Reinventing the Future: Conversations with the World's Leading Scientists Book

"No knowledge is ever to be wasted or despised."
(Dr Needham, snr)
Every hobby has an intellectual angle, and Needham (jr) was obsessively interested in everything.

An exhilarating change from my usual fare (though it fits with my fondness for China and Cambridge): a biography of Joseph Needham (1900-1995), an eccentric but brilliant multilingual Cambridge biochemist who fell in love with a Chinese woman, then her language and her country, becoming the world expert in and ambassador for the history of scientific discovery in China. He was also a free-loving Christian, a luxury-loving communist sympathiser, friend of the powerful, a fantastically organised workaholic, an enthusiastic but clumsy dancer, a diplomat, nudist, co-founder of UNESCO, Master of Gonville and Caius, and more.

His first trip to China was during WW2, when part of the country was under Japanese control. His role was to visit and support scientists there by boosting morale, getting books and equipment, and general diplomacy. But his own interests shone through and took over.

The scope of his investigations and the scale of what he wrote is truly staggering. It ended up as a series of 24 books, under the title "Science and Civilisation in China", published over more than 50 years, some volumes of which have never been out of print. "His search for the Chinese origin of just about everything... the central obsession of his life." What he searched for, he largely found.

The story of how this came about involves derring-do adventure, serendipity (good and bad), politics, war, globe-trotting, biological warfare (or not), unconventional relationships, the Unabomber(!), adulation and disgrace, espionage, and above all, extraordinary insights into China.

Amazing China

The three inventions that Francis Bacon said most profoundly changed the world were all invented in China (the compass, printing, and gunpowder) long before the rest of the world reinvented them, as were many, many more. And Needham found proof - by the cartload (literally).

For instance, there were written decrees prohibiting selling gunpowder to Tartars in AD1076, two centuries before Berthold Schwartz's alleged discovery of it, and the famous Diamond Sutra was printed from wood blocks six centuries before Gutenberg or Caxton.

Water, especially controlling rivers and crossings, has long been key in ruling China. Technology reflects that. Needham found a dam, more than two thousand years old, stone bridges nearly 1,500 years old, and a suspension bridge more than 300 years old, all still functioning. Even something a modern reader may think of trivial, can be crucial, such as the stirrup, enabling riders to stay in the saddle for longer, further, and over rougher terrain.

The number and especially the rate of inventions (estimated as 15 major inventions per century) is unsurpassed.

Needham's "Needham Question"

The conundrum for Needham was, why, if the Chinese were so clever and so endlessly inquisitive, inventive and creative, had they for so long been so poor and scientifically backward? Why were they so far ahead for so long, and then stalled around 1500 AD, after which scientific progress switched to the west?

When Winchester finally considers possible answers (in the epilogue), he concludes there is no good answer, but the consensus is that the Chinese "stopped trying". Cultural hegemony meant there was no need for a competitive advantage, and the culture has always been totalitarian. It felt rushed and inadequate and somewhat disrespectful to the man and the work he was praising.

But taking the much longer view (surely appropriate for such an ancient culture), as China rises, maybe we should consider those few centuries as a mere blip? In the words of a sign at a Chinese space base:
"Without haste. Without fear. We conquer the world."

Questions about Needham

What about the man himself? He was a principled man, though many of his principles did not align with the establishment of the time. He would certainly have been a wonderful, and perhaps rather intimidating man to meet. He undoubtedly loved Chinese culture and people, but nevertheless, one has to question the motives and actions of a European gathering so many documents and artifacts. Many were given - often unsolicited, and he made good use of them in evangelising for China, but whether that means all those documents should remain in the Needham Institute in Cambridge in perpetuity is harder to say.

Also, as Chrissie asks in her review (), was scientific cooperation the only reason the British government sent an academic all that way, at great expense, during a war? He mixed with spies (amongst others), but said almost nothing about them, but as a socialist and known communist sympathiser, he would surely not have been trusted as a spy, would he? Maybe it was just a last blast of Britain's colonial mindset, spiced up with a dash of guilt for the shameful opium wars?

Could there ever by another Needham - one who knows SO much about so many things (without resorting to the internet)? I suspect not, which is just one reason why this his life story is so important.

Paean to Who/What?

Winchester promises much. He says early on that Needham "would alter this perception of China [as backward], almost overnight and almost single-handedly" - though book goes on to mention many people who helped, Needham was an overpowering driving force.

Needham's life's work was a tribute to the country he came to love so much (sometimes too uncritically). This book is a tribute to Needham. It's a good and enjoyable book, and I don't think I can stomach 24 volumes of Needham's work, but it inevitably feels at one remove to the true inspiration of all that passion an effort.

A Chinese aphorism, written in his college room, would be a suitable epitaph:
"The man departs - there remains his shadow."

Facts, facts, facts - but it reads more like a story

That's a good thing. There's an index, bibliography, timeline and most importantly, a list of some of the inventions and discoveries credited with originating in China - tens, hundreds or even thousands of years before they were known in the rest of the world.

Issues with Winchester's Style

It's very readable. Definitely 4*. But I nearly demoted it to 3*.

I've not read Winchester before, so I wasn't sure if some of the very detailed impressions of obscure details were imagined by him. I found that a little irritating at first, but as I realised the scale and quantity of Needham's diaries, notebooks and letters, I relaxed and assumed Winchester was sticking to a broadly factual account.

Nevertheless, there were a few factual aspects I would quibble with:

* Did he check the rather hyperbolic claim that Morris dancing is "the oldest unchanged dance in England"? How would you check it anyway? And that 1946-7 was "the most terrible British winter of all time"!

* He certainly doesn't seem to have checked his claim that the word "punnet" derives from Mr Punnett, a strawberry-growing relative of someone Needham met. Everywhere I looked gave the origin as unknown (first appearing in print around 1822), with no mention of stawberries.

* When considering aspects of China that are unchanging, even in the 21st century, he cites the writing system, without even passing mention of the simplified script used in mainland China for half a century (not in Hong Kong and Taiwan) or the increasing use of Pinyin.

He also has an occasional tendency to repeat himself and to write sentences with a rather odd (though not incorrect) word order. Perhaps one should blame the editor - though the latter could be a deliberate stylistic choice. For instance, the bit of the longer quote above, "Why... had they for so long been so poor and...". It felt so unnatural, I had to retype it twice to get it right. Another was "This hubris, inevitably contributed to the problems that caused the empire in time to flounder and fall" (if you don't want to use commas, wouldn't "in time" be more natural at the end?). I realise I'm being picky, but having noticed it, I can't not mention it.

The epilogue is troubling in a different way. Winchester appears to have visited Chongqing to compare it with the city Needham knew. I've been there myself, and it is an extraordinary place, "Part Blade Runner, part Shinjuko, part Dickensian London" sums it up well. But as he finally attempts to tackle "The Needham Question", too little and too late, Winchester's language takes a slightly nasty tone where he muses on "national smugness" and a general "attitude of ineluctable and self-knowing Chinese superiority".

Quotes etc

* Learning Chinese was "a liberation... for it got you entirely out of the prison of alphabetic words, and into the crystalline world of ideographic characters."

* After trying and failing at a chaste and semi-monastic life, he decided to "worship the deity on his own term". What hubris.

* He and Dorothy had an open marriage from the start, and she "decided to accept the affair in a spirit of intellectually tolerant and fashionable left-wing complaisance".

* A review of one of his books likened it to Proust! "Proust and Needham have made of remembrance both an act of moral justice and of high art" - whatever that means! (Steiner in 1973.)


I read this partly on the basis of reviews by and discussions with:
Caroline
and
Will
Thank you!