Anti-Struldbrug by Will Self

dear jim,

If I might be so familiar — we met briefly, once, at the Conway Hall in London about five years ago, where you were in conversation with the philosopher, John Gray, who’s a mutual friend. I’m afraid I can’t remember what, if anything, transpired between us: it was one of those backstage encounters, with people milling around, and it hardly seemed the right time to tell you what a huge admirer I am of your work. Such gush would be, I suspect, anathema to an independent thinker of your stripe and besides, given you’re nearly twice my own age, I would probably appear to you as something of an irrelevance: a sublunary creature, dancing to an ephemeral drumbeat, whereas for decades now you’ve been fixated clearly on the stars and eternity.

Your Gaia theory, beautiful in its simplicity, suggests that Earth is a self-regulating organism that promotes biodiversity as part of maximising its own lifespan. Such has been the duration of your own life that your formulation of this hypothesis belongs to your distant middle years, when you were working for Nasa. Indeed, it was your viewing of the celebrated “Earthrise” photographs, taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts, that impressed upon you the unavoidably unitary and interdependent nature of life on Earth, together with the colossal strangeness of our vivified planet in a cosmos otherwise seemingly barren.

But you were never in the least bit hippydippy about Gaia; the name may’ve been suggested to you by the novelist William Golding — who grasped that your notion had parallels with the ancient Greeks’ conception of an earth goddess — but the theory is firmly based in observable data. This is only as it should be, given your own career in scientific research which

began during WWII when you worked at the National Institute of Medical Research. From a relatively humble background, you studied first at night but went on to earn a degree in chemistry and a doctorate in medicine.

You were involved in research that pointed the way towards cryogenics — almost as if you anticipated your own extendable lifespan — and also invented an early form of the microwave oven. Indeed, it was your capacity to come up with brilliantly engineered solutions that drew Nasa’s attention to you. For them, you adapted an electron capture detector you’d already invented to be used in analysing the Martian atmosphere; but an unintended consequence of this was that you also discovered the damaging effects of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons found in refrigerator cooling systems and aerosols) on the ozone layer.

Arguably, Gaia theory is also a kind of unintended consequence; while the inventions you’ve come up with often seem to function because of incorporating the sort of feedback mechanisms you’ve identified in the Earth’s atmosphere and biota. Despite being elected to the Royal Society in 1974, and receiving all sorts of prestigious awards, in recent decades you’ve eschewed the title of “scientist” in favour of “inventor”, or even “mechanic”. In your most recent book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, you eulogise James Watt’s invention of the centrifugal governor that regulates the speed of steam-powered engines.

You point out that such mechanisms — in common with Gaia — depend on feedback loops for their functioning, and cannot be fully grasped or explained using the sort of causeand-effect linear reasoning central to scientific thought since the Enlightenment. You were, of course, among the very first thinkers to warn us of the consequences of global heating, but you’ve never fallen victim to doomy technophobia, or dreams of some organic reabsorbing of the human into the natural. On the contrary, you’ve vigorously asserted the necessity of applying human technology to the problems we collectively face, precisely because we humans very much are part of this increasingly fragile natural world.

But Jim, while I admire you for the boldness of your vision, and your mastery of ways of thinking and doing that I could never achieve, it’s in your writing that your heterodox genius is most present to me. In your original book on Gaia, you wrote movingly about your father, a countryman par excellence, who mitigated his own poverty by his sympathetic understanding and engagement with the non-human world. But at the same time, you equally persuasively described human cities by analogy with the nests and mounds of the social insects, and poured gentle scorn on the notion that our fellow animals are bereft of consciousness.

From a Quaker background, you’re no sort of deist, if, by that, is meant a believer in an immaterial being who created all this materiality, but neither do you cleave to the Neo-Darwinian atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, whose fanatic belief in the blindness of natural selection has paradoxically religious overtones.

You, in common with another great scientific thinker, Stephen Hawking (who, you’ve vouchsafed, you dandled on your knee as a baby), have been stentorian in your insistence that humanity — if not Gaia herself — faces a very uncertain near-future. You seem to think that our only way of avoiding it is by rapid degrowth: either that, or becoming the wetware pets of emergent cyborg super-intelligences, a prospect you seem to regard with your usual equanimity.

When Gulliver, during his prodigious travels, arrived at the island of Luggnagg, he was told by its inhabitants that in every generation, born among them were one or two individuals, called struldbrugs, who were distinguished by a black spot on their foreheads. This meant they were destined to be immortal. Gulliver assumed these individuals would be a great asset to the society, given their wisdom born of many years; but he was soon disabused. The struldbrugs, he was told, may never die, but this didn’t mean they didn’t age. On the contrary, by the time they reached their 120s they were entirely senile; and shortly thereafter they would be declared legally dead, dispossessed, and forced to become homeless — and increasingly hairy — tramps.

It seems to me, Jim, that you’re the antistruldbrug. In an interview this July to mark your 101st birthday, you spoke with your trademark lucidity and modesty about the way the Covid-19 pandemic was indeed another confirmation of Gaia theory. Not for you the crowing of “told you so”. You talked about the simplicity of your reclusive lifestyle, and also of your next book, which will focus on the evolution of the human being.

All of which made me think of how very invested you must be simply in being yourself, rather than the usual validation great men seek in old age: that of the things they have done. This seems to me the epitome of modesty, and if only we could follow your example, thereby manifesting this at a collective level, we would indeed have nothing to fear.

Thank you,

Will.

○