Will Self is a walker. In documenting his long-distance journeys, he explores the impact of place on the human condition. Spencer Wells travels to remote areas of the world to genetically reconstruct the migratory patterns of early humans. They recently made their way to New York where Seed asked them to consider: Will a global monoculture erase evidence of our diverse histories? What is the evolutionary consequence of urbanization? What, ultimately, does it mean to be human?
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WILL SELF: I once walked from London to Harwich, along the Essex Way.
SPENCER WELLS: Ah, wow. How many days did it take?
WS: Three-and-a-half days. It was a beautiful long‑distance path, the Essex Way, that avoids all urban centers. The bizarre thing about a walk like that—through one of the most densely inhabited countries in the world—is that I didn’t meet a soul.
SW: Ha—no kidding.
WS: Just the act of becoming ambulatory cuts you out of contemporary culture.
SW: So you can become more of an observer, I guess?
WS: Completely. Or a Viet Cong insurgent from the past, creeping through the tunnels.
SW: Ha—right, complete with rights of way.
WS: But yeah, I’ve always walked. My father was an academic who specialized in urban region development, and he was a walker. It’s partly a connection with him. He died about 10 years ago. And I think it’s also bound up with psycho-geographic concerns, with mapping these unrecorded places, in a sense.
SW: Your personal dérive.
WS: It is a personal dérive. Though my dérive is quite purposive in a way, unlike the Situationists’ dérive, which was, of course, random. They “drifted” and wanted people to become aware of their surroundings. But it has some of the same things associated with it—a way of hitting against what I call the man/machine matrix, and against the way globalized travel destabilizes us and alienates us from our own environment.
SW: It does, it does. I mean, you know, because you go on these sorts of book tours often enough, that you fly into a city and you could be anywhere.
WS: Yeah. On this swing through North America in particular, having done book tours now for 15 years, I was particularly concerned to redeem that. So I’ve been doing these airport walks, walking from airports, or taking long walks in every city I visit. And doing some strange walks, too.
I was very struck by the final chapters of your book where you discuss the way in which globalization is essentially erasing—
SW: —the history of our species, yes.
WS: Yes, and I wonder whether or not my impulse to walk were not part of a…
SW: Luddite response?
WS: Well, a conservatism, at an unconscious level, to retain that, and to somehow get across to people that that’s what we’re losing. In my own way I’m perhaps chiming in with that.
SW: I think there’s something inherent in humans that, yes, makes us want to migrate, but also to have that connection to place, even though we’re moving. I think there is something of a wanderlust in our DNA, something that makes us want to explore a little bit further, but at the same time we want to actually be in the place. The way we travel today, you’re not in the place. There’s never any “there” there.
WS: Yes, there’s no “there” there. I think what I read of yours was one of the clearest and most succinct statements—your view put me in it much more nearly, in a way. Yet, still, I think one of the problems is that it’s so hard for us to conceive of things on such a grand scale. You’re talking about the wave theory of migration into Europe, which is against the diffusionist theories; you’re talking about these approximate measures with which we might conceive of populations being supplanted and moving in.
SW: Mm-hmm.
WS: And speaking as a writer—as somebody who’s mostly preoccupied with the zeitgeist—this multigenerational perspective, this perspective of millennia and of great distances, it’s all so hard to wrap your head around.
SW: And we toss around millennia like they’re nothing—“Approximately 10,000 years, give or take a few thousand.” It’s many, many lifetimes. So, yeah, I think it is quite difficult to personalize it.
That’s why the DNA, I think, is so important. Because if you test your own DNA, you can actually connect back to an individual, a person, who actually lived in a particular place at a particular time. I don’t approach it as a genealogist. For me, it’s a grand historical quest. I’m using DNA as a way to study history.
WS: Do you think that we are in a race against time here? Do you think there are major questions to be answered?
SW: I do. The diversity of humanity is being subsumed into this global monoculture, if you will. Within the next few generations the genes will still be there, but they will be all mixed up and they will have no context. Socially, I think it’s possibly a very good thing. But it just means that we’re going to have erased who we are genetically, these patterns of variation that are relatively recent in the grand scheme of things.
WS: So, in going to these remote locations, is that what you are preoccupied with at the moment? Collecting DNA samples?
SW: That’s a big part of what we’re doing. It’s also educating people about all of this, about DNA. Like it or not, the 21st century is going to be the century of personalized knowledge of your genome. It’s going to be one of the first things your physician looks at when you come in for a diagnosis. That’s coming within the next generation, possibly within the next five to 10 years.
WS: In your book, you couldn’t avoid a note of wistfulness. That’s something that I’ve encountered in other people that write and think deeply about prehistory, a wistfulness about the hunter-gatherer period, about the late Paleolithic.
SW: Oh, absolutely, yes. Noble savages. That’s actually the subject of my next book.
WS: Is it?
SW: Yeah, it’s all about the changes that have happened since the development of agriculture and how, even from the very beginning, they seemed to be bad for us. Anyone who has spent time with hunter-gatherers—have you ever spent time with the San Bushmen, or any of these other groups?
WS: No. I’ve spent a lot of time with heavily deracinated Australian Aboriginals, but there’s enough of it there.
SW: You see this amazing natural historical knowledge they have of the place, and this intense connection. You sit around in the evening after they’ve been out hunting all day and you listen to them tell stories. You can’t understand a word they’re saying, but you still have this sense of something amazing being transmitted between them, and they seem genuinely happy, and yet they have nothing. I think that’s an important lesson.
WS: It is a form of natural magic, of course, for Westerners. Lévi-Strauss said that the thing about magic was that it works.
SW: Right. It would have been myth otherwise.
WS: One of the other things that grabbed me, as it always does when I read about deep time, is the residual in our mythology of “non‑humans,” perhaps
of hominid species that we lived alongside. Think of the enormous grip that The Lord of the Rings has on us, as a story cycle.
SW: Yes.
WS: I think that’s because the folk memory of that period in prehistory, which must have been a long time, is still with us. It’s why fairies and elves and so forth persist.
SW: And possibly the yetis in the central Asian mountains. I think that they, realistically, could have been a surviving band of Neanderthals that people encountered until the past few thousand years.
WS: All of that mythology is clearly about that, isn’t it?
SW: Yeah.
HUMAN, MORE OR LESS
WS: We have a mutual friend, Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London. And he recently showed me a hand axe that dates to 400,000 years ago, dug up in England. So who made that hand axe?
SW: Probably a species we would call Homo heidelbergensis, which we believe was the ancestor of Neanderthals. So it’s a hominid cousin but not a direct ancestor.
WS: This hand axe is a beautiful piece of work to me in terms of its adaptation. There are some theorists of the Paleolithic who view these other hominid species as being more technically expert than we perhaps might imagine. I wonder about their demise in that sense—and I suppose it wouldn’t be called genocide, but perhaps specicide, in this context.
Spencer Wells Credit: Julian Dufort
SW: Call it genocide if you want. But I don’t think it was something that we set out to do, in the case of the Neanderthals. It’s just that they were perhaps better adapted to forested countryside, which is what Europe was until the worst part of the last Ice Age when the grasslands really came in and the tundra moved south. We were better adapted to living in open country and we had larger group sizes and better hunting techniques that had probably been developed on the steppes of central Asia, among other places. We just out‑competed them.
WS: There was a strong inclination towards speciation among humans, but we now have to reassert our connection with nature and the environment at the end of millennia and millennia of doing exactly the opposite. Those Neanderthals have nothing to do with us.
SW: Well it’s a generalized xenophobia, to recognize things that are like us, and are, therefore, to be trusted. It’s scary to think that might have been something that we’ve been adapting to do, for hundreds of thousands of years, and now suddenly, it’s not a good thing. How do you get past that in this modern world?
WS: But it is a paradox, isn’t it, if we’re going to be attracted to the other to the extent that it’s no longer the other? With the level of miscegenation that we have at the moment, the other isn’t going to look like the other anymore.
SW: Eventually, we will all look much more like Tiger Woods, perhaps.
WS: Yeah, then these key markers of who we once were will be eradicated.
SW: Then we’ll develop new ones.
WS: It seems to me that humanness has been a question of refinement.
SW: That’s the way evolution works. You don’t typically have a revolution, you have slow changes, and evolution tinkers with what you have available.
WS: So what is to say that we’re any more human now than we were before the great leap out of Africa? Before the agricultural revolutions of the Neolithic period? What is it that makes us any more human?
SW: I don’t know that we are more human than we were before we left Africa. This whole Neolithic transition is something that really bothers me—the things that were set in motion simply by growing a larger population.
Suddenly you need a hierarchy to control the people and you need organized religion, and those have had a bad long-term effect. But no, I don’t think we are any more human than we were say 100,000 or 70,000 years ago when there’s evidence of this change in behavior that made us fully modern.
WS: Could we be less human?
SW: Yeah, I think in many ways we probably are less human than we were as hunter-gatherers.
WS: I’m toying with these notions because it seems to me that this sadness, this inability to reconnect with the natural world, may be fraught with our understanding of what it is to be human.
SW: We’ve probably changed more since the dawn of the Neolithic than we did in the hundreds of thousands of years leading up to that. Basically what we’re doing is adapting to the culture we created, which is a frightening thing because the culture, in a sense, has become a living organism of its own. It’s almost like a virus the way it’s taken over. The greatest adaptation seems to have come from the change in diet and the change, perhaps, in shelter and making clothes, and all these things that happened as a result of the Neolithic.
WS: And is it encrypted in our genome that we’ll be fatter, for example?
SW: Well, if you believe in something called the thrifty genotype, which was suggested back in the 1960s by an American geneticist and physician called Jim Neel when he was studying groups in the Amazon and other places. He looked at the transition as hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers moved into the 20th century and took on all the attributes of mass culture. And often people do become incredibly obese. You see this in groups like the Pima Indians in the US where something like 50 percent of the population is diabetic.
WS: Do you look around at airports and think, “I can almost see genes mutating in there?”
SW: I don’t think we’re changing fast enough at the genetic level. It’s interesting because now, suddenly, we have the technology to choose the direction we want to take. But now I think the shape of humanity, the morphology, is in the process of changing. And I think we’ll go through a process of adaptation and then we’ll probably fast forward that by changing our own DNA.
WS: Can that be construed as an evolutionary change in itself?
SW: It can, yeah. We were kind of preadapted to do this, if you will. By becoming clever enough to develop the technology over the last few centuries,
it’s almost predictable that we would be able to do this at some point.
WS: But it’s not going to be true of dwellers in the favelas of Rio and São Paulo?
SW: No, so I think there’s going to be a divergence in the world.
WS: It sounds H.G. Wellsian to me. It sounds like time travel or a picture of the Morlocks living underground, all hairy and, was it the Eloi?
SW: The Eloi, yes—rich, thin, attractive. It’s entirely possible. We, now, suddenly have the power to change things many generations down the road. When you’re choosing the genes to put in your children, you’re choosing the genes that go into the grandchildren and the great‑grandchildren and so on. How do you know that the genes you’re choosing are going to be good in 10,000 years or 100,000 years?
WS: You’re worried, but you’re a meliorist; you believe that it’s possible that these problems can be dealt with. Do you think it’s a scientific attribute to be melioristic?
SW: I think it is—to imagine that we’re clever enough to figure out an answer to some of these problems, to find a way around them, to find a fix.
WS: Yeah, definitely the artistic temperament is can’t-do, and don’t-even-particularly-care—ha! Unfortunately.
SW: I sometimes wish scientists had a little bit more of that attitude. Scientists can be a little too rah-rah about technology.
WS: So in a sense you’re saying: We can’t see a problem without thinking how to solve it, but maybe that’s part of the problem.
SW: Yeah. It gives us license to do anything we want because we know we can fix it and deal with the consequences later. And that may not be the case in every situation.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU EMAIL
SW: You’ve always lived in London, your whole life?
WS: Yeah.
SW: Were you ever tempted to move somewhere else for a while? Be an expat?
WS: Not really.
SW: Why not?
Will Self Credit: Julian Dufort
WS: Well, because it feeds back into some of your work. I think that if you are preoccupied, as a writer must be, by the power of the reflective self-communicating liquidity of felt experience, then language, what you can do with language and its capabilities, is absolutely preeminent and essential for you.
You have the great example of Joyce being a furious expatriot and also an incredible linguist and polyglot. Yet his greatest work is saturated in one dialect and one place, one time and one day. You can’t get more localized than that. And it’s completely based around walking. I don’t think anybody uses a wheeled form of transport. It’s a hunter-gatherer knowledge.
SW: Wonderful description.
WS: You have to be a localist in my view to really pull off that obsession. You can write about other things, but there are writers of place and I am one. It’s why I’ve always wanted to stay, and be saturated in that linguistic mulch. Whereas, of course, you move around.
SW: Yeah, incessantly. People ask me where I live and I typically say a series of random hotel rooms and yurts and tents scattered around the world.
WS: Do you think we’ve evolved to the point where people think they are who they are because they talk a lot on their cell phone and they play with their BlackBerry a lot and they’re constantly in flight from one major city to another and from one hotel room to another?
SW: Yeah, modern life is about being disconnected. We rarely connect in a very real way, either to a place or to each other.
WS: Do you think that would have already impacted the genome? Given the levels of chromosome mutation that we tend to look for in human morphological development, how long would you expect it to be before you can put a strand of DNA under a microscope and say, “That is a BlackBerry mutation?”
SW: Ha! A BlackBerry mutation. Wow.
WS: That’s a BlackBerry one!
SW: I think there’s preexisting genetic variance out there. It’s a question of applying the right sort of selection. That’s the nature of evolution—things arise and if there is no need for them, if they are not selected for, then they can disappear very easily.
WS: Why would nature have been so profligate in setting up these potentialities?
SW: Well, it’s just the background of random mutations. They are occurring all the time, whether we like it or not.
WS: Why aren’t there as many for other animals as there are for us?
SW: There are. There’s actually more variation in chimps and gorillas and orangutans; between four and ten times as much at the DNA level, because we nearly went extinct about 70,000 years ago. We dropped down to 2,000 people.
WS: I had no idea.
SW: Yeah. We went through a bottleneck. We came back from that, and probably what allowed us to survive, in part, was that change in culture.
WS: I really had no idea about that; it’s not well publicized.
SW: Well, it’s something I talk about, and Jared Diamond has mentioned it, although not the extreme figures. That comes out of genetics really.
WS: We’ve now got the 2,000 figure.
SW: Yeah, roughly 2,000.
WS: What do you think the population might have been before then?
SW: Probably not much more, maybe between 10,000 and 100,000, but certainly not in the millions or billions.
WS: I think one of the things that inspired me to write Great Apes was the imminent extinction of the chimpanzee in the wild, which I think will be one of the most philosophically queasy moments. But I don’t think people have reckoned on it at all.
SW: Any extinction, but particularly chimpanzees.
WS: Particularly the chimp, surely.
SW: It’s the finality of it and the notion that, “These are our cousins, and we’re the ones who caused their demise.”
WS: Isn’t it also like kicking out the ladder beneath us? The connection is then gone between us and the rest of the natural world in a really profound way.
SW: Yes, but we’ve done that before—we did it with Neanderthals.
WS: Yes, we’ve done it before.
SW: We seem to have no qualms about doing things like that. We’re very good destroyers, as well as creators.
WS: I think, I can’t remember the figure, but there are something like only 150,000 chimpanzees left in the wild?
SW: And fewer orangutans.
WS: And fewer mountain gorillas. But if they were allowed to get on with it now, they would be fine.
SW: If we set aside the territory, yeah. It’s really that simple. It’s just like hunter-gatherer human populations. All they need is to be left alone with enough territory and they will be fine.
WALKING THE WALK
SW: Are you optimistic about the future? It sounds like no.
WS: I believe in the Tao. I’m not optimistic or pessimistic. What is, is, and what will be, will be. And indeed, I would argue—the melioristic side of me would say—that our ability to cope with the possibilities will only benefit from equanimity in the face of it.
In other words, what’s more likely to power us toward an overheated destruction is a frenzied technical solution. In fact, “Don’t just do something, sit there,” is probably a reasonable response to the situation. Or rather, “Don’t just do something, walk around a bit.”
SW: Right.
WS: It may not be like the Lou Reed line in “Beginning of a Great Adventure,” where he says something like, “I’m going to breed up a mutant piglet army in the woods.” But it’s not far off that. And the only way I can see to impact that mindset is to walk. Maybe it is in the migration, and specifically in the migration that is ambulatory. This may be very old evolutionarily—it may be a mindset from the past—but we need a physical analog on which to operate. Because presumably we’ve been chipping rocks far, far longer than we’ve been dealing with the abstract or the idea of digitized knowledge in that way.
I think the only thing I can do is to try and persuade people to walk. I think that impacts everything we’ve been discussing. Once you walk, it starts to fall into place.
SW: A Zen‑like state.
WS: And a Zen‑like state of absorption into physical geography. Because if you are solely concerned with orientation and movement, then the so‑called higher faculties don’t have a lot to do. There isn’t a lot of room. You’re not tormented by what the Germans call the “earworm” gnawing away at you, or the resentment you had toward the guy at the party in 1985 who spilled the drink on you. That goes after a few miles. And I think then we’re probably back in the hunter-gatherer mindset. What I’m saying is, you can be a huntergatherer. You can be a hunter-gatherer now. Anybody here in Manhattan, or in any major city, can make that choice to be a hunter-gatherer.
