Fifty Men, a Hundred Years
From Mark Twain’s What Is Man?:
You really think a man originates nothing, creates nothing.
I do. Men perceive, and their brain-machines automatically combine the things perceived. That is all.
You cannot answer the question ‘What am I going to think next?’ because you know the question makes no sense. And you know that there is no need to go further—neither Twain’s bad and galumphing twentieth-century neuroscience nor any marginally better twenty-first-century neuroscience is required to support, or escape from, the self-evident reality that you possess a critical incapacity to ‘create’ a simple thought.
The steam-engine?
It takes fifty men a hundred years to invent it. One meaning of invent is discover. I use the word in that sense. Little by little they discover and apply the multitude of details that go to make the perfect engine. Watt noticed that confined steam was strong enough to lift the lid of the teapot. He didn’t create the idea, he merely discovered the fact; the cat had noticed it a hundred times. From the teapot he evolved the cylinder—from the displaced lid he evolved the piston-rod. To attach something to the piston-rod to be moved by it, was a simple matter—crank and wheel. And so there was a working engine. One by one, improvements were discovered by men who used their eyes, not their creating powers—for they hadn’t any—and now, after a hundred years the patient contributions of fifty or a hundred observers stand compacted in the wonderful machine which drives the ocean liner.
There was also Sarah Guppy, an engineer best known for bridge-related patents, whose work helped to create the infrastructure—docks, waterways, load-bearing structures, and ship stability systems—that steam engines required. Émilie du Châtelet’s work in physics in the early eighteenth century provided the mathematics needed to understand what steam engines do. Caroline Herschel’s work in precision measurement, optics, and instrumentation made possible the crucial component of ‘Watt’s engine’—the separate condenser. Indeed, Watt did not ‘create’ the steam engine at all, but only improved the efficiency of the already existing Newcomen steam-powered engine, itself preceded, if only in time, by Thomas Savery’s 1698 patent for a commercial steam-powered water pump called the ‘Miner’s Friend.’
No one invented the steam engine. Rather, we credit people with its creation.
A Shakespearean play?
The process is the same. The first actor was a savage. He reproduced in his theatrical war-dances, scalp-dances, and so on, incidents which he had seen in real life. A more advanced civilization produced more incidents, more episodes; the actor and the storyteller borrowed them. And so the drama grew, little by little, stage by stage. It is made up of the facts of life, not creations. It took centuries to develop the Greek drama. It borrowed from preceding ages; it lent to the ages that came after. Men observe and combine, that is all. So does a rat. . . .
And this is okay! We credit the author, the playwright, the inventor, what have you, with ‘creating’ their product, and it is this crediting, over time, that does the defining of creating. To the extent that we credit to the phrase ‘I could care less’ the meaning ‘I couldn’t care less,’ we are doing the same thing—one conversation at a time, we are socially negotiating meanings: a powerful process of transmissive teaching and both explicit and implicit learning that can change ‘couldn’t’ into ‘could’ and a murine borrowing and reorganizing into Creation itself.
The astronomer is very proud of his achievement[s], the rat is very proud of his. Yet both are machines; they have done machine work, they have originated nothing, they have no right to be vain; the whole credit belongs to their Maker. They are entitled to no honors, no praises, no monuments when they die, no remembrance . . . and neither of them may righteously claim a personal superiority or a personal dignity above the other.
We know enough now to know that this goes too far. Communities within themselves control the distribution of honors, praises, monuments, remembrances—and vanities. These are as real as any other social realities and provide valuable services to it—such as role modeling. Scorn can provide that same service as well.
No cadre of twirly-moustached hand rubbers can come along and single-handedly change all these shared, taught, and learned meanings—unless you let them.
You think that these people think. You know better. They don’t think; they get all their ostensible thinkings at second hand; they get their feelings at second hand; they get their faith, their beliefs, their convictions at second hand. They are in no sense free. They are like you and me and like all the rest of the human race—slaves. Slaves of custom, slaves of circumstance, environment, association. This crowd is the human race in little. It is no trouble to love the human race, and we do love it, for it is a child, and one can’t help loving a child; but the minute we set out to admire the race we do as you have done—select and admire qualities which it doesn’t possess.
I should feel embarrassed for Twain, actually. This is no indictment of humanity but a singing toast to it, to the qualities that have allowed it to be fruitful and multiply.
