One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent ideas, discoveries and inventions. Over the course of history, we have extracted many balls. Most have been beneficial to humanity. The rest have been various shades of grey: a mix of good and bad, whose net effect is difficult to estimate.
What we haven’t pulled out yet is a black ball: a technology that invariably destroys the civilisation that invents it. That’s not because we’ve been particularly careful or wise when it comes to innovation. We’ve just been lucky. But what if there’s a black ball somewhere in the urn? If scientific and technological research continues, we’ll eventually pull it out, and we won’t be able to put it back in. We can invent but we can’t un-invent. Our strategy seems to be to hope that there is no black ball.
Around Valentine’s Day, I raise my glass particularly high to any couple who managed to save up any top chat for a romantic dinner for two. What on earth is there to talk about when you haven’t been anywhere or done anything for a very long time? In the absence of such discussion, may I present three ways to remind someone why they love you: the general concept of cupboard love; the very specific qualities of butter; and the particularly special advantages of brown butter?
The Emperor’s Feast tells the story of Chinese food, starting 3,000 years ago with the Book of Rites (Liji), attributed to Confucius, which described meals as the thing that “separated savagery from civilisation – the raw from the cooked”. But Clements also cleverly uses food – the part of Chinese culture with which many western people are most familiar – as a way of charting the complex history of China, a vast country made up of many peoples, cultures and cuisines.
Sarah Jaffe’s new book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, has an answer to this question and it’s a sobering one that all workers need to hear. The language of love, passion, and care, which permeates our work culture, creates the illusion that if we work hard enough, we will be rewarded with advancement, belonging, affinity, and self-worth. What Jaffe’s book sets out to show is that this language helps to not only create and reinforce emotional attachments to our workplace, profession, or employer, but also to justify oppressive working conditions. The rhetoric of work-as-love acts as a powerful weapon of economic exploitation wielded by the managerial class and by workers who lack class consciousness.