I was back in the archives this week, working on some loose ends regarding J. Bruce Wallace.
J. Bruce Wallace favoured Alfred Russel Wallace's Land Nationalisation scheme but in the meantime he threw his energy into establishing a mutual co-operative that used its own 'labour notes' currency, something he thought would be 'the easiest road to socialism'.
After feeling that his Brotherhood Trust was losing sight of its original principles, he set up a new co-operative, the Mutual Service Circle, before going back to his anti-industrialist roots by getting more fully involved with the Letchworth Garden City movement. His periodical, Brotherhood, then became the organ of the Alpha Union, Wallace's means of bringing Theosophy to Letchworth.
I was interested to see, then, that today's Guardian has an article proclaiming that 'Planners are going back to the ideals of Victorian model towns to meet the present-day challenges of community cohesion and environmental sustainability'.
The article quotes Jody Aked, project manager at the New Economics Foundation's Centre for Well-being, who says that 'nothing makes us glummer than the daily commute'. One US study showed that 'of all daily activities, commuting was the one that led to the least happiness – sex was the one that led to most'.
Taking the analytical methods of economic science and applying them to the maximisation of happiness and well-being, rather than wealth, was exactly what the Christian Socialists of my period were trying to do.
But I came across something new after reading about Red Plenty, a new book by Francis Spufford that re-examines the Soviet Union, and how it was regarding in the West, in the late 1950s and early 1960s - a time he calls 'The Soviet Moment'.
The extract (again, in the Guardian) talks about cybernetics, a term once used to refer loosely to science and engineering in the USSR but which had developed globally into the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems.
Cybernetics is applied now to computer science, biology, mathematics, sociology and more (Spufford seems to suggest that it might lay the foundations for an alternative to the consumer market) - but a bit of digging revealed that the study of corrective feedback mechanisms had a history.
It turns out that the way that James Watt's steam engines regulated their own speed was identified as an example of the principle of evolution by... Alfred Russel Wallace!
In an unpublished paper that he sent to Darwin in 1858, called On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type, Wallace wrote:
The action of this principle [of natural selection] is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow.
And if that wasn't enough to show that the ideas of Christian Socialists are still talked about today, just before his bit about steam engines Wallace wrote that
"Neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for the purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of food were thereby enabled to outlive them."
- an idea that Mark Evans and Joy Reidenberg were at pains to point out in last week's Inside Nature's Giants on More Four. (They also proposed that the long neck's role in fighting for the right to mate with the group's females might, in fact, be the way in which natural selection occurred in giraffes.)
Why does nobody seem to remember Alfred Russel Wallace?
In short: 1) He didn't publish his stuff until after Darwin, and 2) because his spiritualist and socialist beliefs may have been a sticking point for the scientific community.
That Richard Dawkins appears alongside the scientists in Inside Nature's Giants is clearly an attempt to show that natural selection debunks intelligent design.
But while I agree with their stance, I think it might do more harm than good to gloss over the fact that, historically speaking, for a lot of people the principle of natural selection did not suddenly shatter their religious mindset. Instead they did what people had done for centuries: they integrated the new science into their religious vision of the world.
Richard Dawkins strove to point out that natural selection wasn't a perfect system; while it allowed animals to better adapt to their environment, it also reproduced their deficiencies, it remembered the mistakes. When constructing our histories of ideas in society, we should also remember the 'mistakes' as well as the moments of progress.
Some bits from the City planning article below; full article here.
Do you have a long commute to work? If so, you're a dinosaur – your ways will soon become extinct. Or perhaps you cycle or walk to work, but return in the evening to a neighbourhood containing few friends or co-workers. If so, that lost sense of community is being linked to health and well-being issues. Worse still, those homeworkers hibernating away from human contact. The answer? The Victorian philanthropists' model towns such as Saltaire and Letchworth Garden City. Let me explain.
For those unfamiliar with the great Victorians such as Titus Salt and Ebenezer Howard, the founders of the above mentioned towns respectively, their ideas were as simple as they were revolutionary. Driven by religious conviction and appalled by the squalor and destitution urban workers were subjected to in the industrial age, they designed towns and factories. Clean and safe, arranged around green leafy surroundings, with schools and communal institutes a short walk from the mill or factory. Other new towns followed, such as Port Sunlight on Merseyside and Bournville in Birmingham...
...
However, the ideas and ideals behind their construction are beginning to re-emerge. The urban expansion of the industrial revolution is happening again in the developing world, most notably in China, prompting the same questions about provision for workers. Europe and America are reflecting on their own cities and workplaces, and questioning their appropriateness for the challenges of our age; health and happiness, community cohesion and environmental sustainability.
In terms of health and happiness, according to Jody Aked, project manager at the New Economics Foundation's Centre for Well-being, nothing makes us glummer than the daily commute. "A study in the US of 900 or so participants showed that, of all daily activities, commuting was the one that led to the least happiness – sex was the one that led to most," she says.
On top of that, replacing a car with a bike or a swift pair of feet will yield obvious health benefits: "The extent to which we engage with our surroundings, and walk instead of taking a car, has a positive impact on how we experience our lives."
...
Little is being planned along similar lines in the UK, other than the Prince of Wales's commendable, yet not entirely successful, Poundbury. Former prime minister Gordon Brown's plans for eco-towns appear to have been shelved, replaced by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith's wish for communities to be broken up, replaced by economic nomads roaming around in search of jobs.
Intriguingly, we don't have to go far back into our social history to find strong live/work communities. The mining towns killed off by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s ticked many boxes. If such communities were rebuilt on a larger scale, and this time offered diverse, safe and satisfying work, then you'd have the ingredients for happiness and productivity.
The Victorian visionaries knew it and today's architects know it: "The early 21st-century city's high density/low public transportation model is not responding to what we might call 'happiness generation'," says Diamond.
No comments:
Post a Comment