August 1998

We come from another planet. We come from a planet of vast natural spaces where we live and work in small groups, only peripherally involved with other tribes. There's a lot to learn by considering ourselves as prehistoric people who happen to live in houses. Our urban and global culture is very new—two or three centuries old. It is only in the last ten years that humans have finally become mostly city-dwellers. In evolutionary terms, these timescales are nothing. It's not surprising we go mad, neurotic and cancerous.

We have an instinctive love of the familiar, and so we also have the opposite fear of The Unknown. No wonder contemporary western culture (especially the urban) sends us mad, because we're living in the unknown. On a fundamental, instinctive level, it's all unfamiliar.

I heard about a study done of all kinds of adults, and they found that nearly every one of them knew 100-150 people ('know' in the sense of being aware of them and their lives and affected by their well-being). When it gets beyond 150 or so, we can't really relate to it, they're not real people to us.

And I thought yeah, this makes loads of sense. When I live on a tree-protest camp, we take care of each other, when we pass anyone we say hello, we treat everybody as a full and present human. Whereas in towns you pass people in the street or sit next to them on the bus and you pretend they're just not there. You have to. To acknowledge so many people would put too much in your head. This is notoriously at its worst in London, because Londoners face the most people so they have to do the most block-out.

But what can being ignored every day by thousands of your species be doing to your stone-age subconscious?

On tree-protest sites we have consensus decision-making—not democracy, which is the tyranny of the majority over the minority (pretty scary when you realise that everyone is in a minority in some way or at some time, and that History has shown that ridiculed and persecuted minorities can often be in the right). But consensus simply cannot happen with thousands and millions of people. Again, the stone-age tribal brain fails the global test.

And I'm sure this is why we—all of us—stereotype so much. We can't cope with the idea of more than around 150 people. So when we're forced to deal with more, our brain lets us deal with it by saying 'oh, it's that person again', and treats an entire group as a single character.

Hence, numbers of people stop meaning anything. How many died in the Ethiopian famine? Half a million? Ten million? Even my best guess would be way out, cos it's just theoretical. But I know how many died in the Hillsborough disaster cos I had friends and relatives there so it's personal and real, and every time I see or hear the name of the place (which is quite a lot, given that I live in Yorkshire) I feel the solemnness and gravity of the thing.

And hence George Michael's careless wrister and the fictional case of Deidre Rachid were people's top concerns in the week of the Good Friday Northern Ireland Agreement, because those two characters are familiar and real to us, they're in our tribe. We can discuss Northern Ireland, but for most of us it's just involved theorisation, we don't actually feel it.

And hence as an environmental activist, the Newbury Bypass and Manchester Airport's second runway are great losses of natural life to human destruction that I feel, whereas (if I'm honest) I'll tell you that all the rainforests of the world don't inspire that gut-level passion. It's not that I'm just playing intellectual games, my concern for rainforests is real and heartfelt and absolutely genuine, but there's a special kind of passion and drive that can only come from personal connection, and it gives an extra feeling, somehow, of authenticity.

And here we come to a central problem of our age, and especially of our generation: our fundamental steeping in a very potent, and yet very vague, feeling of being inauthentic. The feeling that life isn't really happening to you, it's happening somewhere else. This unnamed, unspecified longing at the base of our spirit.

Again, this is a result of our global culture, our personal interaction with tens of thousands of people, but most especially of global travel and recorded media. Particularly television.

The traditions that bonded us with the smaller cultures that we came from, that we were involved in and part of, get steamrollered by the unwieldy vastness of mass communications. Mass media treat us as being all the same, whoever and wherever we are; in our own island, the mass media are as sure a tool of the destruction of the Welsh language as any medieval law.

And so any sense of strong rootedness in our culture and traditions was erased. When you become aware of dozens, hundreds, thousands of other traditions and cultures that seem as equally appealing, sensible and valid as the one you grew up in (if not more so), how can it not shake your confidence in the culture that spawned you and cast you spiritually adrift?

Our feeling of inauthenticity is encouraged by—perhaps even a product of—the fact that these millions of mass-communication images have almost nothing to do with our individual lives. Even the ideals to aspire to—the man in the after shave ad, the supermodel, the reliably providing Oxo mum—although we are supposed to aim to be like them, we know we're not like them and never really will be. The real message is not to copy them, the real message is: All this stuff is going on and none of it includes you. You are not involved. And so, as a group animal, an instinctive tribalist, this means that you don't matter.

This gives us a real insecurity, a fear of other people (who 'really are involved' and are generally cooler) finding out how insignificant you are.

So we pretend to be included by pretending to understand what's going on. We use a few decontexualised facts to imply that we understand a subject, that we have that level of knowledge about the whole thing, and probably the whole of life too. Everybody does this, implying they know and understand more than they really do. The more obvious ones show themselves up, but we all do it. It's not our fault; our culture rears us to feel like we're not involved in it.

No wonder we're such a nation of ditherers—we've so many options and realities presented to us ready to use. It's only 150 years—just out of living memory—since the invention of the telegraph and the ability for information to travel faster than we could carry it. Once we invented long-distance communication, we had to use it. Two hundred years ago, most people would never even hear a foreign language in their lives, now we teach them to three year olds. With such awareness of the vastness of humanity, and the eradication of our own traditions, it's impossible to feel like a central and integral part of the tribe.

And we are tribal. We are a group animal. This is evident in so many truths of our everyday lives: we have to tell each other things. If you have a problem you feel better telling someone else even if they have no advice or solution to offer, just the telling helps. We're rubbish at keeping secrets, we feel compelled to tell other people what's on our mind, even if it's going to make life more difficult for us. A 'loner' is someone who's weird and probably dangerous. Solitary confinement is the ultimate sanction of incarceration, depriving you of all interaction with others—it is taken as a given that solitary life is an awful thing.

We naturally form communities, our identity is based on our roots in the tribe, its morals, customs and traditions. Modern manifestations of this are seen in places like the fashion industry. (None of us likes to see ourselves as fashion victims, but think how different you'd feel if you shaved your head and eyebrows, wore floral nylon pantaloons and your granny's nightie. Actually, I might quite like that, but that's another matter). It also shows in our groups gatherings—you laugh more watching a funny film with friends in a cinema than if you were watching it alone on TV. There's nothing like the feelings of togetherness and spiritual buoyancy that you get at an event like a gig, a rave or a football match.

We place great value and importance on establishing our identity by having private and, especially, group ceremonies and rituals. It tells us who we are.

Even traditions we disagree with we respect as authentic, most notably religions. For example, if I tell someone I'm vegan on moral grounds, I may well get responses like 'just have some this once, it won't kill you', or 'vegetarian's OK, but vegan's going too far'. But if I say I do exactly the same thing because I'm a Buddhist or a Jain, my choice is much more likely to be treated with respect. Yet is there any real rational reason for this? Or is it solely that we seem to have an innate respect for tradition?

As human knowledge has expanded at an ever-increasing rate, so our traditions and culture have changed ever more quickly. Hence fashions, and fashions that change so quickly that we can revive previous ones in retro stylee.

Revivalism is an attempt to distil an age, but because it must be selective it invariably misrepresents. This is usually done in one of two ways: taming (eg making a social revolution like rock 'n' roll into twee pap like Grease) and/or idealising (eg worship of Woodstock, when Glastonbury is, by any criterion except Hendrix playing, a hell of a lot better). Both of these are disempowering because they take away the fact that the thing being revived was, at the time, a new thing being forged by people with an urge for change, and that the potential for change and the ability to create the new is in our hands right now, not just with those people we idealise in our revivalism.

And because revivalism is primarily just a fashion thing, it implies that the original acts being revived were mere fashion statements, and reduces enthusiastic and creative fervour into mere marketable style choices. Even an insular little movement like the mods was fresh and exciting in its day, and it was anti-revivalist, it was facing forwards. (The very word 'mod' is an abbreviation of 'modernist'). The whole point of these things was that they were saying that the most exciting time to be alive is now, and the most exciting thing is what comes next. But solely to embrace the new is not enough—we need traditions and rituals.

Humans love their rituals, it helps them to feel that they know who they are. In western society we've twisted this into the drive for routine that lets us be reliable wage-slaves. I'm not a routiney-based person, but I still notice my little rituals and habits—the way I squeeze the tea bag on the edge of the cup, the way I snap off and fold the bog roll while I'm shitting. A big part of the love of skinning up is the ceremony of it.

Why do people have things like weddings (as the majority of us do), rather than just live together? It's because we love ceremony, and we want to declare it to the tribe (family/state/society at large; it's all the same to a tribal brain, all just 'public'). We love rituals, we love the familiarity of tradition. Which is another reason why we're such revivalists, because we like to do and see and hear things that remind us of things we already know. In a culture that gives us no involvement, no connection, we're doubly desperate and glad to grasp at anything that's familiar. Noel Gallagher is a millionaire because of this.

Today, as ever, at least 90% of popular culture is junk. And, as ever, History will do a reasonably thorough job of erasing the no-talent fools from popular consciousness. The legion of soulless saps will largely be relegated to historical murkiness, as History generally does with bandwagon-jumpers. We remember Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and forget Saxon and Kingdom Come. Unless you're an obsessive or a specialist. And oh how we ridicule them. Trainspotters. Weirdoes, intent on knowing more and more about less and less.

But there is actually a natural will, indeed a natural necessity for civilised humans to be specialists. We are tribal animals, we work as a group. Clearly, in a group, specialisation works best. Rather than solitary animals who have to be a jack of all trades, in groups it works better if one person spends their time learning everything about, say, medicine. That way the total amount of knowledge is greater and so the treatment available to the tribe is more effective. Ditto hunting, domestic organisation, studying weather, remembering history, etc. Not everyone has time to know the weather as well as someone who's spent their whole life doing it, but that person can be useful to the crop-sower, the hunter, etc. But, of course, they'll need someone to feed and clothe and house them if they're going to get on with studying the weather.

All around the world, in every culture and every community, specialisation and co-operation are clearly the most effective way to live as humans. As any field's knowledge grows (as they all must do), so we need specialists within the field.

But because we don't think of ourselves as part of a social group like this, we don't recognise this instinct and we get led up blind alleys of trainspotteriness. And exactly the same lack of recognition leads to others dismissing and/or ridiculing any acknowledgement or use of this instinct. Our instinct for specialisation, an instinct that is there to make sure that each of us serves the whole tribe, gets used to separate us into competing rival gangs.

So we tend to apply our innate skills and motivations in situations where they don't work, and so these remarkable abilities get twisted and corrupted. Our tremendous capacity for memory and specialisation gets sidetracked into memorising the catalogue numbers of all the Greek releases of Ultravox albums or some equally useless nonsense. Our physical skills waste away, perhaps most obviously in our failing eyesight. Think about it; for a species of hunter-gatherer with sight as our primary sense, there's no way we could have done it with such a high proportion needing glasses.

I guess at two main factors for the failed eyesight of modern humans, both concerned with the fact that we evolved living in huge landscapes; First is the distance involved. We're used to being able to see a long way. Put us in houses where we can't see more than 10 feet and no wonder we lose the power of our eyes. We have evolved on seeing massive distances. This idea is reinforced by the way we are all—inexplicably in rationality—impressed by seeing big landscapes or the sea. Think about it—why should a mountain impress you?

The second factor is the nature of the images in these landscapes—the gently shifting patterns of light and dark. Wind moving through the grass and trees, the ripples across water, clouds across the sky; we are so rooted to these that just the words in that last sentence are soothing in themselves! This is so deeply in our psyche that it's an instinct. One of the best ways to calm a restless baby is to put a mobile over its cot—what is that if not a gently shifting pattern of light and dark?

So what happens when we're put into rooms and towns of solid, stable right-angles of uniform colours? Our eyes go funny and our brains go mad.

So what do we do? Pale imitations. We want and need gently moving, rounded patterns of light and dark. We get a fish tank. We arrange the room around the hearth—think about what a fire looks like. These days the hearth is the TV. Living rooms are arranged exactly like a hundred years ago, but with that one difference. The average Briton watches four hours of TV every day!

Which is really worrying. People would spend four hours looking at a hearth, but TV is so one-way. It doesn't present you with coloured patterns that let your mind wander and exercise, it tells your mind to shut the fuck up while it tells you what to think about and what to think about the things you think about. It delivers itself as absolute and authoritative. It shows 'experts' in whatever field, who are always portrayed as more informed and eloquent than you, which takes away your sense of power and feeling of ability and worth, and the idea that you might be able to go out there and affect the things that affect you.

And they are lying, TV is so superficial that its main task is to stop you realising its superficiality and artificiality. They pretend things aren't carefully edited to make implications. They try to make it look like the situation being shown is normal, and not rendered fake by an intrusive TV camera being there. We think if someone looks shifty on TV they must be shifty, whereas it's probably actually cos they're not used to having 600 watts of lightbulb in their face while they try to explain years of experience in an eight second soundbite. It's all about veneers. I've actually done TV shows where I've been portrayed as an authoritative expert, and I got believed. I found the MPs and ministers and journalists were bluffing even more than I was!

It doesn't matter that loads of TV is junk. The problem is that it treats everything the same, that a war or a football match or a McDonalds special offer are treated with equal import. It's OK when junk is undisguised junk, when it's meant to be forgettable nonsense. But when it pretends to be serious it distracts us from the real serious stuff, it lowers the standards of what we consider serious. As TV has become the dominant medium, other media have learned that they must imitate TV or die. Have you noticed how our newspapers now look like TV, and our radio sounds more and more like TV? Even when the TV is off, it has set out the methods by which we understand what's going on. The result is a whole TV culture that makes us as individuals insignificant and disconnected, and everything seem irrelevant and unreal.

Information needn't be useful, or even explained, just the fact that it's moved around and presented is enough to make us feel like we've been told something. All the information you see on TV, how often does it make you change your daily plans? How often does it make you actually do ANYTHING? It's just a barrage of answers to questions we never asked about things we don't know about, (and even if we did we are not allowed a right to reply, let alone to do anything about what we're told). The news is not what's going on, it's certainly not what's important. It's just a quick fix of solemn entertainment. Fascinating pictures, little more. It's just another part of showbiz.

If we had footage from Rwanda or East Timor that matched the visual pizzazz of Tianenmen Square, how much more important we'd have felt it to have been. What else accounts for the importance we attribute to Tianenmen Square, when the other events mentioned are attacks on freedom that are even more brutal, with many thousands of times the number of people killed? But they're just not good showbiz, so they're not on TV overmuch, so they're not considered important. And there's the real measure of whether something's serious, intelligent and important: If it's on TV, it is; if it's not, it isn't.

TV can be very informative, and even when it's crap, it can be watched with an aware mind. But it is so awesomely spellbinding that it can, and very often does, become a substitute for thinking. Sedation rather than information. The hearth, the fish tank, the trees swaying in the breeze, they are like TV in that they are soothing patterns of moving colours, but the key difference is that TV also feeds you its ideas. Not only is it feeding you ideas (with reasons that it keeps hidden), but it also stops your interaction with others. The danger is that whilst TV is soothing to the eye, it also replaces socialisation. Rather than go and do something, we'll just watch it on the telly. More people watch Neighbours than talk to their neighbours. These imaginary people really matter to us, whilst the real people around us don't. For a group animal, this can't be healthy.

As a culture that is very rootless, we'll gladly take what roots we're given. TV can take a bemused and confused gullible culture and have it believe anything it says. Cos it uses pretty patterns and familiar and/or friendly voices, we trust it. It doesn't matter what the words are, we like them if they come out of a mouth with straight teeth. Have you noticed how, more and more, game-show hosts, politicians and newsreaders all look the same?

We are quite clearly group animals, we have an instinctive need for interaction and co-operation. We feel good in crowds, we have a revulsion for feeling 'out of place'. We dislike going against the group, it's so much more difficult to speak up for what you believe in if you're going to be disagreed with. We want the group to like us. This gives us our dangerous obedience to authority. The authority of democracy—the tyranny of the majority—can be dangerous enough. But the authority of those who control the mass media is the tyranny of a tiny minority who do not disclose their motives and objectives, and can appear to be reasonable, rational voices of the majority.

So what happens when we get to where we are now? Increased travel, and especially TV have given us insights into so many different traditions that we don't have any of our own any more. Seeing so many different ways of doing things makes us question the way we do everything. This has obvious benefits, but also detriment: It discredits our established traditions, it leaves us rootless.

Could this be one of the reasons why Rastafarians, Native Americans and others are seen as cool, because they have clearly defined traditions, they have an assured sense of their roots and so seem somehow more authentic as people?

We are in a new stage of being human. We know of many things, we know about very little. The problem is no longer acquiring knowledge, but rather co-ordination of knowledge. We are bombarded with so much information, and we know there is so much more out there ready for us if we want it. We have information networks that not only cover the globe, but do so incredibly intricately, they convey vast amounts of information to us all the time, but because it comes from deep within subjects and places that we have no idea of, we have no context for it, so it has no real meaning. The real issue now is how do we make sense of it? We have to realise that information isn't the same as understanding. We don't need to find information to help us live our lives; we need to find lives that can use all this information that we have. The information revolution may appear to tell us a lot, but it does so in an irrelevant, novelty, pub-quiz kind of a way. It does this ceaselessly, so the overall composite message is that we are detached from pretty much everything that is going on, that you are not really part of anything. The global village is a village of familiar strangers who know only random isolated facts about each other. We have to find how to combine and relate what we have into an insightful and inclusive worldview.

Something new is going on. The global awareness of each other's traditions has severed humanity from its traditionalism. There's no precedent for this. We are a new people. And we've no idea what comes next. Confused? You will be. You already are.

Published in Head issue 9, Rooted issue 2, Wonderlust issue 5 and Goldfish Nation issue 1