66 Books & arts The EconomistJuly 27th 2019
2 Madhya Pradesh, Kipling composed his
story of an Indian man-cub raised by
wolves. Mowgli seeks “the proper balance
between the claims of civilisation and the
claims of the wild”, a favourite theme of the
New England Transcendentalists. (Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” was, for
Kipling, “a sacred creed to live by”.)
In his bid to join the American panthe-
on, Kipling pored over the work of Twain,
Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfel-
low. He befriended Theodore Roosevelt,
then an ambitious civil-service commis-
sioner, with whom he visited the National
Zoo in Washington. Roosevelt, a champion
of big-stick diplomacy, admired the mighty
bears. Kipling, who believed in imperial
duty, preferred the diligent beavers.
Mr Benfey does not gloss over Kipling’s
faith in colonialism. He considers the fla-
grant racism of “The White Man’s Burden”,
a notorious call for America to occupy the
Philippines, alongside denunciations of
Western hubris in lesser-known texts suchas “Recessional”. Long after Kipling’s death
in 1936 reactions to his writing reflected
these contradictions. During the Vietnam
war ciaoperatives read “Kim” for its les-
sons in international espionage, while
film-makers such as Francis Ford Coppola
and John Huston drew from Kipling’s work
to critique imperial overreach.
Kipling’s hold on American culture has
endured. He popularised themes—such as
the virtues of an education in the wilder-
ness—that pervaded American literature of
his age; today his characters live on in Hol-
lywood. But the Kiplings themselves reluc-
tantly quit Vermont for England in 1896,
when a row with Carrie’s ne’er-do-well
brother became a media scandal (leaving
was the most difficult decision of his life,
Kipling said). Once again, the Indian-cum-
Englishman-turned-American would have
to find his place in the world. “Like all men,
Rudyard Kipling was many men,” Jorge
Luis Borges wrote in 1941, “but none with
more conviction than the artificer.” 7“M
yfather was, inmany ways, a
hunter-gatherer,” recalls James
Lovelock on the patio of his cottage above
Chesil Beach, on England’s south coast. In a
poor household, the elder Lovelock not
only scrabbled to feed the family, but
taught young Jim the virtue of respecting
nature and Earth. As a scientist, Mr Love-
lock went on to develop Gaia theory, the
idea that Earth is a single, complex, self-
regulating system. Though initially reject-
ed by life scientists, it became the main
way many people conceive of the planet.
That is just one of his many contribu-
tions to science. Mr Lovelock honed amethodtolookforlifeonotherplanets
while at nasain the 1960s. He found and
quantified cfcs in the atmosphere in the
1970s, which led eventually to a ban on the
harmful chemicals. His nomination to
Britain’s Royal Society in 1974 cited a pleth-
ora of work in biology, chemistry and phys-
ics—all before the popularisation of the
theory for which he is best-known (it isnamed after Gaia, the ancient Greek god-
dess of Earth).
To coincide with his 100th birthday, he
has published a slim book on artificial in-
telligence (ai), written with Bryan Ap-
pleyard, a journalist. It is mind-stretching
stuff. Mr Lovelock thinks the world is leav-
ing the Anthropocene (ie, the current geo-
logical age, when human activity has a
dominant impact on the planet), for the
Novacene, in which “cyborgs” (aisystems)
will play the central role.
This is the next step in natural selec-
tion, he argues, because cyborgs can repro-
duce and evolve. They can think thousands
of times faster than humans: they are as
cleverer than people as people are than
plants. Don’t panic, Mr Lovelock counsels,
terrifying as this sounds. Cyborgs will have
an incentive to conserve humans rather
than wipe them out, since they will need
life-forms to help cool the planet for their
own survival—though mortals may be rele-
gated to the status of pets and play-things.
Cyborgs may “exhibit collections of live
humans”, he writes, just as today people
“go to Kew Gardens [in London] to watch
the plants”.
In the end, ai systems may save human-
kind as well as themselves. Besides climate
change, Mr Lovelock fears other natural
ways that Gaia—the principle that main-
tains the balance in the planet’s climate—
could be destroyed, such as a severe vol-
canic eruption. Keeping the planet cool
will make it more resilient to such threats,
he contends; so, as well as preserving or-
ganic life, the cyborgs will probably enact
other kinds of geoengineering that lower
Earth’s temperature. Hence the Novacene
is to be welcomed, not feared. “Whatever
harm we have done to the Earth, we have,
just in time, redeemed ourselves by acting
simultaneously as parents and midwives
to the cyborgs. They alone can guide Gaia
through the astronomical crises now im-
minent,” Mr Lovelock writes.
As a thinker, he defies categorisation.
He adamantly favours nuclear energy and
rejects the Green movement as utopian. He
considers work on autonomous weapons
to be as foolish as it is deadly. He attributes
his originality to a decision to abandon ac-
ademia for independent research, which
allowed his curiosity to roam. In “Nova-
cene”, his most impassioned argument is
that humans are cursed by language be-
cause it forces causal, linear thinking at the
expense of intuition, which is a truer way
to understand the reality of the world.
He expands on this point on his seaside
patio. Most of his own inventions came
from intuition, he reflects on a warm sum-
mer day, not from following the logical
steps from known science. A statue of Gaia
stares back at him blankly from his garden.
But it gets hot, and Mr Lovelock goes inside
to escape the sun. 7A life in scienceIn praise of cyborgs
Novacene: The Coming Age of
Hyperintelligence.By James Lovelock with
Bryan Appleyard. The MIT Press; 160 pages;
$22.95. Allen Lane; £14.99A distinguished centenarian scientist prophesies the future