A book for the post-apocalypse, how to rebuild civilisation after the fall, to regain lost knowledge for a better life – and the whole way through, I’m wondering, but why?
The Knowledge provides a great ride through science and its achievements, and often manages to decentre Euro-centric assumptions of superiority. The Chinese ‘failure’ to develop a movable-type printing press, for example, is readily assigned to differences in the number of characters in the respective lexicons. Differences in capital, differences in climate, all these are part of the story, the unidirectional arrow of progress, told in these pages.
There are few heroes, which is remarkable, and admirable, in a book devoted to science; instead there is testament to the steady plod of curiosity and inventiveness that helped to build telescopes and uncover microbes. It appeals to my leftist sensibilities – there are few ‘great men’ (though I suspect rather more great women), and those that exist do so through the collective genius of wisdom built over time. Without computers, or electricity, or the internet itself (all developed with a great deal of public money and investment), Microsoft and its mega-profits, duly privatised, would amount to, well, nothing.
So far so politically interesting. But The Knowledge fails to answer a more fundamental question. Is this progress? Do we really want to rebuild civilisation, if this that we have now is its rather difficult pinnacle (to date)?
In Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe points to the lengths Europeans have had to go to both to inculcate their progress as desirable into others – think of the forced opening up of Japan and China, for examples outside of Pascoe’s book – and to prevent the beneficiaries of progress from ‘turning native’ and abandoning modernity and all its rewards. At every turn, we’ve preferred a more precarious, but more spiritually and communally fulfilling life, than the doyennes of modernity have supposed.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some advantages, but often the advantages are in response to costs that have been manufactured. I still extol the virtues of the revolutionary washing machine. The washing machine freed women from one of the most arduous and life-shortening of gendered labours, outside labour itself – laundry. I remember, in that slightly hazy way one has with memories in far-youth, a mangle. The context is forgotten. Was it at my aunt’s house? My grandmother’s? I’m not sure. But I was fascinated by the machine, even then recognising that it could pulp an arm as easily as wring a load. Women’s work was difficult, dangerous and dirty; and laundry was one of the worst aspects. Feminism and emancipation rode on the back of the humble washing machine just as surely as they rode on the back of The Pill.
But… why do laundry? There is a joy to freshly laundered sheets, and a feel-new shirt. But there’s also joy in jumping fully clothed into a river. Rarely, in the sci-fi and fantasy I love, rarely do characters stop to wash their clothes out, they’re too busy living a life. And today, we’re starting to recognise a cost to over-washing our clothes and releasing microplastics into the oceans, the air and our own bodies. There is movement to retreat from the laundering of clothes at the quite-obsessive rate of modern civilisation.
So rather than move back to a world where men chop the wood, and women beat the clothes, perhaps we can rethink the ways in which we define what is important and necessary in both this and in a post-apocalyptic world. Re-think what ‘civilisation’ means, in particular what are the hacks that make life not just easier, but more meaningful, more joyful and leave us with more time to live a full life. And that’s where I think there’s a failure of imagination in Lewis Dartnell’s book – it can only think (except in the case of fridges) of an iteration of a recognisably Western-style culture. Yet, that’s the culture that has brought us to the brink of extinction, ours and other species, with climate crisis being just one of the
