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“The human spirit must prevail over technology” is one of Einstein’s better sayings – if he indeed said it. It would make a good protest banner in Silicon valley, or a classic essay topic, or the leitmotif in discussions about controlling nuclear weapons and AI, since there is no certainty that the human spirit will prevail.
There are many historical antecedents for such contemporary fears. Textile workers threatened by steam-powered looms participated in outbreaks of machine-breaking at the beginning of the 19th century. By the peak of resistance, 1810-1813, the government deployed 12,000 troops against them in Nottinghamshire, West Yorkshire and Lancashire, and made ‘machine-breaking’ a capital offence. The pejorative ‘Luddite’ entered the language meaning combative resistance to technology. Later in the century, reactions to technology similar to our own were shared by Victorians from different classes. The polymath, John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a spirited intellectual champion of craftsmanship versus industrial mass production . The Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1880s was led by the textile designer, businessman, artist and socialist, William Morris (1834-1896) whose wallpaper and fabric designs are still used worldwide. But when it comes to the human spirit prevailing over technology, there are two stories, from the 19th and from the 21st centuries, that deserve telling. Both feature that catchall for experience of change, ‘the journey’, and by coincidence feature Scotland. The technology is that of a Yarrow and Hedley steamship and a Hattersley treadle-powered loom. One was transported from Millwall docks (by Canary Wharf) to Lake Nyasa (now Malawi) in the 19th century, the other from the Isle of Lewis and Harris, in the Outer Hebrides, to Suffolk in the 21st. The explorer and missionary David Livingstone was a Victorian celebrity. He gave the name of his birthplace, Blantyre, (South Lanarkshire), to the commercial capital of present day Malawi. Livingstone’s colleague, Lieutenant E.D. Young, a naval officer, was also a missionary hero though little known today. In 1862, Young shipped out a steamboat to Africa for Livingstone. Like a giant IKEA delivery, the Lady Nyasa was transported in flat-pack form to bypass the Murchison Falls, a long and fierce section of rapids on the Shire River, in order to reach Lake Malawi. Reassembled, Young captained it until 1864. But the mission was recalled by the British government and Young left the navy to become a coast guard at Dungeness. A brief digression on a little-known use of the steamship: a colleague of mine in Malawi in the 1960s collected an oral tradition from an old man whose grandfather, never having seen a Whiteman before, had met the great Scottish missionary. Livingstone’s appearance set off a huge debate. Was this uninvited visitor a spirit, mzimu, or another human being, munthu? A spirit, they decided, would not have normal bodily functions. So they kept him under observation. But Livingstone retreated to the steamship for this purpose, and the question remained unresolved. The word used for the Whiteman today is mzungu. After Livingstone’s death in 1873 at Ilala in today’s Zambia, the Free Church of Scotland made another attempt to plant a mission in what was then Nyasaland employing a young United Presbyterian Minister, Rev. Dr. Robert Laws as a medical missionary. So Young was summoned from Dungeness to the perilous waters of the Shire river with another steamship, the 48ft. Ilala, also reduced to manageable crates full of steel plates plus nuts and bolts – they had arrived rusty in Cape Town – each crate weighing 23 kilograms. The two boilers could only be broken down into three pieces each and were much heavier. Some 600 African porters carried these crates through forest and up steep climbs around the Falls for reassembly by the engineers, carpenters and metalworkers of the mission team. The Ilala plied the lake for many years and, for some fifty years, Laws built up the Livingstonia Mission in the healthy uplands of northern Malawi. It was here that the Malawian nationalist elite were schooled alongside Kenneth Kaunda the future first President Kaunda of Zambia. This year was the 150th anniversary of Livingstonia’s founding. Inhabitants of Suffolk should not be unduly overawed by such heroism. My second journey story is, in its smaller scale and quieter way, something of an epic. It is about a journey in 2016 from East Anglia to the furthest tip of Britain by James Jenkins, a youth worker who had taken up weaving, and his wife Katie, a primary school head teacher. Their less evangelical aim was to buy one of the last surviving Hattersley Treadle-powered domestic looms and bring it home. It had taken a year to locate one. The only boat involved in their journey was the ferry plying between Uig on Skye and Tarbet on Harris in the usual teeming rain and churning sea. Starting near the Suffolk coast, driving an old Land Rover and towing a trailer, they took two and a half days to reach the island of Harris. The Harris tweed weavers did not look kindly on anyone selling a home loom to the English. But the Jenkinses had come to buy a loom that had sat unused for decades from a couple who had recently moved to the Island. The purchase was in all senses counter-cultural. James and Katie stayed on the edge of the village of Arnol on the old coastal road for 3-4 nights in a converted Blackhouse (the museum held an original Blackhouse with its sooty open fire and hole in the roof). The loom was less quaintly housed against a wall in a dilapidated shack open on one side, was rusted and contained birds’ nests. Such looms varied in weight between 300-400 kilograms. They had been told not to worry, help would be at hand. It wasn’t. Katie even briefly contemplated calling it a day and renaming their trip a holiday. But they did get the loom back to Suffolk. Then came many years restoration work in a Sudbourne Park workshop near Orford: learning metalwork, manufacturing the loom’s unique nuts and bolts, struggling with the tension of the warp, repairing and designing, and generally learning the skills of a 19th century home weaver. The old crofter weavers are still retained on Harris, but large mills, sometimes owned by international investors, do a lot of the work. Katie and James weave and do everything else, preparation and design, themselves. The final product was, and is, of the highest quality: beautiful blankets and scarfs, [[email protected].] a challenge to branded, industrialised and - inevitably - lower quality modern textiles. Livingstone and Lieutenant Young and their rusty steamship, Katie and James Jenkins and their rusty loom: both the age-old story of Humanity’s control over Metal and Machines. Two journeys, two triumphs of the human spirit coming to grips with technology. Both in their different ways magnificent. See also TheArticle 12/08/2025
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At the United Nations General Assembly in September, three members of the G7 are set to recognise the State of Palestine joining the 147 of the 193 UN member states who already recognise a Palestinian State. The UK’s own announcement of support on 29 July was influenced both by France and by pressure from the Parliamentary Labour Party as well as Labour’s own members. Canada followed suit. Japan might be next. Italy under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, with the largest amount of trade with Isreal of all the European countries, says it is too early.
Keir Starmer was careful to make the shift in policy towards Palestine a whole Cabinet decision. But there was a touch of the Hebrew saying chai b’seret, (lives in a movie i.e. unrealistic optimism) in the official British statement. The UK will recognise Palestine “unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agrees to a ceasefire and commits to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two State Solution”. Benjamin Netanyahu is more likely to bomb the Damascus Road than experience a Pauline conversion to the solution he has always rejected. In the real world the necessary conditions for Palestinian statehood no longer exist. Since 1967, Jewish settlement on the West Bank, now violent and encouraged by religious extremists in government, has been rising inexorably. Israel is unlikely to meet UK terms for reversing the decision to recognise a Palestinian State. Britain lacks ‘leverage’, or as Donald Trump put it “doesn’t matter”, though the announcement did have some impact. It also evoked outrage in Israel. Trump and the US State Department repeated the refrain that Britain was “rewarding Hamas” whilst Netanyahu denounced the UK Government’s announcement as “terrorist appeasement”. These are well-crafted, resonant slogans aimed mainly at the Israeli public of whom over 75% want a ceasefire and a sustainable peace. And the British Prime Minister has repeatedly demanded that Hamas release the hostages whilst also saying that Hamas should play no part in a future Palestinian State. The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney said much the same in his recent announcement. American policy positions knock on to allies such as the UK, Australia and to a lesser degree the EU. Germany for understandable reasons has been highly supportive of Israel. France, and the British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, has gone beyond asserting Israel’s right to self-defense to roundly condemning IDF’s actions and stopping export licenses for parts to Israeli jets, helicopters and drones. As antisemitic incidents increase nationally, popular protest is closely monitored for hate speech. Whilst the language and tone of Western governments’ support for Israel has shifted markedly, American military support notably has not been withdrawn. But Britain carries an historic responsibility for the origins of the conflict. The then British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour sent his letter to Lord Rothschild, President of the British Zionist Federation, in November 1917 at the height of World War I. HMG viewed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people with favour”. The word ‘State’ was missing. What the Balfour declaration meant by Palestine was vague but the population at the time is usually estimated at 85,000 Jews and some 300,000 Arabs. Concerning the latter “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. A fudge. Britain was given League of Nations mandatory authority over Palestine in April 2020 at a conference in San Remo, Italy, to carve up the remains of the Ottoman Empire. And by 1946 there were 100,000 British troops in the area. Britain was exhausted, bankrupt, short of food and under pressure from USA. Irgun terrorist militia, led by Menachem Begin, Israel’s (later the3 first Likud Prime Minister), inflicted significant casualties, 90 were killed in the bombing of the King David Hotel which housed the mandatory authority. Ernest Bevin, British Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister Clement Attlee himself were initially opposed to a Jewish State as a possible danger to the UK’s political and economic interests in the Middle East. By late 1947 a brutal Arab-Jewish war was breaking out in Palestine. Led by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, the Jewish settler community, the Yishuv, more than held their own thanks to their foresighted preparations for war, an ample arms supply from the West, plus support from Stalin, and superior strategy. On the 29th November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz (Land of)-Israel. Israel declared its Independence on 14 May 1948. Minutes later the USA and Soviet Union recognised the new State. Bevin wanted to think about it and took until January 1949 to follow suit. Predictably Independence inaugurated a new phase of the war with Arab states involved, military setbacks, and massacres on both sides. It resulted in the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, many believing they would return. They call it Naqba (the disaster). In Jaffa and Haifa British troops were left as onlookers. The rest is history. But history repeats itself. Some five million Palestinians are refugees today. Not just Putin’s war in Ukraine but Netanyahu’s destruction and killing in Gaza, his spurious explanations, are normalizing the abandonment by States of moral restraints in war. We are back to Might is Right with the American government adding to the instability. Only Trump can exert effective pressure on Netanyahu to stop the starvation and killing of Palestinians. But he seems worryingly reluctant to do so. Starmer does seem to have achieved some influence over him. This may prove more important than his clear intention to return to the Labour Party’s commitment to see the Palestinians’ right to self-determination made real within a State of their own. And that intention should be rewarded with the return to the Labour fold of numbers of Muslim voters. |
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