This essay from Charles Foster – a writer and a fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford, a barrister, a part-time judge of the Crown Court, and a veterinary surgeon – is as illuminating as it is life-affirming. The essay helps those of us have spent our lives eschewing mainstream choices – in where we work, where we live, how we live, what we read, what we write and how we think – make sense of why we behave in that manner. Why do we keep making decisions which take us towards the edge of society, to the periphery of other people’s lived experiences? Why do we move away from the centre, away from what is deemed to be consensus opinion? The short answer is that we do so because it is at the edge – far away from the centre – where all the interesting things happen.
It all begins with our planet’s location in the universe. Mr Foster writes: “Everything that has happened in space and time happened on the far fringes. The process of creation and innovation is delegated to the margins.
…It’s a statement of the way things are and the way things happen in all domains, from evolutionary biology to religion.
They understood this well in the Middle Ages. The abode of the stars – the stellatum – marked the edge of the visible cosmos. Beyond this was the rotating Primum Mobile – the prime mover, whose motion powered everything else. The ultimate edge was the engine driving all Earthly action.”
Charles Foster then describes how evolution and the ‘survival of the fittest’ itself is a manifestation of the edge being where all the constructive action is: “Evolutionary innovation happens at the edge of genetic orthodoxy, at the edge of an established population, and typically at the edge of a landmass: hence the exuberant biological creativity seen on islands, where new challenges are faced and old inhibitions relaxed. Take the St Kilda archipelago, for instance, in the heaving green sea off the outer isles of Scotland. It once housed a community of embattled farmers and seabird hunters. They were all evacuated in 1930, leaving behind two species of mice, both unique to the islands. The St Kilda house mouse, whose life depended on its coalition with the humans, went extinct within a few years. But the St Kilda field mouse, uninhibited by house mice, cats and humans, blossomed and changed. It doubled in size and became an enthusiastic flesh-eater, prowling the beaches and headlands for dead birds. Edges were fecund on St Kilda – at least for field mice. They always are. Indeed nothing else is.
Sexual reproduction itself is another good example of the creativity of edginess. It involves organisms and their gametes crossing the boundaries of the organism, meeting in the no-man’s land of a fallopian tube, or water, or air, and producing there something different from either of the parents. Sex is a machine for generating novelty. The newly gestated organism bursts across the edge of its mother, becoming fully itself.”
If we move from vast expanses of space and time into the mundane world in which we live our daily lives, edgy behaviour which pushes you to do uncomfortable things ends up having powerful consequences in the long run: “…the secret of happiness – or at least of keeping panic at bay – is to learn to bear, if not enjoy, the ontological vertigo of edge-dwelling.
If we’re edge-people, living in an edgy world, on the edge of death, we might expect our physiology to have evolved to make the most of edges. It has. The phenomenon even has a name: hormesis. Those Victorian schoolmasters who sang the praises of cold baths were right – up to a point. The right sort of stress is good for you. In one fairly typical study, there was a 29 per cent reduction in sickness-related absences from work in people who took up a regime of cold showers.
Stresslessness kills. Sofas are deadly.
The best and truest books, paintings, sculptures and symphonies by edge-people in an edge-world are likely to be celebrations, denunciations or expositions of edges. If they don’t deal with edges, they’re missing the point of it all.”
Opposed to the people on the edge are those at the centre. Mr Foster does not have good things to say for the centrists: “Since the Neolithic there has been an industry devoted to pretending that centres are what life is all about – an industry based, unsurprisingly, in the physical centres called cities. Before then, we were all more or less itinerant hunter-gatherers, wandering in small groups, occasionally coalescing in slightly bigger clans and more occasionally, in some ages and some places (such as Göbekli Tepe, the vast Neolithic temple complex in eastern Türkiye), having bigger, usually cultic, conglomerations. There was nothing then akin to the cities that sprang up in Mesopotamia, where, for the first time, humans could point to a single place and say: ‘That’s where I’m from.’
It’s impossible to exaggerate how big and how bad this change was. Our address had been ‘The Whole World, Scintillating With Potential And Mystery’; now it was ‘A Mud-Walled Pen, Fulminating With Chauvinism And Bureaucracy’. We had been free to go where the seasons, the herds and our preferences led; now we were subject to the tyranny of supply and demand, and at the mercy of a failed harvest.
The Mesopotamian cities of Eridu, Ur and Uruk, which sprouted from about 5500 BCE, were projects of centralisation, conglomeration and consolidation. They and their successors began to articulate a shrill language in which to denigrate edge-dwellers and promote the centrist project. Centres like to get bigger. Their only imperative is growth. They take their philosophy, in other words, from cancer biology….
Mesopotamian metropolitanism blurred those primordial edges. Recall the Tower of Babel (a ziggurat – a typically Mesopotamian structure), built by people sharing a common language, which reached into God’s own domain, the sky. It was a typical centrist, edge-trashing project, combining homogenisation and hubris. God took action. The tower was destroyed, homogenisation confounded, and the edges restored. But not for long. The Mesopotamians won. Or so it often seems. Metropolises boomed. ‘I am, and who but I?’ declared the centrists, seeking to remake the world in their own image – which meant making everything the same and abolishing the seams between things. Every high street in the world is identical, with its dreary phone shops and sandwich joints. Political and economic power are concentrated in shiny capitals.”
In this never-ending and universal fight between the centre and the edge, the centrists tend to think they are winning and will continue to do so. That in turn gives those on the edge a chance to move the world forward, time and time again, generation after generation.
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