Follies of the wise men
In Humans, Tom Phillips, a journalist and former editorial director of BuzzFeed UK, chronicles humanity’s myriad follies down the ages with malicious glee and much wit and humour. As he points out, Homo Sapiens in Latin means “wise man”, but humans come through in the book as a species whose actions no doubt inspired Murphy’s Law which, bluntly put, says that if anything can go wrong, it will.
Mr Phillips is a confirmed sceptic. The sum and substance of Humans is that if we try making sense of the world, our brains let us down; we regularly make a complete mess of the places we live in; we have a long history of getting into pointless wars; and science and technology may usher in rapid change and innovation, but invariably offer exciting new ways for humanity to fail — perhaps as a result of the law of unintended consequences.
A particularly striking example is that of Thomas Midgley, the man who invented leaded petrol (during a search for an anti-knocking agent for car engines) and CFCs (in his search for a cheap, supposedly non-toxic refrigerant) in the 1920s. The first was a deadly pollutant, and the second began destroying the earth’s ozone layer. Small wonder that one journal described him as “a one-man environmental disaster”. Mr Phillips ranks him as one of the most catastrophic individuals who ever lived — until one day in 1944 he made his last “mistake”. Paralysed below the waist from childhood, he had built an elaborate system of pulleys to lift himself out of bed and avoid depending on others. That day, things went wrong and he was found strangled to death by the ropes of his own device — another unintended consequence of one of his innovations.
Humanity’s biggest mistakes have been made when messing with nature. For example, Mao Zedong decreed in 1958 that sparrows must be exterminated because they ate up grain that should rightfully go to humans. With one billion sparrows having been killed, there was nothing to stop locusts from destroying China’s crops. The famine that ravaged China between 1959 and 1962 claimed between 15 million and 30 million lives. It was a great leap back for the newly industrialising country. But the lesson wasn’t learnt; when the SARS virus broke out in 2004, the Chinese government ordered the mass extermination of mammals ranging from civet cats to badgers.
There is an example from the nineteenth century, involving an Englishman named Thomas Austin, who settled in Australia and has the distinction of having created that country’s rabbit menace. An avid hunter, he imported 24 English rabbits into the state of Victoria in 1859. They bred like, well, rabbits, and by 1870 two million rabbits were being shot each year in the state. By the 1920s, Australia’s rabbit population was estimated at 10 billion. Eventually, it was the accidental release into the wild in 1995 of rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus created by Australian scientists that brought the rabbit population under control — but what other side effects the pathogen will have is not known yet.
Even as Mr Phillips was typing away, activities were being undertaken that in hindsight may turn out to be costly mistakes. For instance, in April this year, it was decided to re-open a previously closed coal-fired power plant in Australia to provide cheap power to a company mining cryptocurrency (large amounts of power are needed to run the data centres devoted to cryptomining, as well as to cool them as they overheat). In a bubble reminiscent of America’s gold rush of the 1840s, cryptocurrency firms are also investing hundreds of millions of dollars to create power-hungry cryptomines in small country towns in several western American states — and this despite the fact that such currencies have found hardly any mainstream acceptance.
A chapter on assorted kings and other leaders features a bizarre cast of characters. One of these is King Farouk, installed on the throne of Egypt by Britain. He was an indefatigable pickpocket, and once nicked Churchill’s watch at a meeting during World War II. He even had one of Egypt’s notorious pickpockets released from prison, so that he could teach him how to steal things better. And once waking up after a nightmare in which he was attacked by lions, he promptly had himself driven to Cairo’s zoo and shot all the lions.
Humans is admirably wide-ranging in its portrayal of humanity’s mistakes. The style is glib and facetious, the language blunt, direct and irreverent (even rude), the content entertaining.
But only the treatment is humorous; Mr Phillips’ intent couldn’t be more serious, with the consequences of many human actions still playing out.
The bibliography is remarkably brief — all of a page-and-a-half, with nine books listed. Mr Phillips assumes that history writers may not have got it all correct, and concedes the possibility that Humans itself may contain bits where he could have gone horribly wrong. But the book is a rib-tickling page-turner, and readers won’t mind.
HUMANS
A Brief History of How We F---ed It All Up
Tom Phillips
Hachette India
258 pages; ~499