Asia, including journeys to present-day Burma, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.  He also travelled around China, living there for 17 years, and in doing so visited many places previously unknown to Europeans.

These are all examples of explorers travelling foreign, often dangerous and inhospitable regions, pushing back frontiers and discovering unfamiliar countries and civilisations.  There’s another sense of travelling, where the issue is about a journey having an internal character.  There are many such stories, and of these, one of the most famous has to be Paulo Coelho’s novel, The Alchemist.

The Alchemist concerns a shepherd boy,  Santiago, who dreams of a treasure while in a ruined church.  A Gypsy interprets his dream, telling him it’s a prophecy, and he will discover treasure at the Egyptian pyramids.  On the way, he meets Melchizedek, the ‘king of Salem’,  who tells him to sell his sheep to fund his travel to Egypt and accomplish what has become his ‘Personal Legend’.   Arriving in Africa, he is robbed, and has to work for a merchant to earn enough to continue his journey.   He joins up with an Englishman, who is searching for a famed alchemist, who can change any metal into gold.  Next he meets and falls in love with an Arabian girl, Fatima, who promises to marry him only after he completes his journey.  Frustrated, but he is beginning to learn some deep truths, that true love will not stop nor must one sacrifice one’s destiny to it.  To do so robs it of truth.

As he continues, eventually meets the wise alchemist, who teaches him to realize his ‘true self’. Together, they take a journey through the territory of warring tribes, where Santiago is forced to demonstrate his oneness with the “Soul of the World” by turning himself into dust storm  before he is allowed to proceed.  When he reaches the pyramids and begins digging, he is robbed by thieves.  They ask him what he is doing, and he explains his dream has led him to buried treasure.  After laughing, their leader relates a dream he once had about treasure under a tree at a ruined church.  On hearing this, Santiago realizes the treasure he sought was where he had his original dream all along.

The plot of The Alchemist draws on a traditional folktale.  In the Arne-Thompson-Uther Index of  folktales, this is an example of ‘Treasure at Home’:  “A man dreams that if he goes to a distant city he will find treasure on a certain bridge. Finding no treasure, he tells his dream to a man who says that he too has dreamed of treasure at certain place. He describes the place, which is the first man’s home. When the latter returns home he finds the treasure.” (no. 1645).  It’s a traditional tale, found both as a poem by the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, and also in the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, a collection of tales.  As with these other examples, this is a story on the theme of finding one’s destiny.  The advice given to Santiago that “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire so that your wish comes true” is the core of the novel’s thinking.

Ignoring for the moment the complexities in saying this, at one level it is reasonable to claim fiction and fact are different.  Fact is the material of our shared world, drawing on empirical data.  Fiction is invention, imaginative accounts that may or may not draw on some ‘facts’ to help the story along.  However, such simplicity ignores some important subtleties.  In particular, there is a category of what might be called ‘self-help’ books., and in these there is a common theme of ‘finding yourself. Kelly Nickels in her blog Wakeful Travel.com, commented on the issue and travel and finding oneself.  Her commentary begins with a quote from by Emily Mcdowell:

“Finding yourself is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. Finding yourself is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering of who you were before the world got is hands on you.”

Santiago’s story is a great example of finding yourself.  As Kelly Nickels goes on to comment, “Traveling can help you ‘find yourself’ by:

• Throwing you into the unknown, so the only known that remains is you
• Helping you realize traveling isn’t the answer, but rather a helpful ‘tool’
• Opening up new perspectives and ways of thinking
• A reminder to be grateful for what you have, adding “If we continue to externalize our search for love, we will not find lasting, satisfying love in this lifetime.”

If Coelho was writing a self-help book, a story to illustrate the importance of searching for happiness, success, or love outside of yourself, but the paradox is that you won’t find it until you internalize that search as well. You may find glimpses, but eventually all roads lead back to introspection. They lead back to yourself.

Traveling can help on this journey because until you do it, you may think that the reason you are unhappy is because you haven’t travelled enough. “Maybe if I see more of the world or move to a new city, then I’ll feel complete.” But you could talk to someone who has travelled from Nepal to Thailand and every other beautiful place you can think of, yet they still share that same restlessness.  Jim Carrey once said, “I wish everyone could get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that’s not the answer.”  I think what he was getting at is that seeking fulfillment outside of yourself will never yield peace. If you had all the toys you’ve ever wanted, accomplished every goal or dream you’ve pined after, and travelled to every country on Earth, would you be satisfied?  I  don’t think so.  Then why travel at all? Well, if you can find yourself anywhere, then you can find yourself anywhere. Might as well embrace your wanderlust! Go to Costa Rica, visit the Hobbit Holes of New Zealand, take that plane flight to South America.  However, remember Coehlo’s one important insight;  Finding yourself is internal work.

If The Alchemist isn’t entirely satisfying, there’s an army of therapists to give you more than Coehlo’s rather trite story.  Back in 2023, John Kim, wrote a blog about finding yourself.  While it is one among thousands, it does make good sense.  He begins by proposing “finding yourself is important because it is the key to living  … When you truly know yourself, you can make decisions that align with your values, passions, and purpose. It’s about understanding who you truly are, embracing your unique story, and living authentically.

Face value that seems rather simplistic, so let’s continue with his proposals.  So, what does “finding yourself” really mean?  “Your story is what makes you unique and powerful. Take the time to reflect on your life experiences, both positive and negative. What have you learned from them? How have they shaped you?   Embracing your story means accepting every part of it, even the challenging moments. By doing so, you can gain a deeper understanding of yourself and what the universe has in store for you.”

Not sure about the universe’s role in this.  However, he goes on to suggest “When you find yourself, you can live authentically, being true to who you are at your core. This means embracing your strengths, accepting your weaknesses, and showing up in the world as your genuine self. Living authentically allows you to attract people and experiences that align with your true essence.  After noting there are though patterns that can hold you back, he goes on to observe: finding yourself helps you uncover your purpose in life. By understanding your values, passions, and unique gifts, you can identify the path that brings you the most fulfillment and meaning. Your purpose gives you a sense of direction and guides your decisions, leading to a more purposeful and satisfying life.”

But he isn’t satisfied with staying as you are.  “Think about what new behaviors or thoughts can replace the old ones. This step requires conscious effort and practice. By consistently implementing these new thoughts and behaviors, you’ll start to see a shift in your life.” He adds:  “when you know who you are, you develop a strong sense of self-confidence.”

One powerful way to find yourself is by shifting your focus from yourself to others. When we constantly worry about how we are perceived, our light can feel dimmed. Instead, focus on how you want to be remembered and the impact you want to have on others. By making it about others, you’ll feel a sense of purpose and invincibility.  Finding yourself allows you to attract and cultivate meaningful relationships.

Finally he warns us “finding yourself is an ongoing process. Embrace change and growth as you navigate through life. Be open to new experiences, challenge yourself, and step out of your comfort zone.  Remember, it’s in the moments of not knowing and feeling lost that our true potential emerges.  Knowing yourself helps you make choices that align with your values and aspirations. You become more aware of what truly matters to you and can make decisions that support your personal growth and well-being. This leads to a greater sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in life.  Finding yourself is a deeply personal and unique journey.”

He finishes: “Remember, finding yourself is a continuous journey of self-discovery. It’s about exploring, learning, and evolving as you navigate through life. Embrace the process, be patient with yourself, enjoy the adventure of uncovering your true self, and know that you’re not alone. We’re all trying to find ourselves.”

I guess we are.  To be truly alive is keep questioning who you are and what you are seeking.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

There is little more fascinating than discovering and meeting with people from another culture, especially if that culture is strange and exotic.  It has been a theme in literature for decades, wonderfully exploited in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, a novel containing one Lemuel Gulliver’s narrative about his four fictional voyages to remote regions of the world.  In the first, Gulliver is shipwrecked off the shore of Lilliput.  Falling asleep he is tied up by the Lilliputians, people who are less than 6 inches tall. The Lilliputians are not just small, they are small-minded, with  ridiculous customs and petty debates. At one point Gulliver is asked to help defend Lilliput against the Blefuscu empire at odds in a war over at which end of a cooked egg the shell should be broken.  If you thought that was weird, his second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, inhabited by a race of giants.  In that story the Brobdingnagian king responds to Gulliver’s description of the government and history of England by concluding that the English must be a race of “odious vermin.”

The voyages continue, and in yet another, the third, he finds himself arriving on the flying island of Laputa, where the people are so lost in thought that they must be reminded to pay attention to the world around them. They’re so greatly concerned with mathematics and music, they have no practical applications for their learning.  Finally Gulliver visits the land of  the Houynhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are cleaner, more rational and considerate than a brutish, filthy, greedy, and degenerate humanoid race called Yahoos.  After Gulliver describes his country and its history, the Houyhnhnm concludes that the people of England are as unreasonable as the Yahoos.  Gulliver returns to England so disgusted with humanity that he avoids his family and buys horses to converse with them instead.

Gulliver’s Travels is a satire on humans, but it can be read as a children’s story, as science fiction and as a forerunner of the modern novel.  It is often read as a systematic rebuttal of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a rather more optimistic account of human capability. It seems likely Swift was writing his fiction to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, (as Defoe’s novel about Robinson Crusoe seems to suggest).  Gulliver repeatedly encounters with established societies rather than desolate islands and uses them to lampoon various ways of thinking.  For example, the experimenters in Laputa are used to illustrate the effects and cost on society on an extreme embrace and celebration of policies pursuing scientific progress, together with a questioning of modern liberal democracies.

Alongside such fictional views of the world of others, sit the results of real life accounts by social anthropologists.  One of the early classics of social anthropology was a study carried out in the Trobriand Islands by Bronislaw Malinowski, who had decided to accept voluntary internment in the Southern Pacific during the First World War.  His monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, was a wonderful piece of ethnography, observing, describing and interpreting a series of exchanges, of shell necklaces and arm bands, between leaders in the various islands.  The exchanges were concerned with status, and the objects were never ‘owned’, but looked after by the recipients before they were exchanged in the next round.

A discussion of the Kula Ring, as Malinowski described it, deserves a commentary of its own.  However, quite apart from the study and analysis, there are other less central parts of this research study that deserve mention.  One of these has to do with Malinowski himself, and a couple of photographs in the books.  They are quite stunning, and very revealing.  There is Malinowski in his tropical gear, safari suit and pith helmet, surrounded by a nearly naked group of young men and women.  They make clear, with unexpected clarity, Malinowski’s relationship to the Trobriand Islanders.  He was a Westerner, who sustained his identity in a rather idyllic tropical location, clearly and markedly separated from those he met.  He was an observer, and he could have been studying the inhabitants of a distant planet.

Those photographs speak to a view of social anthropology of which Malinowski was an exemplar.  We have moved from fictional imagination to observation, looking at another group.  However, Malinowski was a distinct and detached observer:  he could have been studying the islanders as if they were the inhabitants of one of those glass sided ant farms.   When you read his book, a marvel of observation and analysis, you know you are on the other side of a window.  You can observe what is taking place, every action described in detail, but you are doing so ‘objectively’, a scientist observing his specimens.

Some 40 years later, another anthropologist was undertaking fieldwork, this time in Brazil.  David Maybury-Lewis found himself ‘poised between two worlds’. Despite their rich heritage, the Shavante were urged to join the rural poor or follow the missionaries. “Nobody mentioned the other option,” wrote Maybury-Lewis, “that they might retain their lands and enter the Brazilian economy while modifying, but not abandoning, their own traditions.”  In The Savage and the Innocent he details his own mid-20th-century time when he met and befriended a people regarded by westerners as the ‘wildest Indians’ and ‘notorious savages’, claimed to have killed multiple previous parties of white interlopers.  However, he isn’t a Malinowski, and he neither romanticises nor ennobles the ‘savage’, but instead reveals, with empathy, what happens to people like these who do not resist western encroachment.

Key in this was his wife, Pia.  Wanting to travel, he was encouraged by a Cambridge professor to pursue fieldwork among the Indigenous tribes of Brazil, a relatively unexplored territory for anthropologists at the time.  David left for South America in 1953, and Pia followed several months later via a 24-day trip on a freight ship from Norway.  On their first visit to the Xerente, Pia noticed the deplorable racist attitudes Brazilians held towards the country’s Indigenous Peoples. David took a turbo-prop plane and Pia, due to lack of space on the flight, again followed, in a boat. “The [riverboat] captain heard that we were going to see the Xerente. He said at night he just stops in the middle of the river because they eat you. There wasn’t a horrible thing they didn’t say about the Indians,” she recalled.

After living with the Xerente for 18 months, the Maybury-Lewis’s returned to England and Pia gave birth to their first son, Biorn. When it was time for David to return to Brazil to begin his fieldwork with the Xavante, Pia’s family encouraged her to stay behind and take care of the baby, but Pia insisted on following her husband and bringing her child with her.  David, Pia, and Biorn spent several months with the Xavante over the next year.  Pia worked in the fields with the other women, carrying Biorn on her back in a sling wherever she went.  “He was a toddler. A little baby would have been easier,” she remarked.

It is probably fair to describe this as another step forward in social anthropology as David and Pia Maybury-Lewis describe what they find disturbing, annoying, and even disgusting about the Shavante and the neighbouring Sherente people, but also what the Sherente and Shavante find savage, disgusting and risible about their uninvited white guests. Maybury-Lewis’s toddler son quickly adapts to village life and helps David and Pia develop the self-critical instincts and an understanding of the anthropologist’s perspective that was to transform the ethnographies of the 1980s and 1990s.  Rather than the distanced observations of Malinowski, now the observer’s own relationships to those described are exposed, and so is our insight into an author’s awareness of limits to his own understandings.

These academic studies of other cultures are paralleled by the accounts of missionaries, studying the native populations of groups they were sent to convert.  One extraordinarily detailed account is that given by Harry Ignatius Marshall, whose 1922 book The Karen People of Burma contains rich data on the lives of these people.  For example, in Chapter XIX he includes an extraordinarily detailed account of a marriage.  Here’s one part:

 “the villagers early on the second morning of the wedding ceremonies prepare a feast of rice and chicken curry for their guests. Not less than two young roosters or two pullets are used in the preparation of this final feast, every part of the fowls being cooked, even the intestines, which have been carefully cleaned. Bits of stewed plantain stalks are included in the dish, inasmuch as the prolific nature of this plant is supposed to be communicated to those partaking of its, thus assuring the large families desired. A joint of bamboo full of liquor is also brought out. The bride and groom must then dip their fingers into the liquor and the food, while calling out “Pru-r-r k’la, heh ke” (“Pru-r-r k’la, come back”), two or three times. The elders now shout: “This day you twain, husband and wife, have become one spirit. May God take care of you. May the Just One watch over you, May the powerful Thi Hko Mu Xa (Lord of the demons) shield you. May you have strength to work and gain your livelihood. May you sleep in peace and eat the fruits of the land. May you have long life, ten children, and one hundred grandchildren.” 

Our fascination with other cultures is never-ending, whether in terms of fact or fiction.  To move to contemporary fiction, Peter Matthiessen wrote a masterly, and eventually rather dark, novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which combines the study of other cultures with missionary activities and human fallibility.  This complex and amazing story is set far away from civilisation, so very far back in the jungles of the Amazon headwaters that not even an anthropologist has visited nor observed the lives the Indians of a little naked tribe which might be the last in the world still untouched by civilization (the dream of most social anthropologists).  This story explores how this remote society is ‘touched’ and how it falls undone, largely the result of the actions resulting from the allure of ultimate remoteness and almost obsessive enchantment this hidden society exerts on an assortment of Americans.

As reviewers have noted, “Matthiessen’s novel has nearly everything–a powerful plot, a rich variety of characters, a perceptive, deeply felt view of man’s yearnings and his essential ironic tragedy and a prose style that is vivid, sensuous and disciplined by his intelligence”.  At the same time, it leaves us, as do so many other accounts of societies unlike our own, feeling outside the events, as observers curiously detached from much of what is happening.  Perhaps it is always like this when we try to write about people who live in another culture, trying to make sense of another and often almost impossibly different world.

This tribe in the Amazon rain forest, the Niaruna, is depicted as utterly primitive, stone age Indians whom everyone outside wants to change. The Niaruna are seen as dangerous, both politically and morally. This is because they harass neighbouring Indians, so that the local chief is under pressure to ‘civilize’ and pacify them, or drive them across the border, or kill them, or get rid of them some other way.  To do this, he hires two cynical, rootless mercenaries to bomb the forest. One of them, Lewis Moon, a North American and half-Indian himself, bails out, and soon becomes someone whom the Niaruna tentatively accept as a god.

To add to the complexity of the story, on the edge of the jungle worldly Roman Catholic and fanatical Baptists missions are already competing for the honours of converting the naked savages to Christianity. “I am enjoying the profits of a business deal I entered into with the Lord,” exults one inspired Baptist.  The novel tells how this begins as by plane, outboard motor canoe and jungle trail a group of Americans, including two missionary families, bring about the first successful contact of the modern world with the ‘savage Niaruna’.  It’s dramatic.  At every stage of their complicated adventure, the various characters are exposed to every variety of danger, confronted by piranha-infested rivers, by the filth and disease of jungle outposts, by the treacheries of the local government-appointed official, by their enmities for one another, by drink, drugs, madness, by machine gun and rifle and pistol fire, by spears, machetes, arrows, knives, fists, and broken bottles.  If that wasn’t enough, they are tormented day and night by lusts, racial hatreds, and religious enthusiasms.  It’s a catastrophic tale, in which some die, while others find their lives dramatically altered.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a novel of adventure, and it’s a good old-fashioned story about adventurers going into an unknown world.  However, Peter Matthiessen doesn’t fool around with the elements of an adventure story, but rather he tells it straight. The perils of his adventurers, both physical and spiritual, are the key elements of the plot, and his tale is serious, full of modern sensibilities, and extremely engaging, to the point our excitement in wanting to know what happens next, leads to an almost unconscious acceptance of how skilful and even ingenious a story is being told.

In the first place, he makes it clear the characters assembled here are far from an accidental or coincidental group, coming together by chance while pursuing  their separate fates. Each of them has his own complicated necessity for the push through the jungle to the Niaruna tribe. Their relations with one another are characterised by their confrontations, quarrels, fights, and loves, often leading to unexpected stages in the plot. If the perils are vivid and violent, no single adventure seems to be there just for the sake of giving the reader a thrill.  Rather, the events keep increasing in intensity, until every character has been laid bare, every gun that had been hanging on a wall has been proven to be no mere ornament, and the basic elements of the novel’s opening prove themselves to be inescapable omens of fate and necessity.

Two antagonists in the story compete for the Niaruna, each wanting to save them. One is a soldier of fortune, totally disenchanted and self-debauched, but because he is, of all things, a college-educated American Indian, he is determined first of all to find some “real” Indians, and then, finding them, he is determined to lead them in what might well be a successful military defence of their territory. The other is a missionary, one of the American group determined to save the Indians’ souls for Christ. The soldier of fortune, of necessity, becomes a god; the missionary, of necessity, loses his faith and becomes the tool of secular interests. And between them, in their exchanged roles, they destroy the tribe they have so spectacularly risked their lives to save.

However bizarre and astonishing, for the reader these plot elements and complications don’t come across forced or impossible as they unfold.  The story remains to the end an adventure, with the scale and intensity of the action constantly growing almost uncontrollably.  This is no mean an achievement. If, having finished this novel, you were to turn back to the start and read the early chapters again, you would see how all this was brought about. This is a good old-fashioned writing, albeit using a plot resting on an exotic locale, combining jungle, river, sky, bars, latrines, bordellos, hog-wallows, and other sordid horrors of frontier villages.  False morality, myth, magic, the Noble Savage, man’s tragic destiny to corrupt himself and find innocence only in madness, are at the centre of “At Play in the Fields of the Lord”, a title that masks that this isn’t a comedy but a tale of bitter endless irony.  And it’s all too real …

After Pooh

And after Pooh, there was Piglet.  If Winnie-the-Pooh was to offer an introduction to the world of Western philosophy, then his shy but determined friend Piglet was clearly the ideal candidate to introduce us to Taoism.  It was in a previous blog I had explored how Pooh was used to provide us with an introduction to philosophers  and their ideas over the centuries, as covered in John Williams excellent book Pooh and the Philosophers.  It would have been easy to move on from there to Benjamin Hoff’s excellent volume, The Tao of Pooh, to offer a further program of enlightenment.  However, Hoff went on some years later to issue a second introduction to Taoism, in the Te of Piglet.  Why Piglet?  This cautious and yet very thoughtful creature was the embodiment of Taoist thinking.

In The Te of Piglet, Hoff uses Piglet to explain how this Chinese concept means ‘power’ or ‘virtue’, through the Taoist concept of ‘Virtue—of the small’; though in his ruminations with Piglet, he also has the opportunity to elaborate on Taoism.  In this book we find Piglet is shown to possess great power—a common interpretation of the word Te, which more commonly means Virtue—not only because he is small, but also because he has a great heart or, to use a Taoist term, Yz’u, and elaborate on how Taoism explores living in harmony with the Tao.

So, what are these terms?  Hoff explains that Taoism is counterbalance to Confucianism.  As Hoff explains, Confucianism is concerned with human relations, how we relate to one another, and the importance hierarchy, social rules and political systems.  Taoism is about the individual’s relationship to the world.  Rather than focussing on social rules and systems, it is addressed to scientific, artistic and spiritual thinking.  Hoff suggests the key principles are “Natural Simplicity, Effortless Action, Spontaneity, and Compassion”, and goes on to add that, in contrast to the rather patriarchal message of Confucianism, “Taoism is happy, gentle, childlike and serene – like its favourite symbol, that of flowing water.”

The Daodejing  (also known as the Laozi after its purported 3^rd Century author) has traditionally been seen as the central and founding Taoist text, though historically, it is only one of the many different influences on Taoist thought, and at times, a marginal one at that.  The Daodejing changed and developed over time, possibly from a tradition of oral sayings, and is a loose collection of aphorisms on various topics which seek to give the reader wise advice on how to live and govern, and also includes some metaphysical speculations.

Some scholars have argued that the Daodejing prominently refers to a subtle universal phenomenon or cosmic creative power called Dào (literally “way” or “road”), using feminine and maternal imagery to describe it.  Dào is the natural spontaneous way that things arise and exist, it is the “organic order” of the universe.  James Giles, however, argues that the Dào refers to a meditative state of awareness in which one sees that one’s own awareness is what enables things to arise and exist.  The Daodejing distinguishes between the ‘named Dào’ and the ‘true Dào’ which cannot be named (無名;wúmíng; ‘no name’) and cannot be captured by language.

The Daodejing also mentions the concept of wúwéi (effortless action), which is illustrated with water analogies (going with the flow of the river instead of against it) and “encompasses shrewd tactics—among them “feminine wiles”— which one may utilize to achieve success”.  Wúwéi is associated with yielding, minimal action and softness. Wúwéi is the activity of the ideal sage (shèng-rén), who spontaneously and effortlessly express dé (virtue), acting as one with the universal forces of the Dào, resembling children or un-carved wood (pu).

A further basic concept mentioned in the Daodejing is guigen (return to the source or root) or guifu (return again). This concept is employed in several examples from nature, such as when plants return to their dormant state after a cycle of luxuriant growth or when a stream that has become muddied returns to clearness. After each such example, it is suggested that people can likewise return to a state of stillness or clarity and thus achieve the Dào. According to Giles, this back and forth movement between stillness and the constant flow, what he calls the double return, refers to a feature of human awareness in which stillness and activity co-exist in awareness. According to Giles:

What happens is in finding the stillness within the constant flow, one disengages from actively participating in this flow. One lets the perceptions and thoughts go on their way without oneself being swept along with them. This is returning to the root or source of awareness. It is the root of awareness because it is this state that allows us to see the workings of awareness. It is the root from which the ceaseless activity (luxuriant growth) of awareness issues forth. This root is, as it were, a vantage point from which the other operations of awareness can be quietly observed.

This, says Giles, is the meditative state of awareness that is the Dào. It is the state of awareness achieved by sages.

Sages concentrate their internal energies, are humble, pliable, and content; and they move naturally without being restricted by the structures of society and culture.  The Daodejing also provides advice for rulers, such as never standing out, keeping weapons but not using them, keeping the people simple and ignorant, and working in subtle unseen ways instead of forceful ones.  It has generally been seen as promoting minimal government

Hoff offers a masterly approach to the issue of perception, or how ‘It All depends on How You Look at Things’.  The sad but rather brilliant story of what happens when Pooh and Piglet decide to build a house for Eeyore, captures this memorably.  They realise they would need material to build a house, sticks for example:

“‘There was a heap of sticks on the other side of the wood’, said Piglet.  “I saw them.  Lots and lots.  All Piled up.”

So they took the pile of sticks and made a house for Eeyore.  And later when Eeyore couldn’t find his pile of – that is , when he couldn’t find his house, he and Christopher Robin went looking for it and met Pooh and Piglet, and …

Where did you say if was?’ asked Pooh.

‘Just here’, said Eeyore.

‘Made of sticks?”

‘Yes.’

‘Oh!” said Piglet.

‘What?” said Eeyore

‘I just said ‘Oh’’ said Piglet nervously.  And so as to seem quite at ease he hummed Tiddely-pom once or twice a what-shall-we-do-now kind of way.

‘You’re sure it was a house?’ said Pooh.  ‘I mean you’re sure the house  was just here?’

As Pooh and Piglet contemplate what they have done, neither can quite admit the truth about how they had looked at things.  They are saved by Piglet, who eventually remarks:

“‘It’s like this’, said Piglet quickly. … ‘Only warmer’ he added after deep thought.

‘What’s warmer?’

‘The other side of the wood where Eeyore’s house is.’

So they went there and Eeyore found his house and …

“So they left him in it; and Christopher Robin went back to lunch with his friends Pooh and Piglet, and on the way they told him of the Awful Mistake they had made.  And when he had finished laughing, they all sang the Outdoor Song for Snowy Weather the rest of the way home.”

Goff isn’t interested in a light-hearted opinion, however. Te is serious, and Hoff wants us to understand this.  He is particularly interested in exploring the nature of ‘problems’ and he presents two critical observations on these.

First There is the issue of defining and dealing with problems before they arise.  He observes it is often difficult to see ‘problems in the making’, because the best time to see them is when they are relatively small, minor difficulties that could have been avoided or their consequences stopped if we had addressed them early on.  This isn’t just a matter of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care”, but it is also a matter of perception.  Minor irritations and issues can grow large and troublesome, but Lao-Tas noted “Trouble is easily stopped before it commences.  Put things in order before chaos occurs”.

Equally important is the recognition that many problems aren’t really problems at all.  “People who don’t see situations for what they are often struggle against difficulties that aren’t there, and create difficulties in the process”.  Goff quotes some wonderful Taoist writings.  Here is a story by Liu An:

An old man and his sone lived in an abandoned fortress on the side of a hill.  Their only possession of value was a horse.

One day, the horse ran away.  The neighbors came by to offer sympathy. “That’s really bad!” they said.  “How do you know?” asked the old man.

The next day, the horse returned, bringing with it several wild horses.  The old man and his son shut them inside the gate.  The neighbors hurried over.  “That’s really good!” they said.  “How do you know?” asked the old man.

The following day, the son tried riding one of the wild horses, fell off, and broke his leg.  The neighbors came around as soon as they heard the news.  “That’s really bad!” they said.  “How do you know?” asked the old man.

The day after that, the army came through, forcing the local young men into service to fight a faraway battle against northern barbarians.  Many of them would never return.  But the sone couldn’t go, because he’d broken his leg.

Taoism is hard to ignore.  It places an emphasis on simplicity and often seems to cut through the complex and tangled path we follow.  Hoff offers many somewhat blindly optimistic views as indicative of failing to pay attention to simple but critical facts.  It is hard to go past his observation that the US has 5% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of the world’s energy, and emits 25% of the world’s greenhouse-effect-producing gases.  Isn’t the problem clear?

In many ways, The Tao Te Ching is a seductive read for Westerners.  It describes the Tao as the source and ideal of all existence, unseen, but not transcendent, immensely powerful yet supremely humble, something to be found at the root of all things. People have desires and free will (and thus are able to alter their own nature), but many act “unnaturally”, upsetting the natural balance of the Tao. The Tao Te Ching is regarded as seeking to lead students to a “return” to their natural state, in harmony with Tao.  As a result both  language and conventional wisdom are critically assessed. Taoism views them as inherently biased and it presents various paradoxes to sharpen the focus on what is really the case.

‘Non-action’ or ‘not acting’, is a central concept of the Tao Te Ching. The concept is complex, and reflected in the words’ multiple meanings, even in English translation; it can mean “not doing anything”, “not forcing”, “not acting” in the theatrical sense, “creating nothingness”, “acting spontaneously”, and “flowing with the moment.  It includes the concepts that value distinctions are ideological and seeing ambition of all sorts as originating from the same source.  The term is used broadly with simplicity and humility as key virtues, often in contrast to selfish action. On a political level, it means avoiding such circumstances as war, harsh laws and heavy taxes.

Unsurprisingly, the Tao Te Ching has been translated into Western languages over 250 times, mostly to English, German, and French.  One writer has suggested “It is a famous puzzle which everyone would like to feel he had solved.”  Many translations have  written by people with a foundation in Chinese language and philosophy who are trying to render the original meaning of the text as faithfully as possible into English, but some of the more popular translations are written from a less scholarly perspective, giving an individual author’s interpretation.  Indeed, Russell Kirkland goes further to argue that these versions are based on Western Orientalist fantasies in his 2004 book, Taoism:  The Enduring Tradition and argues they represent the colonial appropriation of Chinese culture.  Others suggest that while they do not pretend to rigorous scholarship, they meet a real spiritual need in the West. These Westernized versions aim to make the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching more accessible to modern English-speaking readers by, typically, employing more familiar cultural and temporal references.

It is easy to regard The Tao Te Ching as another way in which Western students latch on to something apparently esoteric and give it unwanted credence and attention.  There is good reason to consider this unfair, and that Hoff is addressing an important area of thinking and reflection.  It  should be recognized as a seminal work, often insightful; but one where it is the task of the reader to reflect and want to work out the full implications of its often provocative or sometimes apparently tangential insights. It shares a background set of ideas and assumptions with other early Chinese philosophical texts, but it does invite reflection on the very core of being beyond any cosmological assumptions. As is the case with other unfamiliar material, while the production of meaning is context dependent, new horizons do emerge from great works of philosophy.

The power of the Tao Te Ching is best understood as seminal insights rather than in its doctrines, but in its seminal insights. The ills of discrimination, exploitation and intellectual hubris, so deeply embedded in language and value systems, remain as serious today as they were in early China. The healing power of nonaction still strikes a chord and commands continuing reflection and engagement. Although in working out these insights differences will no doubt arise, they unite many Western interpretations  of the Tao Te Ching and draw new generations of readers into the mystery of Taoism and its virtue.  If it is through the apparently simplistic of his reflections that some readers find their way into this literature, The Te of Piglet offers an excellent stepping stone.

Is beauty natural?

In 1833, two years into his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle, a 24-year-old Charles Darwin wrote to his sister Catherine, entreating her for supplies. He didn’t ask for food or funds,  but “for more books; those most valuable of all valuable things. His correspondence is dotted with Austen references in a way that conveys a genuine fluency with her work. …

Though she would never encounter Darwin’s research – Austen died in 1817 – her own work was steeped in the same scientific and philosophical tradition that paved the way for his theory of evolution. She wrote in an era obsessed with explaining the natural world; the word ‘biology’ burst into usage in England around 1800. Austen’s acute, almost clinical, attention to detail resembles the style of early British naturalists. In Jane Austen and Charles Darwin (2008), the literature scholar Peter Graham explores parallels between Austen’s sensibility and Darwin’s, arguing that both ‘were keen observers of the world before them, observers who excelled both in noticing microcosmic particulars and … discerning the cosmic significance of those small details.’

The two also share a concern with the philosophically rich relationship between the natural world and aesthetic beauty. Darwin was fascinated by capricious ornamentation – natural features such as the peacock’s plumes, which seemed to serve no other purpose but beauty, even to the detriment of other sorts of biologic fitness. He saw a paradox: the naturalist posits that all that exists can be explained in natural terms. And, yet, there is a sense in which ornament, in its superfluity, goes beyond what nature dictates. How can the naturalist make sense of ‘excessive’ beauty, of nature’s ‘wonderful extreme’, which may appear to defy or transcend the closed logic of the naturalistic worldview?

Austen prefigures Darwin’s contention that aesthetic ornamentation is a natural human practice that places us in continuity with the wider natural world. Like Darwin, she grapples with ornament’s apparent superfluity, and the tension between naturalism and aesthetic ‘excess’. She writes evocatively of this clash in Pride and Prejudice: ‘I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild,’ gossips Mrs Hurst after Elizabeth traipses across dirty fields to see her ill sister. Worst of all: ‘her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain’. The aesthetic is literally drenched in the natural; human ornament splashed with mud. …

Austen’s interest in the natural is readily apparent. Her relationship to naturalism is more difficult to pin down. There are two closely related respects …  Firstly, she is stylistically engaged with naturalism as an artistic movement, or what Peter Graham describes as ‘selective and artful manipulation of detail’. In his naturalist manifesto ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1893), Émile Zola characterised this as an aversion to ‘irrational and supernatural explanations’. In Northanger Abbey, Austen makes her literary naturalism transparent; she critiques a popular journal’s ‘unnatural characters’ and ‘improbable circumstances’ as a mark against its literary merit. Northanger expresses through satire what Zola asserts in his manifesto: ‘[N]ature, being there, makes itself felt, or at least that part of nature of which science has given us the secret, and about which we have no longer any right to romance.’

The second way in which Austen engages with naturalism extends beyond participation in the literary movement, to her philosophical commitments. As Graham notes, a philosophical naturalist is ‘someone who believes that natural causes offer sufficient explanation of the world, its origins, and its development.’ This philosophical perspective is characterised by an extreme sort of empiricism that privileges the scientific method as the highest, or even only, avenue to truth. Graham proclaims Austen and Darwin as ‘perhaps the great English empiricists of the 19th century’. Austen’s ‘clear, cold eye’ directed ‘at the concrete particulars of the world’ situates her alongside philosophical empiricists who rejected the existence of anything that couldn’t be verified through sense data, i.e., non-material things like God, mind/consciousness, Platonist universals, transcendent moral law, etc.

… For Graham, Austen’s naturalism is more than mere metaphor. She participates not only in the literary movement of naturalism, which favoured realism and detail, but also in the reductionist empiricism emerging in her time and brought to a height with Darwinism. Applying the observational method of natural science, Austen situates human beings in a continuity with the wider natural world. In her novels, writes Graham, ‘human beings and their societies are understood to be part of nature’; Austen gazes ‘with scrupulous, penetrating, and relatively unbiased attention at the rich and messy details of the world around them.’ Her interests are not in abstract universals; Woolf complains that her work lacks ‘moons, mountains, and castles’. Rather, Austen’s interests lie in the animal particulars of courtship and kin ties, the ‘specimens destined for extinction (those social dinosaurs the landed Elliots)’, as Graham puts it, and the evolution of social arrangements more primed to survive, such as Wentworth’s social mobility, or the unusual marriage dynamics of the Crofts.

Austen’s work models a sort of everyday analogue to the scientific method. I would argue that the primary mode by which her characters progress in their moral development is via a form of epistemic humility and responsiveness to evidence. By learning to see beyond their motivated biases, Austen’s heroines are able to take in new information that allows them to better understand their social world. This can be seen everywhere in her work: Elizabeth’s revision of her hypothesis about Darcy’s character, in light of the updated evidence of the fateful letter; Emma’s continual observations and modifications of hypotheses regarding ideal matches; Marianne’s revised judgment of Colonel Brandon – the list goes on.  Writing in The Journal of Aesthetic Education (2008), Eva Dadlez argues that Northanger Abbey mounts ‘a naturalistic argument for the adoption of naturalism … Step-by-step, Austen moves us from melodrama to naturalism, negotiating an evolution in our reactions and our sympathies as she does so.’ … Austen’s keen observation extends to her rich aesthetic sensibility. And, yet, beauty figures strangely in a naturalist’s worldview.

Darwin, who develops the naturalistic worldview to a new extreme, was deeply troubled by ‘ornament’ in the animal kingdom as a potential threat to his theory of natural selection. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin marvels that ‘The development, however, of certain structures’ – such as horns, feathers, and so on – ‘has been carried to a wonderful extreme; and in some cases to an extreme which, as far as the general conditions of life are concerned, must be slightly injurious.’ The peacock’s feathers are superfluous to its biologic fitness; their cumbersome size may actually be antithetical to any one bird’s individual survival. And so their existence seems to fly in the face of naturalistic explanation.

In his early writings, Darwin ‘conceived of beauty first of all as scandalous excess, as potentially self-destructive luxury,’ writes Menninghaus. This was a deep problem for the naturalistic worldview in which what exists is what evolution strictly accounts for. Excess is an unnatural aberration, its putative existence a counterpoint to the theory. In Sense and Sensibility, we see a vivid instance of ornament’s destructive tendency: a pin in Lady Middleton’s dress pierces her progeny, ‘slightly scratching the child’s neck’ as it ‘produced from this pattern of gentleness such violent screams’. The order of life and its perpetuation through motherhood is marred by a tiny ornament.

In his later work, Darwin offers a way to reconcile the tension between the apparent existence of excessive beauty and naturalism’s denial of excess. His solution is a paradox at the heart of existence: superfluity is itself necessary and, as such, never really superfluous. He assigns ornamentation a biologic function in sexual selection. Menninghaus writes that ‘though [they are] mostly handicaps in the “general conditions of life”, aesthetic ornaments provide competitive advantages in the highly specialised context of sexual courtship.’ As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, ‘the power to charm the female has sometimes been more important than the power to conquer other males in battle.’

In part, the very purposelessness of these aesthetic features is what renders them desirable. One recalls the fragile fabric of Northanger’s Mrs Allen’s dress at the first ball in Bath, impractical for dancing, but ‘such a delicate muslin’, unlike anything ‘in the whole room, I assure you.’ Its delicacy impedes the dress’s function, and yet this very delicacy is what distinguishes the dress and makes it attractive. By devising a functional explanation for the appearance of excess, Darwin can make sense of ornamentation in a purely naturalistic framework. Far from being unnatural, abundant ornamentation is a phenomenon germane to, and demanded by, the natural world. What we might perceive as excessive beauty is an illusion. Nothing in nature is genuinely superfluous. These instances of ‘extreme beauty’ serve a critical function in providing competitive advantages in sexual selection.

Darwin and his supporters sublimate fashion into a perfectly natural strategy of sexual selection. However, not all share his optimism about a naturalist explanation of ornament. Walter Benjamin, in the 1930s, opposes Darwin’s reading of fashion. Influenced by a complex blend of Jewish mysticism, idealism and romanticism, Benjamin resists the absorption of beauty into the natural realm. On this reading, our human insistence on beauty, even when impractical, inutile and dangerous, represents a transcendence of our evolutionary nature. The superfluity of ornament, the way the peacock’s cumbersome feathers or a woman’s silk petticoat hinder biologic fitness, becomes a protest against the constraints of naturalism, and indicative of the mysterious transcendence that permeates existence. As Benjamin writes: ‘the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.’

If Austen is a strict naturalist, we might expect her to side with Darwin in this debate. But the picture we get in her novels is more complex. Austen’s attention to fashion is often pejorative. It is primarily villains who are concerned with clothes, while a heroine is more apt to ‘clothe her imagination’. And yet, Graham uses Austen’s observations on clothing as a primary example of her naturalistic attention to detail. Her observations on women’s fashion in an 1814 letter are ‘analogous, one might say, to Darwin’s fascination with the diverse and fanciful variety in breeds of domestic pigeons.’  Even as she satirises certain sartorial attitudes, Graham argues that her focused attention betrays a ‘genuine interest’. …  For Austen, it appears that good taste in dress ‘unites beauty with utility’.

Though at moments in her corpus Austen seems poised to offer Darwin’s tidy resolution, she maintains a steady line of critique premised on the notion that there are more or less natural ways to engage with fashion. Not every instance of apparent superfluity is absorbed into the logic of sexual courtship, and her disdain toward extravagance goes far beyond Darwin’s perturbed fascination. Where Darwin is awestruck at nature’s ‘wonderful extreme’, that which is superfluous really is unnatural to Austen; it calls out for contempt, and its role in courtship can’t wholly redeem it. …

To what, precisely, is Austen opposing ‘natural’? One might consider the original meaning of ‘fashion’: a verb meaning to fashion something into another; to contrive, manufacture, create. Austen approves of Elizabeth, whose ‘person, behaviour, and dress’ is ‘without fashion’. She disapproves of Mrs Elton’s ‘studied elegance’. The dividing line between natural and unnatural engagement with dress has something to do with authenticity. Fashioning is seen as inauthentic, whereas a refusal to fashion – be it Lady Russell’s lack of rouge, or Elizabeth’s muddy skirts – is authentic, and therefore natural in the sense of true to one’s own nature.

If we read Austen’s use of natural as ‘authentic’, we discover a continuum of ways to engage with style. There are multiple senses in which one might dress ‘unnaturally’, that is, inauthentically. For instance, one can adorn oneself with superfluous ornaments that limit your capacity even to move and act as one ordinarily would, such as Mrs Allen’s dress: ‘But I think we had better sit still, for one gets so tumbled in such a crowd!’ Splashing mud on Elizabeth’s muslin skirt in Pride and Prejudice (so indulgently portrayed in countless film adaptations) becomes a visually evocative way of contrasting her true free nature with an artificially imposed and constricting one.

One might also forgo authentic self-expression for imitation. Austen complains that the Musgroves ‘were now like thousands of other young ladies, living to be fashionable’. This, too, is unnatural in one sense because it divorces the girls from their authentic natures. In another, more traditionally naturalist way, however, this behaviour is the most natural. It’s ‘herd mentality’, an animal function of assimilation. For naturalists like Darwin, this type of imitative inauthenticity represents nature at its most totalising, our deference to evolutionary patterns of behaviour serving sexual selection. With this framing in mind, Austenian heroines’ very refusal to fashion themselves defies naturalistic logic. Authenticity, going against the imitative herd, becomes in some manner ‘supernatural’, that is, beyond what is natural.

This unnatural, or rather supernatural, engagement with dress can be a site of subversion, much in the manner of Benjamin’s transcendence. In rare glimmering moments, choices regarding dress become a vehicle for self-expression that can oppose the tides of the social ecosystem and transcend the limits of what has been deemed natural. Elizabeth’s brazen wearing of the muddy dress is an act of aesthetic autonomy, a fashion statement as real as any other. It’s unnatural in the sense that it defies the herd evolution of fashion norms, natural in the sense of true autonomy, realised through authenticity to her own nature. Lady Russell’s decision not to wear rouge strikes Sir Elliot as unnatural; her dress artificial for being ‘formal and arrangé’. Mr Tilney’s knowledge of Indian muslin, so rare for a man, seems to Catherine to fly in the very face of nature. She stops herself before blurting out as much:  How can you,’ said Catherine, laughing, ‘be so – ’ She had almost said ‘strange’.

In Austen, the unnatural is not always bad, and the natural not always good. It is worth noting that she was writing in an era when horticulture was on the rise and florists first set up shop in major cities. Just as the ‘florist’s flower … was compact of both reality and fiction, at once the stuff of Nature – Nature’s gift – and an artefact of human fancy and fetishism,’ writes the literature scholar Deidre Shauna Lynch, Austen seems to suggest that fashion is both in continuity with and can stand opposed to nature. She is insisting on a contradiction that a novelist can make and perhaps a natural scientist like Darwin can’t. Resisting the urge for resolution, she holds taut a tension for readers to tightrope across.

Both Darwin and Austen are sharp observers, responsive to evidence and resistant to supernatural explanations. And, yet, the pair also share an obsessive interest in beauty, in its abundant and even superfluous presence in our world, and the way it may threaten a naturalistic worldview. Reading them alongside one another enriches our understanding of both. Darwin’s love for Austen illuminates his deep fascination with the aesthetic, and his contention that accounting for beauty is an important part of giving an account of the natural world. Austen, read alongside Darwin, invites questions regarding the contours and perhaps limitations of her naturalism. In her insistence that fashion can be engaged with in more or less natural ways, she resists Darwinian resolution without fully committing to Benjamin’s transcendence. This tension between totalising naturalism and a transcendent aesthetics of ornamentation pulses throughout her corpus, and keeps the questions she and Darwin both grappled with alive and in view.