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 A Theory of Everything

When I was at school, it all seemed so simple.  The physical world, at the smallest level, was made up from atoms.  Atoms were like the solar system, with electrons whizzing around a nucleus, and this was a system just like the world we knew at the macro level, where planets whizzed around the sun.  Now, we knew there were some complications.  Electrons had their orbits, and they could jump from one orbit to another, and it appeared that those jumps were carefully scripted, so they could only go from one defined level to another, as if you were going from one level of a building up to the next.  And, yes, there was another complication, as it turned out that in the nucleus there were two things:  neutrons and protons.  The protons had a positive electromagnetic force, while the electrons travelling around them had a negative force:  the only reason the electrons didn’t hurtle down towards the protons and annihilate each other is because they were travelling in their orbits at speed: just like an aeroplane not falling to earth because it travelled fast enough to ensure it created lift?  Well, not quite like that, but it would do.  Those other items in the nucleus were neutrons, and they were called that because they didn’t have an electric charge.

There was more.  In a way I found exciting at the time, this model of the nature of the physical universe also made sense of lots of chemistry, and from there on to many other things.  Atoms could be linked together to form molecules.  Some molecules were ‘stable’, like oxygen, which in our daily lives compromises two oxygen atoms linked together to form the O₂ molecule (and later I learnt these was another stable form, O₃, ozone, which was the reason you could smell something funny by the tracks of electric trains in the London Underground).  Then we went on to compounds, like hydrochloric acid, which was a combination of hydrogen and chlorine, and this was interesting because it was really in two parts.  Part of the molecule could break away and link up with another substance, and that would lead to other combinations like sodium chloride (the sodium element combined with the chlorine bit from hydrochloride acid.  It was like the parts in a Meccano set!

Of course, it all got complicated, and eventually scientists were taking substances apart and discovering they were made up of very complex combinations of atoms, often several, sometimes even scores and even hundreds of atoms.  However, it all made sense.  However, I think all that was falling apart long before I was at school, although I didn’t know it at the time.  Although it was somewhat beyond my schoolboy science classes, at least until I reached the final years of secondary education.  Somewhat later I was to confront the science of what’s truly fundamental, and the amazing world of theoretical physics.  At that point all my schoolboy knowledge was cast aside, and I learnt that our physical reality is shaped by a bewildering and complex world of particles, fields, together with many laws and rules that nature played by.

Where was all this leading?  I was off on a different path by the time I was well into my university studies (I’d abandoned science for social anthropology), but even back then I was aware and know much more clearly today, our understanding of ‘reality’ remains limited and incomplete.  Despite this the animating hope of many scientists today and throughout history) is that we will be able to formulate a ‘Theory of Everything’, (with that marvellous acronym TOE) where one set of universal equations and one framework will describe literally every aspect of our physical reality.

When most of us think about science, we don’t often think about something very fundamental to the enterprise: what the goal of it all might be.  Clearly reality is a complicated place, and the only tools we have to guide us in understanding the nature of our world rely on what we can observe, measure, and test through experiments.  When we take account of that huge body of observational and experimental knowledge, we have a record of all the phenomena that we know exist. The enterprise of science, then, seeks to make sense of the huge body of empirical data, and then seeks to explain it in as simple and conclusive way as possible, to maximize our predictive power concerning natural phenomena, doing so with as few assumptions which seem absolutely necessary.

As many writers today remind us, we have seen incredible advances in our understanding of the physical world when compared to what we understood when I was at school.  Now it appears we can analyse just about everything we can directly detect and measure, and do so precisely, even exquisitely. The ‘Standard Model’ of elementary particles lists four key influences that underpin our world, the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces along with general relativity and gravity. Then there is the inflationary Big Bang which describes our cosmic origins, when those four key forces first appeared, only to evolve and become independent. It makes for a compelling story.  Unfortunately, current mysteries like dark matter, dark energy, and the baryogenesis puzzle to do with asymmetry together hint that there’s more to the Universe than we currently understand.

The elusive goal that motivates many scientists is the belief tall of these key forces can be brought together into a ‘Theory of Everything’.  However, despite its fascination, some argue that there is not a Theory of Everything out there to be found at all, that the goal is an illusion.

The modern idea of a Theory of Everything goes back more than 100 years, to the early days of general relativity. Einstein was able, starting in 1915, to successfully describe the observed phenomenon of gravitation. The presence, distribution, and motion of matter and energy through spacetime determined the curvature and evolution of that spacetime fabric, and then the curvature of that spacetime fabric determined the future trajectories and fates of every particle that exists within that spacetime. Put simply, general relativity took the idea of special relativity and unified it with the idea of gravitation, creating the powerful framework that many would argue was the most important of Einstein’s astonishing accomplishments.

When I was learning about science at school we were being taught about science prior to Einstein, with some brief references to what he had concluded.  Before his theories there had been a different approach, Maxwell’s classical theory about electromagnetism, with four central principles:

• the speed of light was the ultimate speed limit at which anything could travel,
• particles and interactions could be described in terms of fields and charges,
• electromagnetism vs relativistically invariant, and
• energy and momentum were always conserved.

Maxwell’s (classical) theory put the previously distinct notions of electricity and magnetism together into a unified footing.

Within four years from the publication of Einstein’s theory of general relativity scientists were working to unify this theory with Maxwell’s principles.  However, it turned out that despite some similarities the two theories also exhibited several fundamental differences.     Despite this, it was the first 20th Century attempt at a Theory of Everything.  Einstein’s general relativity was already a four dimensional theory (adding the dimension of time to our familiar three dimensional view of matter in the world), but Maxwell’s electromagnetism required four separate degrees of freedom in addition, meaning that the same four dimensions used in Einstein’s theory would be insufficient to hold general relativity and electromagnetism together in a single, unified framework.

Theoretical physicists weren’t discouraged, and attempted to solve the mismatch by taking a dramatic leap into a fifth dimension, allowing general relativity and electromagnetism to be unified.  Alas, in a way that has become familiar with integrating approaches since then, there were some new inconvenient problems.  The postulated fifth dimension couldn’t impact anything in our four-dimensional spacetime; it must somehow ‘disappear’ from all the equations that impacted the observable physical world.  Moreover, scientists knew the universe didn’t merely conform to Maxwell’s classical electromagnetism, but required more, especially it required a quantum description for electromagnetism (at least), and other limiting postulates.

However, this was merely the beginning of formulating what would turn out to be many proposals that drew on extra dimensions. In one sense this was unproblematic, as in theory there could be more than three spatial dimensions to our Universe so long as those ‘extra’ dimensions were below a certain critical size that experiments had already explored. However, as soon as scientists began to talk about the notion of a Theory of Everything, their suppositions almost always required the addition of new entities — particles, fields, interactions, etc. — whose existence was already either ruled out or highly constrained by observations, measurements, and experiments by known results.  If there is a fifth dimension, it had to be so tiny and its effects so weak that it would not affect the body of data scientists had already collected and which revealed no evidence for its existence.

The quest for a Theory of Everything was to lead to enormous advances in physics during the 20th century, in nuclear physics, quantum physics, and particle physics. The combination of novel experimental results and new theoretical developments has helped us understand what appear to be the full suite of particles that exist in the Universe, what rules they followed in interacting and binding together, and how the forces that governed them behaved.  The result today is the Standard Model of elementary particles, simultaneously simple and contradictorily, full of complexities.

As a schoolboy I learnt about atoms and their building blocks, the trio of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Rather, now the electron is just the lightest of three generations of charged leptons: along with the muon and tau lepton. Then there are their antiparticles, plus a species of neutrino (and antineutrino) that is the corresponding ‘uncharged lepton’ to each of the charged leptons.  Confused?  What’s more, protons and neutrons are no longer considered fundamental particles, but are composite particles composed of quarks and gluons. Guess what:  there are three generations of quarks, with the up-and-down quarks (making up the first generation) having charm-and-strange and then top-and-bottom quarks as their heavier-generation counterparts.  Getting even more confused?  Hang on …Meanwhile, there are eight massless gluons (mediating the strong nuclear force), one massless photon (mediating the electromagnetic force), and three very massive W-and-Z bosons (mediating the weak nuclear force), plus the Higgs boson to complete the Standard Model.  Yes, it does seem confusing, but despite this veritable zoo of particles, every particle-based experiment performed, and every detector set up to observe particles ever concocted has only found evidence of these particles and these particles alone, with the properties given to them by the Standard Model framework.

It’s not surprising to read that many have sought — and are still seeking — the elusive Grand Unified Theory, a theory of everything, one that includes gravity, string theory and additional symmetries, additional dimensions, additional extra particles, or additional unification frameworks. It seems in confronting these ideas there’s an enormous amount of trouble. All of the new ideas necessitate adding further ingredients to our reality: ingredients which can lead to new interactions or decays of the particles we already know about.   However, we already have masses of data on how the known (Standard Model) particles interact and decay (or appear forbidden from interacting or decaying), we have to take extreme care that any attempt toward a Theory of Everything doesn’t conflict with already-existing data, particularly with the data we have from particle physics experiments.

One popular approach is string theory (and positive geometry). Instead of one extra dimension, there are many: at least six and as many as 22 in addition to the four we know about. Instead of relying on such esoteric behaviours as magnetic monopoles, extra Higgs sectors, superheavy bosons admitting proton decay, and left-right symmetric features, they have even more. Instead of space, there’s superspace; there’s supergravity; there’s not just the conventional ‘for every Standard Model particle, there’s a superpartner particle’ version of supersymmetry, leading to suggestions there are four new super symmetries and hundreds of additional new particles.  It seems as though, by adding more and more and more and ingredients, ingredients that aren’t reflected in observations we grow and worsen, the puzzles we’re facing when it comes to the Universe today.

From the outside, and looking at this confusing array of developments, there’s one obvious question that haunts the scientists: do our theoretical ideas line up with reality? When we formulate attempts at a Theory of Everything, it is important to remember the goals of science are working “to maximize our predictive power of nature’s phenomena with as few assumptions, parameters, and variables as are absolutely necessary”  Our current big scientific mysteries compel us to keep seeking truths about the Universe, given many aspects of reality that we cannot yet, fully explain. But relying on loose, superficial analogies and mathematical ingenuity is more than dissatisfying; it’s an approach that loses a fundamental connection with observable, measurable reality.

Unsurprisingly, there are many critics.  Paul Davies, (in Schrödingers’s Cat Flap, The Monthly: December 2026) offers a nice if quixotic comment on this state of affairs:

“In a famous remark, Albert Einstein once asked whether the Moon continues to exist when nobody is looking.  This startling comment stemmed from Einstein’s deep distrust of a branch of physics called quantum mechanics, the mind-bending theory that brilliantly describes the atomic microworld.  Now celebrating its centenary, quantum mechanics is the most successful scientific theory of all time.  It accurately explains the behaviour of matter from subatomic particles to stars, and has given us the laser, the transistor, MRI machines, superconductors, AI and much more.  Although quantum mechanics underpins much of modern technology, the foundations of the theory make no sense, shredding our everyday notions of reality and defying intuition. A century on, scientists remain deeply divided over what to make of it.”

What is this powerful theory that brings such practical benefits yet appears perplexing and paradoxical? In the mid 1920s scientist found the quantum microworld is riddled with uncertainty.  In itself, that is not so troublesome.  We are, after all, familiar with uncertainty in daily life.  Suppose you toss a coin and keep it concealed between your hands:  will it show heads or tails?  It’s fifty-fifty: you can look to find out which.  The fact that you didn’t know before looking which side of the coin faced up doesn’t affect the fact that it must have already been either heads or tails. Your observation merely uncovered a pre-existing reality.  Quantum uncertainty, however, denies that there is a pre-existing reality. Instead, atoms, molecules and subatomic particles don’t actually possess well-defined basic properties, such as position or orientation or speed, in the absence of an actual observation. You can measure, say, the location of an atom and find it to be somewhere. But that doesn’t mean the atom was already there before you looked.  Quantum mechanics says asking where the atom was an instant before inspecting is not only pointless, it’s meaningless.: “there is simply no fact of the matter of where the atom was located – a philosophically startling assertion.

In exploring the world of quantum theory and its applications, Davies ends with more philosophical problems.  “Is there a real world out there after all, even among atoms and molecules? Or is the unobserved microworld suspended in a state of existence limbo? There are a dozen or so rival attempts to make sense of quantum weirdness, ranging from invoking consciousness to adding new physical processes that collapse superpositions spontaneously into a single reality. But the most widespread attempt to make sense of the theory is to treat the alternative realities in a quantum superposition as “really real” parallel worlds. … Outlandish though the multiverse idea may seem, many distinguished physicists buy into it. … So, does the Moon exist when nobody is looking? A many-worlds advocate would answer yes, but with a vengeance: not only does the Moon exist, but there are also countless versions of the Moon, each existing in a separate branch universe amid an infinity of parallel realities. It is a conclusion that would have Einstein spinning in his grave.”

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?

Descartes’ Bones

There are many challenges in writing about other people, especially those whose ideas have become important to you, or more widely.  The challenge is simple:  do you talk about the ideas, and leave the author a disembodied voice, or do you address the person, a life lived, a network of relationships, and a history of events and actions?  In recent decades there has been an increasing interest in the person, sometimes to the point that revelations about the personal life and antipathies of a philosopher, historian or scientist can be used to set aside or side-step what they had said in terms of their contribution to understanding.  Russell Shorto came up with an interesting twist on this, using skeleton bones as the linking motif in his story on the history of Descartes and an exploration of his thinking.

Descartes’ Bones is a frustrating yet fascinating book.  In one sense it starts at the end.  Shorto’s account begins in 1650.  Descartes is in bed, dying in Pierre Chanut’s house in Stockholm.  Chanut was the French Ambassador to Sweden.  He was Descartes’ friend, and a worried man as it was he who had invited Descartes to visit.  Worse than that, it wasn’t just a very cold winter, but Descartes had earlier nursed Chanut as he’d been the one experiencing a fever, only for Chanut to recover and Descartes to catch the same illness.  In Descartes’ case it was a fever that was to prove fatal.  Christina, the 23 year old Queen of Sweden, had been a source of the invitation to Descartes to come to Stokholm, and she was to send her personal physician in an attempt to aid his recovery.  The physician failed to impress Descartes; he was dismissed, and the philosopher died shortly after.

However, beginning at the end isn’t always a good idea, and in this case misses out on all the activity – and hilarious issues – that surrounded Descartes as he developed his ideas.  Of course, it was relatively early in his career that he explained the result of his intensive introspection was to conclude ‘I think, therefore I am’ – a phrase which became known as cogito ergo sum and is inextricably bound to every account of his work.  His method of exercising doubt was to define this aspect of his work, which was to focus on reason.  However, while that is the Descartes we know about, Shorto makes it clear there is a lot more to be understood about his work and his approach.

In a sense, the trouble started with his book, Discourse on the Method.  He saw this as an opening salvo in a career that was to provide a basis for education, for understanding, and, most important, to replace the received wisdom of his forbears from Aristotle onwards.  Shorto tells us Descartes wanted to “reorient the way every human being thought”, and that meant influencing the approach of learning across all the disciplines pursued at the university, and in particular at the university in Utrecht.  Somewhat unwilling to jump into controversies himself, he allowed proxies to argue his approach.  Early on, this was Regius, the professor of medicine at that university, but they didn’t always agree.  Regius was happy to follow the work of Harvey on such matters as the circulation of blood in the body:  Descartes, beginning a career of arguing with all and sundry, believed the heart wasn’t a pump, as Harvey proposed, but a furnace, heating the blood which caused it to circulate.

However, the core of his approach was doubt, an approach that was almost designed to ensure that he was in conflict with most other people in the university.  They saw him as selling his approach through his own personal magnetism,  “encouraging his followers to forget what they had learnt from the ancient master”.  He was accused of emptying students minds so he could fill them with his own approach.  It was an approach to win friends!

Russell Shorto does go back to the beginning, especially the emergence of Descartes’ thinking.  He also goes well past his life, and we spend much of the book following a detective trail, seeking to find what had happened to his skeleton, and even where his skull ended up once it followed a different route from the rest of his bones.  In fact, Descartes is a small player in this book, which uses the wanderings of his skeleton as a framework to explore the emerging intellectual revolution that was to sweep through Europe.  OK, not sweep, but slowly and often controversially begin to change the intellectual path for academics, thinkers and even religious practitioners in the west.  Above all it is an amusing book, told as a story intended to be funny.  It is an enjoyable read.

However, while amusing, there are times Shorto’s account can be frustrating, as we hop back and forth in time.  It is somewhat odd to find, 154 pages in, that we are, in Shorto’s words, “back to the beginning”.  There is Descartes dying in Sweden and creating something of a problem.  It’s not just that he is far from home, as he was a Frenchman who had lived much of his life in Holland, but he was a Catholic and Sweden was Protestant.  Given his religious character, he is buried in a ‘forlorn’ cemetery, some distance away from Stockholm.  Eventually, sixteen years later, the deteriorating skeleton is disinterred, and the remains put into a two and one half feet copper coffin, ready for it to be transported to France.  This is where we learn that the French Ambassador is given permission “to take, as a personal relic, a bone of the right index finger”!

This is just one part of a very tangled story.  His skeleton got to France, but his skull didn’t make it.  Instead, the captain of the guard watching over the coffin before it was sent south decides on his own initiative that “Sweden should not ‘lose completely the remains of such a famous person’”.  The guardsman, Isaak Planström, kept the skull as “a rare relic of a philosophical saint” for the rest of his life.  However, a merchant, Olof Bång, later collected some property from the estate of a man who had died and owed him money, and one of the items was the skull.  In due course Bång’s son, Jonas Olofsson, was showing the skull to a local headmaster, Swen Hof.  The story has it, perhaps accurately, that Bång wanted to find an appropriate set of words to accompany the skull, which Hof provided, and which Bång wrote on the skull.  There on the skull, with the text in Latin, is a poem ‘celebrating Descartes’ genius and mourning the scattering of his remains.

What did this inscription say?

In Latin –

Parvula Cartesii fuit haec calvaria magni,
exuvias reliquas gallica busta tegunt;
sed laus ingenii too diffunditur orbe,
mistaque coelicolis mens pia semper ovat.

In English –

This small skull once belonged to the great Cartesius,
The rest of his remains are hidden far away in the
land of France;
But all around the circle of the globe his genius
is praised,
And his spirit still rejoices in the sphere of heaven.

Just in case you think that was all, Descartes’ skull has several other pieces of writing on it, most of which are now quite impossible to read.  It sems that once you’ve written something, others follow.  Certainly, that was evidently the case when I was young and in a London park you came across a tree where someone had carved something along the lines of:

PF loves PC

From the moment one such testimony to everlasting love was cut into a tree’s bark, others would follow, despite the fact that the collective effort for memorialise relationships could lead to the tree dying.  At least Descartes’ skull had the attribute of already being dead …  and perhaps that is similar to those people who spray paint their mutual love on walls?

There is much more to Shorto’s story than the adventures of a disembodied skull.  He reveals that Descartes was far from being a shrinking violet.  “He may have shied away from face-to-face confrontation, but his arrogance was rather spectacular, and when crossed he had a deeply malicious streak”.  We read that he considered Fermat’s mathematical endeavours as ‘shit’, and a colleague of his as writing ‘toilet paper’.  Not every comment was scatological, of course, and when writing about Pascal, he suggested that the only vacuum (the subject of the argument they were having) was a vacuum in Pascal’s skull!

He also makes it clear that Descartes had considerable belief in his own excellence, and Shorto remarks that he believed:

“The body was a machine; therefore it simply needs to be understood in all its parts in order for it to work properly.  In this regard, death was tantamount to a malfunction; locate and correct the errors and you solve the problem of death.  Descartes became convinced he would crack the body’s code and extend the human life span as much as a thousand years.  At one point in his career he was certain enough of his progress that he felt he would do it soon, provided, he wrote – and he seems to have missed the joke – that he was not prevented ‘by the brevity of life’”.

However, we also read that this ‘vainglorious’, self-centred and isolated man had one sign of a rather different perspective on family, when he fathered a daughter born out of wedlock.  That child was to be the love of his life, even though he kept the facts of her birth hidden., travelling with the mother, Helena, as his servant, and his daughter Francine as his ‘niece’. However, Francine came down with scarlet fever and died when she was five years old.

There is some evidence that this loss had a lasting effect on Descartes and his work, pushing him to take on physiology and anatomy.  This was to prove important.  Descartes had insisted that the physical and the mental were two distinct substances:  that left him with explaining how they interacted.  The puzzle was clear:  if your body needed food, how did the stomach’s need get transmitted to your mind, and then lead to other actions (walking to get something from a cupboard, for example).  It was his continuing dissections that gave him an answer.

Together with others Descartes noticed there was a small ‘nut shaped structure in the centre of the brain’, the pineal gland, and decided that this was the place where the physical and the mental came together:

“the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which our thoughts are formed.  The reason I believe this is that I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double … moreover it is situated in the most suitable place for this purpose, in the middle of all the [brain’s] concavities; and it is supported and surrounded by the little branches of the carotid arteries, which bring spirits into the brain.”

Overall, Descartes’s Bones is an enjoyable read rather than an academic review.  However, there are a couple of points that do deserve emphasis.  As a man who has been described as a wimp and a menace Descartes influence on philosophy has been considerable.  First and obviously among these, Descartes’ concept of the brain and how it was the focus of  separation between the soul and the physical body created what has proven to be an enduring ‘mind-body’ problem, which is still debated today, especially in contemporary in discussions about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the nature of self.

In referring to its contemporary relevance, this analysis isn’t just a matter of philosophical speculation about the nature of the human mind.  His ideas still influence how we think about everything from health and well-being to personal responsibility and social dynamics.  Often referred to as ‘dualism’, his views stimulate argument and there are continuing attempts and even philosophical justifications to challenging Descartes’ divide.  Indeed, considerable contemporary research is devoted to moving beyond dualism, and to emphasizing that the mind and body are inextricably linked.  Many advocate a more integrated approach, not just as a matter of speculation, but as a basis for developing approaches into such areas as treatment for a variety of mental conditions and illnesses.  While Descartes might have lost his head through events subsequent to his death, his thinking is still alive.

Russell Shorto really is a frustrating writer as he hops between Descartes’ time, the years soon after, and then onto decades and even centuries later.  However, there is a purpose in his approach, as it encourages a focus on issues, rather than following a linear timescale and thereby having to keep several themes together.  That would be a complicated balancing act.

Instead, what he achieves is three fold.  He makes Descartes live, and instead of appearing as a dry yet brilliant philosopher, we begin to learn about the real person.  This is a dilemma, of course, as what is written should stand alone, separately from whether the author is a puritan or a drunkard.  Well, perhaps that is too idealistic a view, but the reality of the author has to be appreciated in a measured way, and not allow it to overwhelm insights and conclusions, even if they might be viewed with suitable caution.

Second, he brings home Descartes impact in a way that academic analyses often fail to achieve.  We get glimpses, albeit rather partially, that illustrate Descartes wasn’t a dry analyst, and that he spent much of his life worrying and hoping.  The worrying was evidence of his recognition that elements of what he had to say needed constant re-examination, and that nuances could sometimes get in the way of clarity.  At the same time, he was a man of curious passions and ambitions, and Shorto illustrates many of these limitations.

Third, the greatest strength of Descartes Bones is that it sets the scene – both for Descartes lifetime, and for the eras that followed – for a time in which ideas, bones, and even a skull wandered around Europe.  This isn’t philosophy, nor is it narrowly written history.  It is more an account of some of the odd figures that played a role in Descartes life and the ideas and controversies they contributed.  It’s a worthwhile book to read, and a good way to make you think about this curious thinker, offering an explanation as to why he is often seen as a wimp and a menace.  He did claim more than was justified, for certain, and he did back away from taking some of his arguments to their logical end, but he was a key thinker in a time of revolutionary ideas.

St Martin’s Cathedral Utrecht

Major cities across Europe become packed in the summer months.  It’s not just Paris, Rome and Berlin:  a day in Vienna, Bucharest or Prague is going to be equally overwhelming, and today the tide of tourists is sweeping through Split, Dubrovnik and Valletta.  Packed cities have to respond to the needs of their visitors, and so the roads in the centre of these cities are lined with shops selling souvenirs, food (tea rooms and cafes offering snacks), and cheap summer clothing alongside the usual range of international fashion stores.  Municipalities are trying to work out how to manage the influx, which often runs for six, eight or even ten months.  Cars may be banned, tourist buses have to go to special areas, and public transport is limited in most inner city areas.  In the centre holidaymakers can be found sitting at a streetside coffee shop while another member of the family braves the flood to go shopping.

So it was in Utrecht in the summer of 2025, as this formerly quiet city in the Netherlands now receives hundreds, no thousands, of enthusiastic visitors.  After a coffee and pastry at the Winkel van Sinkel and continuing to battle through the streets, they can see a church tower behind some of the shops.  It is the 112-metre-high (367 ft) Dom Tower, the hallmark of the city.  Navigating the narrow streets, you eventually arrive at the Domplein, where you realise the church tower is quite separate from the Domkerk, the gothic cathedral!

Well, perhaps we’ll leave that a sight for a moment ‘over there’ and return to the Winkel van Sinkel.  Anton Sinkel was born in 1785, and in 1806 he established a store selling fabrics and textiles.  He was a pioneer in  retail business with his haberdashery store which dealt in clothing fabrics, stockings, hats, and more .  His ambition is described in the popular song “In de Winkel van Sinkel is van alles te koop” (In the Winkel van Sinkel, everything is for sale)”. However, the store became famous because of four caryatids that supported the building’s façade colloquially known as the ‘British harlots’, as “Due to their visible décolleté, these figures were believed to be a potential threat to the moral values of the citizenry.” Today they are seen as less offensive, but according to legend, “only at midnight, the caryatids swiftly and inconspicuously fly across the canal to the opposite side and back again.”

Returning to the cathedral, the best way to see it is from the air, a balloon flight out of the reach of most of us.  However, the proportions become clear, a massive spire towering above much of the city, separated by a small park area, and the other side of the open space the remains of the rest of the church, a major building in its own right, but its height diminished by that spire:

So much for what you see.  The story of St Martin’s is fascinating in its own right.  Wikipedia reveals the first chapel was founded around 630 AD by Frankish clergy, but it was destroyed during an attack shortly after, and its site remains unknown.  It was the beginning of a cycle of rebuilding and destruction.  A second chapel devoted to Saint Martin was built close to the site of the current building soon after, but was destroyed by the Normans during a raid on Utrecht in the 9th century .  It was rebuilt by Bishop Bladeric in the 10th century, by which time St Martin’s had become the principal church of Utrecht, the site of the see of a bishop.

The life of the cathedral remained challenging.  The church was repeatedly destroyed by fires and then rebuilt.  Then Bishop Adalbold built a Romanesque style church, which was  consecrated in 1023, only to be  partially destroyed in the fire of 1253 which ravaged much of Utrecht.  Undaunted, another bishop, Henry van Vianen, began building the next cathedral in 1254. but the  construction of the Gothic style cathedral was to continue into the 16th century.  The work was in stages: the Dom Tower was started in 1321 and finished in 1382.  By 1515 financial difficulties prevented completion of the building, and in 1566, the Iconoclast Fury swept across the region, a movement based on the Calvinist doctrine, which asserted statues in a house of God were idolatrous images which must be destroyed. As a result, many of the ornaments on both the exterior and interior of Utrecht’s cathedral were destroyed.

In 1580 the Utrecht city government decided to delegate some of its controls over the Diocese of Utrecht to local Calvinists, and now it became a centre for Protestant services.  However, the building’s saga continued, and in  1672-3, during the upheavals of the Franco-Dutch War, Catholic Masses recommenced – for two years!  After the French retreat, the unfinished nave collapsed on 1 August 1674 during a massive tornado. From that time on, much of the building fell into further neglect.  Despite significant renovations in the early twentieth century, much was left incomplete and the nave was never rebuilt.

Images and history are important, but both can only offer a partial insight to a place.  However, as the saying goes, ‘you have to be there’.  Visually, there are two very different perspectives on St Martin’s today.  For the visitor to Utrecht standing outside the cathedral area , the only visible perspective from a short distance away is of the tower as it rises above the surrounding buildings.  It soars above the shops and other buildings in the town centre, but you are well aware you are only seeing the upper part of the construction.

Moreover, although you can see it from a distance away, it is hard to reach.  As you get closer, passing the Winkel van Sinkel, it seems to be one of those illusions where the tower retreats behind buildings and never appears to become any closer.  There are some streets that take a straighter line, but for the visitor walking alongside the Oudergracht, which takes a couple of 90° around the area, any direct line of sight at ground level is impossible.

The second perspective is from the Domplein itself.  Once you are there, there are buildings close by to the West and North.  The best perspective is from the South, but even then the tower seems to reach up so high you can’t really encompass what it is like.  It’s an impressive sight, as is the cathedral building and other offices and meeting rooms across the way, but close by the tower rises above any normal sight line.  It is a little frustrating.  In many other cities the authorities, or possibly the church itself, would be able to keep quite a large area clear.  In Utrecht, the height of the tower combined with closeness of the retail area, and some offices, means that a real appreciation of the height is impossible. That balloon flight mentioned earlier would be ideal.

A completely different way of seeing the cathedral is from the inside.  On entering you’re shocked as it appears almost empty.  Just two stained glass windows to grab your attention, and the internal decoration is simple to the point of being austere.  There’s an altar in the Choir, with a beautiful screen and carving behind.  Overall the church has a simple beauty, but it is found in its simplicity, the very opposite of so many cathedrals in other places.

However, then you turn around and see the organ.  The case and pipes are set on one of the side walls, with the keyboards and pedal board below.  Built by Jonothan Batz, the instrument dates from 1831, although it incorporates parts of an earlier organ, built by Pieter Janszoon de Swart between 1569-1571.  It is said to precisely conform to the type of instrument that was being built in the Netherlands throughout the 19th century.  Some research revealed that a “church architect, Tieleman Franciscus Suys, from Brussels, designed the case and ornaments, as well as constructing a small building at the back of the church to house the nine wedge-shaped bellows. The case is in a kind of neo-classical style, although in size and proportion  (the length of many of the front pipes are far longer than what is required for the pitch needed ), not strictly functional.”

Wikipedia advises that the organ had  been superbly designed internally “so that every pipe and each division, with all of its parts can be easily accessed for maintenance and tuning, which was very favourably commented on by probably the greatest organ builder of the 19th century, Aristide Cavaille’-Coll (1811-1899), about the spacious internal layout during a visit he made here in November 1844.”  There were many changes over the years.  Eventually the organ finally “underwent an extensive restoration between 1972-73 by the Van Vulpen company, which replaced all the stops that had been removed over the last 107 years, and a new modern wind supply with internal regulators was built within the main case, because there was nowhere outside to house a bellows chamber based on the space as originally constructed.”

The organ today is said to be widely acclaimed for its “mild tone and expressive tremulants which makes the instrument far more suitable for the late romantic or modern periods of composition, rather than for the strict Baroque counterpoint or fugal music of Buxtehude and Bach.“  It was wonderful to see.  Alas, I don’t know if it was wonderful to hear, as there was no-one playing on the organ, or even practicing when we were there.  Despite this it was a gem in a rather surprising building.

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.

Hagia Sophia

Seeing a great building is a fascinating experience.  By a great building, in this case I mean one that is historic (there is quite a different commentary to be made about seeing a new but equally extraordinary construction, like one of the new Guggenheim museums).  To be clear, there are two reasons to consider a building as ‘great’:  first there are those considered so because of their history, the events in which they have played a part, the people with whom they’ve been associated; and second, those that are great in their own right, architecturally compelling and internally rich in such ways as to be striking, imposing, or simply intriguing.  Quite often the attraction of historic great buildings lies in the stories in which they played a part, the past events in which they were implicated, or even those which were based at home, a resting place or a meeting place, places that mattered in the conduct of human affairs.

This building, the Hagia Sophia, has been important for centuries, as a religious centre, as a landmark, and as a meeting place. The photograph shows it in 2025, with one of its minarets under repair.  If it’s only seen from the outside, the building offers only a limited sense of its amazing interior, and the history that interior reveals.  To the casual external observer, it is big, somewhat squat, with some evidence of its complicated past.  Briefly, from around 360 AD through to 1453 AD (with a few minor interruptions), it was a major Eastern Orthodox church, the greatest in Christendom, with a dome that was unequalled until Brunelleschi’s in Florence in the 15^th Century. One of the Hagia Sophia’s interruptions was between 1204 and 1261 when for a short time it became a Roman Catholic church.  Following that, from 1453 to 1934, it was a Sunni Moslem mosque.  Then, in 1935 it was deconsecrated and became a museum, a major attraction for visitors to Istanbul.  In 2020 it reverted back to being a Sunni mosque once more, but this time one that is still allowing tourists to visit.

For those who might be hoping for a kind of striking beauty, outside it appears to be rather big but not especially graceful.  One of the minarets was under refurbishment in 2025 which was somewhat disconcerting to those who want their travel photographic images to mirror some kind of unrealistic form of perfection.  The reality of repair got in the way!  There are gardens around the building, nicely tended, but unremarkable.  More to the point, the few trees tin the gardens gave rather little shade, in a location that is often hot, and sometimes unrelentingly so.  It is only on entering that you realise the true beauty is inside.

What you see was built by Justinian 1 between 532 and 537 AD and was formerly called the Temple of God’s Holy Wisdom.  It was the world’s largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, and was considered as the quintessential example of Eastern Orthodox church design.  In various iterations it was to remain a religious centre until 1931, when it was closed to the public, only to re-open in 1935 as a museum.  In 2020, it was reclassified back as a mosque, a controversial decision which remains widely debated.  As a major tourist attraction, visitors today can freely enter the first floor of the building, but the ground floor is restricted to worshippers and their invitees.

It is impossible to briefly describe the many features of the Hagia Sophia.  It is regarded as one of the greatest surviving examples of Byzantine architecture.  It used masonry in its construction, but it is the decorations inside that have ensured its fame.  The interior is decorated with mosaics, marble pillars, paintings, and other items of great artistic value. As it was being constructed in the Sixth Century AD, Justinian achieved his vision by his determination to oversee the completion of what was to be the greatest cathedral ever built up to that time.  The basilica was simultaneously the culminating architectural achievement of late antiquity together with being recognised as a masterpiece of Byzantine architectural style. Its influence, both physically and liturgically, has been widespread and enduring .

Of particular interest is the complex structure of the vast interior. The central nave is covered by a huge dome, which rises to 55.6 metres (182 ft 5 in) above floor level and rests on an arcade of 40 arched windows. Not perfect, however, as repairs to its structure have left the dome somewhat elliptical, with the diameter varying between 31.24 and 30.86 metres (102 ft 6 in and 101 ft 3 in).   At the western entrance and along the eastern liturgical side, there are arched openings extended by half domes of identical diameter to the central dome, built up to create an overall vast oblong interior crowned by the central dome with its uninterrupted span of 76.2 metres (250 ft).

The overall design is clearly geometric and is said to be based on mathematical formulae from Heron of Alexandria, which avoided the use of irrational numbers for its construction.  Research suggests the architects used Hero’s proposed values for constructing the vaults. The measurements were calculated using a side-and-diagonal number progression, which results in squares defined by the numbers 12 and 17, with 12 defining the side of the square and 17 its diagonal, numbers which had been used as standard values as early as cuneiform Babylonian texts.  Each of the four sides of the great square at the centre is approximately 31 metres long, previously thought to be the equivalent of 100 Byzantine feet. However recent research has determined the side of the central square of Hagia Sophia is not 100 Byzantine feet but instead 99 feet. This measurement is not only rational, but it is also embedded in a system of number progression (70/99) used in the applied mathematics of antiquity.

Over the centuries, there have been restorations and enhancements.  One remarkable moment was in 1453 when 21 year old Mehmet II decided not to obliterate all the mosque’s Christian mosaics when he conquered Constantinople:  he was not there simply to destroy.  Another and more recent phase was the 19th-century restoration ordered by Sultan Abdulmejid I, which was completed between 1847 and 1849 by eight hundred workers supervised by the Swiss-Italian architect brothers, Gaspare and Guiseppi Fossati.  Given concerns about stability and evident slippage, the brothers consolidated the dome with a restraining iron chain.  At the same time they strengthened the vaults, straightened the columns, and revised the decoration of the exterior and the interior of the building.   Upper gallery mosaics were exposed and cleaned, but many were re-covered ‘for protection against further damage’.

Restoration did more than preserve.  Eight new gigantic circular-framed discs were hung from the cornices on each of the four piers on either side of the apse and the west doors, designed by Kazasker Mustafa Izzet Efendi, and emblazoning the names of Muhammad, Allah, the first four caliphs and the two grandsons of Muhammad.  They are simply stunning.

Given continuing deterioration and problems, the need for restoration continued, aggravated  by decisions like those during in the Second World War when the minarets of the mosque housed machine guns!  Sadly, today the condition of the structure continues to deteriorate, and it was included in the 1996 and 1998 Watch Lists of the World Monuments Fund.  The building’s copper roof had cracked, causing water to leak down over the fragile frescoes and mosaics. Moisture entered from below, increasing the humidity level within the mosque.  Work has been undertaken to repair of the cracked roof, and preserve the dome’s interior.  Despite all the care that has been shown, major problems remain.  Most experts have concluded the dome will collapse soon, a tragic outcome signaling the end of this remarkable building. Thrilling to see, the Hagia Sophia is close to the end of its life, unless amazing and unlikely efforts are made to save it:  indeed some suspect it might collapse before 2040.

The Culture of Hope

As I see it, destiny was determined to make Frederick Turner of interest.  Born in England on 19 November 1943, one day less than a year before me, he soon proved himself to be a wanderer, living in Africa before he went to university (Oxford, not Cambridge!).  He then became a US citizen, and from 1985 was at the University of Texas (after positions at the University of Bath in the UK, and UC Santa Barbara in California).  He is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas.  More to the point, he is a prolific writer, poet and critic.  Among many others, his books include Shakespeare and the Nature of Time; Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science;  Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion and Education;  Beauty: The Value of Values; The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit; Shakespeare’s Twenty-first Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money; On the Field of Life, on the Battlefield of Truth, and  Natural Religion.

There’s much more.  He contributes essays, poetry, reviews, and translations to many periodicals, including Harper’s Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The Wilson Quarterly, Poetry, Reason, Forbes ASAP, Society, The Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, The American Arts Quarterly, Pivot, New Literary History, Oral Tradition, First Things,  The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Missouri Review, The Ontario Review, The National Review, The Partisan Review, Shenandoah, The Stanford Literary Review, American Enterprise, Lapham’s Quarterly, and , believe it or not, many more.   His work has been translated and published in Albanian, French, German, Japanese, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Rumanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and other languages.

He’s a polymath.  He was first known for his Shakespeare criticism and for his scholarship in the field of English Renaissance philosophy.  More recently he has written on Renaissance science and art, Shakespearean theatre and performance, Christopher Marlowe, and explored several Shakespeare plays.  He is a founder of the literary-critical school known as Natural Classicism.  Another emphasis has been on the relationship between science and technology on one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other.  As a result he has been involved in groundbreaking studies of the neurobiology of aesthetics, the ritual and performative roots of the arts, and the humanistic implications of evolution, ecology, recombinant DNA technology, space travel, artificial intelligence, brain science, and chaos theory.  He has been awarded numerous prizes.   Did I say he’s a polymath?

His book The Future of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit assessed the chances for a revival of our cultural energies at the turn of the millennium, based on what was seen as the remarkable new developments in scientific cosmology and technology. It is this book, published in 1995, that is the starting point of these comments.  He made his intentions in writing his book clear:  “When one seeks for radical equality, and a total pruning of the tree of authority, one gets an Oliver Cromwell, a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Lenin, or a Stalin  instead. In recent times, the egalitarian commune movement has given birth to such monstrosities as Charlie Manson and Jimmy Jones.  Any of us who were involved in radical consciousness-raising groups in the sixties, seventies, and eighties can remember the oppressive atmosphere of thought control and authority, the way in which some unacknowledged leader emerged supported by a little coterie of moral enforcers and yes-men, and bullying of the weak or independent.”  He’s not frightened to make his views clear.  He has often been controversial.  He’s the ideal person for my last blog in this current series.

Thirty years ago, Turner proposed a radical agenda in The Culture of Hope, with its telling subtitle – A New Birth of the Classical Spirit.  Why did I read it?  Because he commented “This book is for those who have been shaken out of themselves by art, who have felt a piece of Mozart’s Magic Flute reach out and grab them by the heart, who have seen the grave look on Flora’s face as she steps out of Botticelli’s Primavera the way gods always do, lit by a light too powerful to be quite shown: for those who have heard a line of Shakespeare so that it rang and rang again in their ears – ‘Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul/Of the wide world dreaming of things to come.”  I felt I had to read it!

To continue to quote, but now from the book release:

“Turner recycles some material from earlier university press books for this, his grand synthesis that promises to overcome the stalemate in the culture wars. Proponent of a “third way” or “centrist” position, Turner (Arts and Humanities/Univ. of Texas, Dallas) rehearses the standard complaints about our culture in crisis. Unlike traditional conservatives, though, he ventures a prescription that goes beyond nostalgia for faith and values. A sober critic of the so-called avant-garde, Turner posits a “radical centre”—“a return to classical forms, genres and techniques in the arts” that is grounded in the latest research in anthropology and science. Turner fancies his “reconstructive postmodernism” a new paradigm on the intellectual horizon, and it’s hard to imagine anyone familiar with all the disciplines he brings together in this fascinating, if exhausting, book. A cogent critic of anti-foundationalist thought (be it feminist, Marxist, or linguistic), Turner reaffirms the need for hierarchy in the arts, for logic over force, and for beauty over relativism. His multiculturalism is truly pan-cultural, discovering the transcendent in all cultures. Turner’s idea of a “natural classicism” is remarkably transparent—he locates classical forms in nature itself. Some of his other ideas are a bit obscure, and his tendency toward unrelieved abstraction will turn off sympathetic readers. Turner’s immediate cure for cultural malaise is nothing less than a four-page manifesto that is certain to provoke debate, and his discussion of biology is sure to be used against him, despite his distinctly un-“bell curvish” ideas. Turner’s fictional “fable for the future”—a brave new world that resembles the utopian cyberspace of the Tofflers—flirts with kookiness. A superb critic of trendy feminist and multicultural ideas, Turner deserves a hearing in the ongoing debate: He’s Apollo to Camille Paglia’s Dionysus.”

So what is this Third Way?  A number of contributors to Philosophy Now in October 2019 suggested answers, and a few were published.  The topic was  “How to negotiate a path between capitalist & socialist excesses?   There were many similarities between the views expressed, of which these are just a selection.

Steve Foulger, from London, observed “In political philosophy a ‘Third Way’ is usually taken to mean a position that rejects the extreme views to be found at either end of the left/right spectrum. It is commonly seen as occupying a middle ground, rejecting radicalism. Its proponents often say it offers the best of both worlds, whilst detractors see it, unsurprisingly, as the worst of both.”  …. I believe Third Way proposals should reject the (monist) idea that there is one all-embracing solution to the problems of society, and instead accept value pluralism as its guiding principle. Values are vitally important to people, but they can be contradictory and indeed incommensurable. … my Third Way would involve a radical extension of democratic control into a largely devolved society.”

Similarly, at least to some extent, Jonathan Tipton, from Preston, Lancashire, suggested “In the last twenty five years, the ‘Third Way’ has denoted a distinct political ideology that argues in favour of the free-market, entrepreneurship, and against the nationalisation of industries, whilst still endorsing radical policies of social justice. It is commonly seen as a compromise between right-wing neoliberalism and leftist social democracy.” …

Tipton goes on to observe, “Arguably John Rawls offers the closest thing to a theoretical basis for Third Way values. In his influential book A Theory of Justice (1971), he put forward a thought-experiment, the ‘Original Position’. Imagine, he said, that a society’s values were to be decided by rational individuals behind ‘a veil of ignorance’ which would prevent them knowing anything about what their own place in that society would be, even of their own social status, gender, ethnicity, etc. Rawls thought that concern for their future wellbeing would impel them to create a society that was free-market but with a strong sense of social justice. It would therefore outwardly resemble a society modelled upon the Third Way. Social inequalities such as great wealth would be permitted if and only if they also benefited the least well off, through high taxes, or more employment”.  Appealing to a Rawls fan!…

Another contributor, Ian Rizzo, Zabbar, from Malta, commented:  “If only we could ditch the left-right-centre-populist ideological splits and focus on a Third Way based on reasonable rethinking and strong ethical, humanistic beliefs. …  A Third Way would recognise that the right balance ought to be maintained between markets, the state and the community. Risk should be appropriately rewarded, since the economy needs to be sustained with creativity and self-sufficiency; but not to the detriment of rewarding hard work. … . A Third Way would insist that the key to our wealth and happiness lies in measures to truly improve quality of life for all…  Such an objective can be reached if the Third Way is based on a philosophy where every human being is treated with equal dignity and respect. Tolerance of a diversity of views should go hand in hand with J.S. Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’ (people’s freedom should only be limited to prevent them doing harm to others).”

For Frank S Robinson of Albany, New York, there is a path for a ‘Third Way’ between rapacious capitalism and coercive communism.  “The answer is Enlightenment humanism. This philosophy celebrates the flourishing of individuals, recognizing that the only thing that can ultimately matter is the feelings of beings capable of feeling.  An important part of human flourishing is finding meaning. Most of us want to do that as freely as possible. This doesn’t mean disconnecting from society. Indeed, being embedded in social structures is part of how we flourish and find meaning. So we want a balance between freedom to do our own thing and the societal ties enabling us to relate to others. … Experience and rationality point to a society ruled by laws protecting us from harms by others – including capitalists – while otherwise leaving us as free as possible: free to pursue economic advantage, which makes society richer; and free to pursue happiness in our individual ways.”

Finally, Mark Bennett, Newmarket, ON asks if there is still a basis to strive for a Third Way. “Democracy is now under the influence of consumerism. … We channel our citizenship toward consumerism, giving tacit assent to our government to undergo a process of zoning. As Alain Badiou … reminds us that “1% of the global population possess 46% of the available resources while 50% of the global population possess nothing.  There seems to be no solution other than democracy. So for a Third Way, democracy must undergo an evolution in which we address both environmental and human needs. It must replace the effects of hegemony with a globalized citizenship. Jürgen Habermas writes, “politics must globalize too, in order to rein in the economy. It means expanding politics beyond the nation state”.

Can we have hope?

The Third Way has been defined as: “different and distinct from liberal capitalism with its unswerving belief in the merits of the free market and democratic socialism with its demand management and obsession with the state. The Third Way is in favour of growth, enterprise, entrepreneurship, and wealth creation but it is also in favour of greater social justice and it sees the state playing a major role in bringing this about.”  So as  Anthony Giddens of the LSE has noted: the Third Way rejects the so-called neo liberalism philosophy.  Indeed, the Third Way has been advocated by its proponents as a ‘radical-centrist’ approach, an alternative to both capitalism and what it regards as the traditional forms of socialism.

The more I have read about it, the Third Way has become harder to summarise, partly due to its flexible nature, putting ends before means, and prioritising achieving social justice rather than focusing on the methods by which it could be achieved.  One way to summarise the Third Way is to say it’s about ‘rights with responsibilities’, pairing the right to education with the responsibility to put effort towards achieving good grades.  On economics, a great deal of the emphasis is placed on tax revenue, and the means by which it is generated. The Third Way argues that growth is the best way to raise tax revenue, and that growth can be achieved through a free market economy, fiscal discipline and a ‘healthy human capital stock’.

The Third Way has been advocated by proponents as competitive socialism.  Anthony Giddens has been a prominent proponent of the Third Way, and has suggested it is a modernisation of socialism, achieved through the social democracy movement.  However, he argues that traditional socialist ideology, resting on the direct involvement of the state in economic management and planning, is flawed.  He has argued that justification for the idea of the managed economy barely exists any longer.  In defining the Third Way Blair once wrote: “The Third Way stands for a modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice”, and he added: “The Third Way stands for a modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the centre-left. … But it is a third way because it moves decisively beyond an Old Left preoccupied by state control, high taxation and producer interests; and a New Right treating public investment, and often the very notions of ‘society’ and collective endeavour, as evils to be undone.”

While it sounds encouraging, The Third Way has been criticized as being a vague ideology with no specific commitments:  “The Third Way is no more than a crude attempt to create a bogus coalition between the haves and the haves not:  bogus because it entices the haves by assuring them that the economy will be sound and their interests will not be threatened, while promising the have-nots a world free from poverty and injustice. Based on opportunism, it has no ideological commitment at all.”

All this takes us back to Frederick Turner.  With an undeniable religious underpinning, he argues that a culture of hope has to draw on such matters as the preservation of the richness and variety of life, and suggests we have to replace ‘environmentally unsound technologies with the more efficient, elegant and benign ones that the new science is making possible”.  He is an unashamed ecologist, but above all he seeks “a new aesthetic philosophy, critique, and theology, as humanistic as it is naturalistic, embodied in an art in which all these studies can be guided.”  Is this the voice we heard up to the end of the previous century?  Have we lost the confidence he exhibits?  At the end of this series of blogs, I fear our world has become more hierarchical, more exploitative and less humanistic.  I hope I am wrong.

The Company

There are two usages that dominate the word ‘Company’, one very familiar, and the  other somewhat more limited.  That second usage is American, where The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is often called ‘the Company’ due to its role as the coordinator of intelligence activities and its origins in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).  Indeed, it was first referred to as the Company during World War II.  The wartime OSS was the precursor to the CIA, and as a result the nickname carried over to the newly formed agency.  While The Company is an informal nickname, it reflects the CIA’s central position in the U.S. intelligence apparatus and its historical roots in the OSS.

However, the choice of the nickname influenced by the history of Ivy League universities, especially Yale.  The very first American spies against the British in the War of Independence were educated at Yale.  Further, Russell & Company, the most successful American Company in the opium smuggling business, was very influential in all of the Ivy League universities and the Russell Family played a key role in Yale’s Skull and Bones, from which many went into intelligence.  Gaddis Smith, a History Professor at Yale, said, “Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.” And “Bonesmen” have been foremost among the ‘spooks’ in the building known as the CIA’s ‘haunted house’.  Professor Antony Cyril Sutton of Stanford University wrote a book about how the Skull & Bones club focused on the Hegelian Dialectic: ‘Thesis Vs Antithesis which will create Synthesis’.  “The power elite applied this to Politics & Geopolitics with a few changes, rather than waiting for the Antithesis to evolve naturally, create the Antithesis in the first place and make gains & profits out of the evolving Synthesis. In other words, create a Problem against the established system, learn what type of Reaction will occur, find the Solution, and while achieving that collect the benefits.”

Then there is the more familiar usage, a company being “an organization that produces or sells goods or services in order to make a profit” (from the Cambridge Dictionary).  The word ‘the’ before ‘company‘ is key, of course:  by itself company refers to “the fact or condition of being with others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment’.  When 22 years ago, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldrige combined to write a ‘short history of a revolutionary idea’, The Company they were referring to the organisation (and not the CIA).

At the time, Micklethwait oversaw US issues for The Economist, and Wooldridge was the magazine’s Washington correspondent.  Micklethwait was appointed as editor-in-chief of The Economist in 2006, and in 2015, he was appointed as a Trustee of  the British Museum.  Currently he is the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, a position he has held since 2015.   Wooldridge worked at The Economist for more than 20 years.  In September 2021, he joined Bloomberg Opinionas the Global Business Columnist.

The Company is a fascinating book.  It was reviewed in 2012 in The Ratchet of Technology, by Michael Magoon.  He rated its scope 3.5 stars (out of 5); readability was 4 stars, while his personal rating was 5 stars.  He summarised its ideas in six key points.  First, he suggested it could be regarded as the most important organization in the world, concluding the modern company brought together three big ideas: “it could be an ‘artificial person’  with the same ability to do business as a real person; it could issue tradable shares to any number of investors; and investors could have limited liability.”

He went on to add some other factors.  He suggested that the modern corporation, invented in 19^th-Century Britain, has slowly spread throughout the world.  Americans added on some key attributes, that it employed professional salaried managers; that many had wide networks of suppliers; and it was organised into various operating units.  Later developments in Germany and Japan in particular enhanced the corporate model by utilising bank financing, largely through investment banks, and by focussing on developments based on connections with technical universities, combined with their own research and development labs.  In more recent decades the model has been complicated by developments such as the increasing use of lean manufacturing techniques, and by acquisition and selling by corporate raiders.  Today, especially in the West, it is often seen as the most important form of organization in the world.  Regulation has grown, and Companies Acts rapidly emerging in many countries, allowing entrepreneurs to raise money, safe in the knowledge that investors had protections.

Time has seen other gradual changes appear.  A company’s past is often more dramatic than its present, despite alarmist accounts in books like Barbarians at the Gate and Only the Paranoid Survive.  Many would also argue that, in general, companies have become more ethical, more honest, more humane, more socially responsible. The early history of companies was often one of imperialism and speculation, of frequent disasters, even the use of slavery and opium.  Generally free from these and other historical hangovers, the company today has given the West great competitive advantage. Finally, in more recent years we have seen a cluster of competing companies creating an innovative economy, like Silicon Valley.

As Micklethwait and Wooldridge make clear, today’s modern company has a long, varied and sometimes fascinating history.   In the early Middle Ages, the law began to recognize the existence of “corporate persons”: loose associations of people who wished to be treated as collective entities. These corporate persons included towns, universities, and religious communities, as well as guilds of merchants and tradesmen.  The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of some remarkable business organisations: ‘chartered companies’ that bore the names of almost every part of the known world (“East India,” “Muscovy,” “Hudson’s Bay,” “Africa,” “Levant,” “Virginia,” “Massachusetts”).  Many were the lucky recipients of royal charters giving them exclusive rights to trade in specific areas.

These chartered companies also drew on two other ideas . The first was offering investment shares that could be sold on the open market. The other was limited liability. Colonization was so risky that the only way to raise large sums of money from investors was to protect them.  Approaches varied.  The Dutch East India Company obtained a monopoly from the state in 1602 and became a model for many chartered firms.  Investors were the first to trade their shares at a stock exchange:  the first was founded in 1611. Using a slightly different approach the English East India Company initially treated each voyage as a separate venture.

In the journal Medium, Rohan Murdeshwar, (on May 9, 2020) reviewed The Company, and noted: “One theme that flows through the book is the relationship between companies and the state. Between 1500 and 1750, the British and Dutch East India Companies grew to behemoths on the back of state-sanctioned monopoly power. Unlike their counterparts in the south of the continent, Northern European nations ‘subcontracted imperialism’ to privately owned companies resulting in a symbiotic relationship between company and state. The company was given monopoly rights and the state obtained a steady stream of revenue from the trade that followed.  Politicians in governments also received lucrative shares in the monopolies they’d delivered to the world, the world‘s first taste of crony capitalism.”

By the first half of the nineteenth century, the state began to step back, at first in the United States of America. There were three prompts for change. The most important was railroads, which by 1840 needed funds to build thousand miles of track to establish the bare bones of a national network.  This could only be financed by chartered joint-stock companies. The second was legal. In an 1819 ruling about the status of Dartmouth College, the Supreme Court found that corporations of all sorts possessed private rights, so states could not rewrite their charters capriciously. The last prompt was political. Concerns over losing potential business led legislatures to loosen control over companies.

However, these development were still a long way from modern shareholder capitalism. British law provided remarkably little protection for shareholders.   It was not until 1897, when the House of Lords ruled in favour of a leather merchant who had transferred his assets into a limited company, that the separate legal identity of the company, and the “corporate veil” of protection that it offered to its directors, was firmly established in UK law.

Why did these extraordinary organisations take off when they did? Alfred Chandler provided the classic answer: “Modern business enterprise” became viable “only when the visible hand of management proved to be more efficient than the invisible hand of market forces.” First, a new system of transport and communication was necessary.  The railroads were not just great enablers for modern business; they were also the first modern businesses.  The first American companies to take advantage of the railway infrastructure were in distribution and retailing.  In 1840, most goods were distributed around the country through a system of wheeling and dealing. Within a generation, distribution was dominated by giant companies. The 1850s and 1860s saw huge wholesalers emerge buying directly from producers and selling to retailers. Next modern mass retailers emerged, chain stores, department stores, and mail-order companies.  Integrated companies dominated most vital industries by the turn of the century.

From the middle of the 19th century to the early years of the twentieth, different approaches to capitalism across the world gave birth to different types of companies.  American and capitalism enthusiastically embraced each other, with a combination of light regulation, a scientific approach to management and a growing acceptance of business seeing the rise of large vertically integrated multidivisional firms. Across the Atlantic, a preference for small family firms meant British companies failed to develop the managerial expertise needed in in a globalising world. This was exacerbated by a “fatal snobbish distaste for business”.

In Germany and Japan, where companies were meant to serve the nation, stakeholder capitalism triumphed over shareholder capitalism. For example, capitalism in Germany “emphasised cooperation rather than competition”. The state took a leading role by legalising collusion and encouraging cartels as the resulting agreements on prices and output “benefited the country as a whole”.  Company boards included representatives from lenders, unions and government. Japan’s family-owned conglomerates, the zaibatsu, adopted western methods and hired managers from outside the family to run their business that “operated in a bewildering number of industries”. They were helped by the government which showered them with subsidies and put money into infrastructure, universities, helping business and offered credit.

America’s analytical approach to business takes us to the third theme in the book and the reason why American companies superseded their British counterparts in the early 20th century. The authors argue that the multidivisional firm, pioneered in the 1920s at General Motors, put American companies on the fast track to global domination. A centralised corporate strategy together with the latest “management science”, worked together like a well-oiled machine. Markets were segmented so that there was a car for “every purse and purpose” (General Motors), delivery trucks were painted with a strict shade of red (Coke) and “brand management” identified everyday items in people’s homes (Procter & Gamble).  Britain was reluctant to establish companies. Germany and Japan embraced the idea, but tried to twist it to rather different ends, such as workers’ welfare and the quest for national greatness.  British entrepreneurs clung to the personal approach long after American businesses had embraced professionalism. As late as 1939, a remarkable number of British firms were still managed by founding family members.  Germany’s companies were focussed on the new economy, especially metals, chemicals, and machinery. Both countries emphasised cooperation rather.

A second difference was the influence of the big banks. Germany’s capital markets were too localized and inefficient to power its industrialization. Germany’s bankers stepped into the breach by forming joint-stock and limited-partnership banks that duly channelled money from savers of all sorts, first into the railways and then, after the railways were nationalized in 1879, into young industrial companies like Siemens.   Germany’s success might owe less to stakeholder capitalism than to other practical issues. The first was emphasising scientific and vocational education, and technical universities acted as both research agencies and recruiting grounds.  German firms also developed internal laboratories investing in research and development.  Second was the relatively high respect accorded to managers.  Japan’s approach  had many similarities to Germany’s.  It embraced a conception of the company that combined up-to-date professionalism with a pronounced nationalism.  Mitsubishi was the model for the zaibatsu, Japanese conglomerates (“financial cliques”) that dominated business in the country until the Second World War (and were subsequently reborn as keiretsu.

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the gradual separation of ownership from control.  By 1920, the ‘Company Man’ combined professional standards and corporate loyalty:  he was defined by credentials rather than by lineage or collective muscle.   The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of Company Man, or Organization Man, as he became known.  Then came change.  The rate at which large American companies left the Fortune 500 increased fourfold between 1970 and 1990.  Big became a code for inflexibility. In 1974, America’s one hundred biggest industrial companies accounted for 35.8 percent of the country’s GDP; by 1998, that figure had fallen to 17.3 percent. Companies were gradually forced to focus on their “core competencies.”

Next came Silicon Valley which changed companies in two ways. The first was through the products it made. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the cost of computing processing tumbled by 99.99%, 35% a year. Computers offered increasing power, while the growing Internet reduced transaction costs.  It also changed the company with an alternative form of corporate life. The Valley epitomized the idea of “creative destruction” with much of the Valley’s growth coming from gazelle companies, firms whose sales had grown by at least 20% in each of the previous four years.

The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea is just that, too brief a book to answer pressing questions that businesses and society are asking today: Who are companies meant to serve? How should governments regulate monopolies? And what do companies need to do to make profits without destroying the planet? Rather than provide original insight, the authors summarise research by previous business historians.  However, the book’s well worth re-reading now, as the study of the past offers insights into organisations that have become increasingly important to understand in solving the problems of the present.

DD82 – Gods and Robots

It is hard not to be fascinated by robots, machines that are capable of carrying out complex actions automatically, not under the immediate control of a human.  Although some robots are constructed to resemble people, most are task-performing machines designed with an emphasis on functionality, with little regard for aesthetics.  Going back to ancient civilisations, there have been accounts of user-configurable automated devices resembling humans and other animals, many in the form of animatronics, primarily developed as a form of entertainment. In more recent times it was electronics that enabled the development of robots, right back to those three-wheeled tortoise robots created by William Grey in 1948.

Today robots are familiar, especially after visits to manufacturing facilities.  They have replaced humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks, often those that people prefer not to do or avoid because of the limitations of size.  It is also the case that  recent years have seen increasing concerns over the use of robots and their role in society. Robots are blamed for rising unemployment, and their use in various forms military combat have raised ethical concerns. The possibilities of robot autonomy and potential repercussions have been addressed in fiction and may be a realistic concern in the future.

It is easy to assume that robots are a Twentieth Century development.  However, many ancient mythologies referred to artificial people, such as the mechanical servants built by the Greek god Hephaestus (or Vulcan in Roman times), the clay golems of Jewish legends, let alone the story of Galatea, the  mythical statue of Pygmalion.  In the 4th century BC, a Greek mathematician, Archytas of Tarentum suggested a mechanical steam-operated bird he called ‘The Pigeon’, later followed by such writers as Philo of Byzantium, who made a washstand automaton, and Hero of Alexandria, an inventor who created several user-configurable automated devices, and went on to describe machines powered by air pressure, steam and water, including a ‘speaking’ automaton.  Not just the Greeks.  In ancient China, the 3rd-century text of the Lie Zi describes an account of humanoid automata developed by Yan Shi for the Chinese emperor King Mu of Zhou.  To my surprise, I read the 5th century BC philosopher Mozi contributed to invention of artificial wooden birds (ma yuan) that could fly.

All this is the background to Adrienne Mayor’s 2018 book, Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (published by Princeton University Press).  She reveals that first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine wasn’t created in MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. As she points out “More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, ‘life through craft’.”  In her nicely illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the surprising story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements, and how these visions reflect the invention of real animated machines.

To quote from her preface: “As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for making automata. Mythic animations appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human technicians used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices weren’t just imagined but actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, [perhaps] the original Silicon Valley.”

The word “robot” will soon celebrate its 100th anniversary, as it was coined in 1920 by Czech writer Karel Čapek. But our enduring interest with self-moving devices, or automata, is far older. In her book classicist and science historian Adrienne Mayor surveys the many living statues, robotic warriors, and artificial devices that populated Greek mythology to show the deep roots of our fascination with beings “made, not born”.  However, I should make it clear that Mayor, who is a researcher in the history of science, is not offering a broad historical overview of ancient automata, as her book is largely about Greek mythology, with only some material from ancient India and China.  If you are interested in mediaeval automata, this isn’t the book for you:  she doesn’t even mention Leonardo da Vinci.

Indeed, in the spirit of further clarification, I should explain that the focus of  Gods and Robots is on myths and the dreams of the subtitle, rather than on the machines. As Mayor explains, the ancient Greeks imagined their gods capable of crafting robots without necessarily explaining how these were supposed to work (obviously the gods’ expertise is beyond scrutiny!).  However, this is a serious and scholarly account, coming from Princeton University Press, and it provides us with interesting look into the minds and thoughts of some fascinating ancient Greeks.  Mayor opens with the bronze giant Talos who was said to patrol the borders of Crete. Despite his origins, he turns out to be susceptible to all-too-human ruses and is destroyed by removing a bolt in his ankle, suggesting similarities to the story of Achilles. This causes him to “bleed out” his ichor, a vital substance akin to blood.

An important figure is Daedalus, a prolific tinkerer.  Mayor reminds us that, as with much about the ancient world, the surviving literature and other evidence is incredibly fragmentary, so opinions are divided on whether Daedalus was a real person, a mythical character, or even a group of inventors.  It is an excellent example of her cautious approach.  Indeed, some of the content also makes you wonder whether her book should have a content warning.  She advises us that “the adulterous King Minos, who ruled over the same Crete patrolled by the above Talos, was cursed by his wife Pasiphae. Any attempt at extra-marital sex would result in him ejaculating scorpions, millipedes, and snakes. Pasiphae, in turn, was punished by Zeus to lust after a bull in Minos’s herd. To satisfy her cravings she turns to Daedalus to make her a hollow replica of a cow that she can crawl into and that the bull can then mount.”  Those who working in the livestock industry and who use similar devices to collect bulls semen for artificial insemination might want to ponder some claims about the roots of their profession.

Only some authors have an (often much needed) sense of humour.  That this is true in this case is evident when you read some of Mayor’s commentaries in her book .  For example, she notes Daedalus was so good at making his statues life-like that the theme of statues escaping their plinths became, well, a recurring element in period dramas. But it also led to Socrates questioning whether such automata should be tethered to prevent them from escaping like runaway slaves. Mayor sees many parallels to current conundrums. Are we comfortable considering robots and artificial intelligence (AI) as property, or even as slaves? And who, then, is responsible for their actions? Early accidents with self-driving cars have already shown that this is no mere academic question.

In God and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor opens up ancient history to new interpretations by adopting a rather capacious definition of technology, one that many scholars of the ancient world—according to Mayor—may reject out of hand. Focusing on biotechne, or artificial life, Mayor accepts any figure from the texts and artifacts of the ancient world which was “made, not born” as a technological creation.  Though many of Mayor’s subjects—such as Talos, mentioned before, the bronze automaton that defended Crete from outsiders—were made through divine processes apparently unknown to humans, Mayor argues that ancient cultural constructions of technology were less about the inner workings of a black box (e.g., a giant metal robot) than about the imagining of such things existing in the first place. As Mayor writes, “Ideas about creating artificial life were thinkable long before technology made such enterprises possible. The myths reinforce the notion that imagination is the spirit that unites myth and science”. Yet such an interpretation of these ancient stories raises the question of whether it is not precisely the inscrutable nature of so many technologies that encourages us to, like the Titan Epimetheus, accept them into our lives and societies with little forethought.

Of course, the ancient Greeks could not have predicted the rise of the godlike techno-capitalists of the early twenty-first century, not to mention our relatively unbridled embrace of their freely-given technological wonders. Nonetheless, the idea that we might not so eagerly trust those more powerful than us is central to the character of technological myths through the ages. In Gods and Robots, Mayor offers a new interpretation of many texts and artifacts from ancient mythologies and cultures.  She opens up new ways of thinking about some very old cultural considerations of the relationship between technology and culture. As Mayor argues in the epilogue, technological wonder “might seem a uniquely modern response to the juggernaut of scientific progress in the age of technology” but an ambivalent fascination with technology “surfaced thousands of years ago in the ancient Greek world”.

In nine chapters, Mayor recasts various myths and figures of the ancient Greek world in this new light. The aforementioned myth of Talos represents an early expression of the idea that a sort of independent, if limited, form of life might be replicated through technology. Likewise, Medea luring Pelias into a “cauldron of rejuvenation” represents a forebearer of the “hope and horror [that] still coexist in modern Western reactions to ‘playing god’ with science” (page 42). Mayor also finds evidence for earlier technologies in Celtic and Norse mythology, calling the goddess Freyja an “organic cyborg” (page 68). Ancient “techne-pornography” can be traced back at least as far as the myth of Pasiphae, in which Daedalus—he of the wax wings and Minotaur—built what Mayor calls a “realistic, life-size sex toy” (page 71). Early philosophical writings on the nature of automata, Mayor argues, presaged the complex work of more contemporary philosophers and ethicists on artificial intelligence. Ancient anxieties about how artificial images and beings could seem eerily lifelike find their contemporary analogy, here, in the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. Mayor finds some unnerving references to these myths in the contemporary world, such as TALOS, a “computerized exoskeleton” being developed by the U.S. military (page 138). Each of the chapters is illustrated with reproductions of ancient art representing the myths under discussion.

But as Mayor’s overarching interpretation of the relationship between myth and technology suggests, Gods and Robots is more about ancient Greek imaginings of technology—or how “mechanical technology, evoked sebas, thauma, and thambos . . awe, wonder, and astonishment” (page 102)—than it is about how technology has been wielded as a form of power, both in these stories and in the cultures in which these stories circulated. However, technology and myth do not act as mere vessels for the imagination. For instance, Pygmalion sculpted a sort of semi-living statue that pleased him in a way that “vulgar real women” could not (107). What does this story say about the ancient Greek world’s understanding of who could claim technological power and how that power had been or ought to be wielded?

Among her many fascinating exegeses of ancient myths, Mayor acknowledges these are often focussed on power and technology, noting, for example, that “one of the essential motivations for the creation of machines and robots is economic” (page 152). It’s a pity that, building on this text, she didn’t explore this motivation further, as she covers mythic and factual material in the context of these narratives.  Despite this, Gods and Robots is a revealing account of how technology has functioned in both ways from the beginning of recorded history.

It is easy to get swept up by the stories Mayor uses to illustrate her study of technology and ‘magical transformations’.  However, to do so is to miss the point.  As in so many other ways, her book reveals an important truth, which is that so much of what we think of as modern thinking finds echoes in ideas form 2,500 years ago.  What is old becomes new each time we re-discover themes.  Major does go outside classical Greece, and in one case study looks at Qin Shi Huang , an early emperor in China.  Back in 219 BC, he sent people (‘three thousand young people’) to discover the elixir for immortality.  He failed, and it seems such searches end up in failure, as immortality of the body (and mind) seems impossible.  Indeed, it appears the dream of eternal and ageless life never goes away – it‘s still with us in 2025, with some of the new ‘super-heroes’ of the virtual computer technologies seeking ways to live for ever.

In one section she touches on another dream , that of enhancing ourselves, finding ways, through technology to be like other members of the animal kingdom.  In Roman times one example was the story of Daedalus who focussed this energies on creating wings for humans, his way to save Icarus.   His attempt failed because the wax he used to fix the feathers to his artificial wings melted as Icarus strayed too close to the sun.  It was an improbable story, but it has left us with that image of many dangers in ‘flying too close to the sun’.

If we stand back from the various stories and myths she relates, Mayor’s book is a thoughtful piece about the ongoing desire humans possess to step beyond their limitations.  We can go down deep in oceans, fly, and even travel away from the earth.  However, this is only because we sit inside inventions that are designed to protect us.  We remain weak, easily crushed., killed and readily eaten, our only hope to build artificial carapaces to protect us.  It’s not surprising, those ancient Greek and Roman dreams of changing our bodies live on.

Mayor writes of the “tensions and gaps between imagination and actuality, representation and reality”, an issue that somewhat mirrors William Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, which ends with Leontes, the King of Sicily encountering a statue of his wife Hermione, whom he had had unjustly executed years before for an infidelity of which she was innocent. Standing before the sculpture of Hermione, Leontes mournfully intones “Still, methinks, /There is an air comes from her! What fine chisel/Could ever yet cut breath?”  Suddenly, Helios arrives on his chariot and the statue of Hermione comes to life and embraces her husband.?

After reading Mayor, perhaps we should think of Hermione in a third way, as an Artificial Intelligence programmed with the consciousness of Hermione, encased in the body of a robot shaped like a woman. Such robots (and their ancestors) have always existed in that uncanny valley between the inert and the living, the artificial and the natural, the human and the divine. They encourage a sense of wonder, with a god from the machine emerging above an Athenian stage, or a statue coming to life in a Sicilian workshop, or in any of the innumerable dreams and myths which animated both classical and the contemporary minds.  The idea won’t go away.