Joseph Needham (1900-1995) was a world renowned scholar who helped put the history of Chinese science on the map. He is now, sadly, in danger of being forgotten. He was a ground-breaking bio-chemist at Cambridge whose life-long interest in Chinese civilisation resulted in a series of books on Chinese science, which was fostered by a research team at the Needham Research Institute from 1976. He was renowned for conducting informal seminars and get-togethers at his home off Grange Road in Cambridge. I was studying at Cambridge in 1992 and never learnt about these soirees after his death in 1995. They were open to all and I wish I had attended.

Needham has been described as a bridge builder between science, religion and Marxist socialism. He was one of a group of leftist scientists in the UK who wanted to popularise science for the masses, and to reform it away from its elitism. Needham was the son of a Harley Street speciialist and an artistically gifted mother.. His life has been seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between his creative mother and a more rationalist father who nevertheless had a deep interest in theology and the classics and was active in the Anglican Oxford Movement. Joseph himself became attached to a broad and tolerant Christianity, plus a deep interest in religions such as Buddhism, Islam, and Taoism. He had veered towards a religious vocation in his early years, trialling for two years as a novice in the Oratory of the Good Shepherd (an Anglo-Catholic order) and was also active in the Guild of St Luke, promoting Christian ethics in the medical profession.

I will look in future at how these influences turned out in his later efforts to reconcile science and religion, the Holy and Society. I have published my thoughts on Needham in my book Intellectuals and the Decline of Religion (Boolarong Press, 1917).

Geoffrey Gorer, in his Exploring English Character (1955) concluded from his studies that about a quarter of the British population had given up on conventional religion and had turned to pagan, mystical and other superstitious beliefs, nothing less “than a fully fledged magical universe”. Here as the social scientist Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree also confirmed “was a nation living outside the churches… but far from happy with its new existential lot”.

“All the great dangers threatening humanity with extinction are direct consequences of conceptual thought and verbal speech [the greatest gifts of man]…Knowledge springing from conceptual thought robbed man of the security provided by his well adapted instincts long, long before it was sufficient to provide him with an equally safe adaptation. Man is, as Arnold Gehlen has so truly said, by nature a jeopardized creature”

Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (1963).

“… the clever demagogue, well versed in the dangerous art of producing supra-normal stimulus situations, gets hold of young people at the susceptible age [late teens to early twenties], he finds it easy to guide their object-fixations in a direction subservient to his political aims. At the post-puberal age some human beings seem to be driven by an over-powering urge to espouse a cause, and, failing to find a worthy one, may become fixated on astonishingly inferior substitutes. The instinctive need to be a member of a closely knit group fighting for common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what those ideals are and whether they possess any intrinsic value. This, I believe, explains the formation of juvenile gangs whose social structure is very probably a rather close reconstruction of that prevailing in primitive human society”.

Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (1963).

Lorenz grew up in Austria in the 1930s and was possibly thinking here about the Hitler Youth movement. He was reticent in mentioning Nazi subjects as he himself, like may others at the time, had felt obliged to join the Nazi party.

Konrad Lorenz imagined what an unbiased observer on another planet would make of human behaviour when observing Earth by telescope. He concluded that this observer would never gain the impression that human behaviour was dictated by intelligence, still less by responsible morality:

“Unreasoning and unreasonable human nature causes two nations to compete, though no economic necessity compels them to do so; it induces two political parties or religions with amazingly similar programmes of salvation to fight each other bitterly and it impels an Alexander or a Napoleon to sacrifice millions of lives in his attempt to unite the world under his sceptre.

We have been taught to regard some of the persons who have committed these and similar absurdities with respect, even as ‘great’ men… most of us fail to realize how abjectly stupid and undesirable the historical mass behaviour of humanity actually is”:

On Aggression (1963)