Don’t eat the soap

What would an ancient Egyptian know of a telephone by looking at it? What would a Roman or a Greek make of a jet plane, or of radio? Or, coming right down to the simple things, if you saw a slab of chocolate for the first time you might think it was for mending shoes, lighting the fire, or building houses – about the last thing you’d think was that that hard brown rectangle was meant for eating – and when you did find it out, you’d most likely try eating soap, too, because the texture was similar and the colour was more attractive.

John Wyndham - The Seeds of Time (1956)

These historical speculations are so common that it is easy to forget how dramatic their implications are. Our super-complex technical world evolved with extraordinary rapidity but it is not easy to say why. Any explanation is untestable and to that extent unsatisfactory. 

The implications are equally interesting but equally unsatisfactory. We did not evolve within this modern technical environment and it is fairly obvious that we still think in pre-modern ways, tribal ways which no longer work as they evolved to work.

For example, the chattering classes deplore those who in their view are irredeemably tribal in their social and political outlook. Yet there is no tribe more tribal than the chattering classes. Outsiders who do not speak their language are unwelcome, inferior, barbarian oiks from the wrong tribe camped on the wrong side of the tracks.

There is an underlying element of fear too, but a fear which cannot be admitted. The chattering classes see outsiders as somewhat mysterious and unpredictable - weird people who know how to get things done, how things really work. Difficult people who dabble in the dark arts of integrity and even honesty.

It may well be that we should acknowledge our tribal evolution and accept that it has not disappeared so we may as well make the best of it. As for the chattering classes, that is one tribe we could do without - considering the problem from a tribal point of view.