I have come to realise that the most valuable education I ever received was learning to see the same country from two completely different points of view.
I was reminded of this recently while listening to Andy Burnham speak about the “Makerfield test”: his promise that national policy should be judged by whether it improves life in places such as Makerfield, rather than merely satisfying the economic and political orthodoxies of Westminster.
I was attracted to the idea immediately. That was not altogether surprising. Burnham and I have several things in common.
How the moon led me to rethink the origins of the universe and humanity’s place and responsibility within it.
As I settle into my new life in Spain, I wake up before dawn in order to jog along the promenade before it gets too hot, watch the sunrise, contemplate cosmology and meditate.
Last week, to the west above the Carihuela, there was a huge, bright, full moon poised low in the sky before the sunrise.
It wasn’t merely bright. It seemed suspended. As if detached from its control of the tides below. Silver against an increasingly blue sky, refusing — for a few precious minutes — to surrender to the approaching sun.
The sea below was calm. The seagulls were swooping down majestically to collect their breakfast. Somewhere behind me, the town was waking. Yet for a brief moment everything felt strangely timeless.
I stood there on the harbour wall longer than I intended. Not because I understood what I was looking at. Indeed, as I meditated, I was startled by how little I did.
That quiet moment began another of my recent intellectual odysseys. I jogged home and began researching in detail the origins of the universe.
The answers I discovered have profoundly changed the way I see both the universe and humanity.
We began with almost nothing
According to our best scientific understanding, the Universe began around 13.8 billion years ago.
In the first few minutes after the Big Bang, almost all that existed were the simplest elements imaginable: hydrogen, helium and tiny traces of lithium.
There was no carbon.
No oxygen.
No calcium.
No iron.
No chlorine.
No lead.
Nothing from which planets, oceans or living organisms could eventually be built.
Everything else had yet to be created.
Stars are not simply lights
The next discovery astonished me even more.
I had always thought of stars as glowing balls of gas.
In reality, they are unimaginably powerful nuclear furnaces.
The identity of every chemical element is determined simply by the number of protons in the nucleus of each atom.
Hydrogen has one proton.
Helium has two.
Carbon has six.
Oxygen has eight.
Iron has twenty-six.
Lead has eighty-two.
Inside stars, gravity compresses matter with such extraordinary force that atomic nuclei are pushed together in a process known as nuclear fusion.
When four hydrogen nuclei fuse together, they produce helium and release enormous amounts of energy.
Later, when stars become even hotter, three helium nuclei combine to create carbon. Carbon can then fuse with helium to produce oxygen. Larger stars continue building heavier and heavier elements through countless further fusion reactions.
Quite literally, the periodic table is assembled one proton at a time.
Eventually, the largest stars manufacture elements all the way to iron. When those stars finally exhaust their fuel, they explode as supernovae, scattering their newly created elements across the galaxy.
During those unimaginably violent explosions, still heavier elements such as gold, lead and uranium are created before being hurled into interstellar space.
Without generations of stars living and dying long before our Solar System existed, neither the Earth nor we ourselves could ever have existed.
For years I assumed that was simply a poetic metaphor.
It isn’t.
The hydrogen in the water within my body was formed shortly after the Big Bang itself.
But almost every other element within me has a different origin.
The carbon in my muscles.
The oxygen I breathe.
The calcium in my bones.
The iron carried around my body by my blood.
All of them were forged inside stars that died billions of years before the Earth even formed.
Some of those atoms may once have been part of ancient forests.
Some may have passed through dinosaurs.
Some may have circulated through countless generations of my own ancestors.
Matter itself is endlessly recycled.
The atoms change partners.
The universe never stops reusing its building blocks.
In this way, it is no coincidence that the branching networks of our neurons and the elegant spirals in hurricanes and elements of our DNA echo patterns that also appear throughout the cosmos. Different processes, different scales, yet strikingly familiar forms emerging from the same universe.
Then came another surprise
Just when I thought the story could not become any more remarkable, genetics added another layer.
Every person alive today shares common ancestry.
Research suggests that all living humans inherited their mitochondrial DNA from one woman who lived in Africa roughly 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Likewise, all living men inherited their Y chromosome from one man who lived much later.
They were not the only people alive at the time.
They are simply the individuals whose particular genetic lines survived uninterrupted to the present day.
Meanwhile, every generation doubles the number of our ancestors.
Travel back only a few thousand years and our family trees overlap so extensively that the distinctions between “my ancestors” and “your ancestors” begin to disappear.
In a very real biological sense, humanity is one enormous extended family.
A different foundation for responsibility
As the moon faded into the brightening Andalusian sky, I found myself asking a question that science itself cannot answer.
If Carl Sagan was right that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” what follows logically from that?
As far as we currently know, nowhere else has the universe organised itself into beings capable of wondering where the universe came from.
Perhaps intelligent life is common throughout the cosmos.
I hope it is.
But until we know otherwise, we must take seriously the possibility that conscious beings like ourselves are extraordinarily rare. Maybe even unique.
If that is true, then our responsibility extends far beyond ourselves.
Protecting our planet.
Seeking truth.
Advancing knowledge.
Caring for one another.
Safeguarding future generations.
These are not merely useful social conventions.
They become responsibilities entrusted to the very few beings — perhaps the only beings — capable of understanding what is at stake.
The moon itself had not changed that morning.
Nor had the sea.
Nor the rising sun.
What changed was my understanding.
For the first time, I began to see humanity not as something standing apart from the universe, but as one of the most extraordinary things the universe has so far produced.
Perhaps, after all, the starry heavens above us do not merely invite our curiosity. They really can provide us with the most rational basis for human ethics that we will ever discover.
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” — Immanuel Kant
How a Spanish football shirt unexpectedly changed the way I think about history, education and the origins of our globalised world.
I recently bought a Spanish football shirt to wear at a bar while watching Spain’s 3:0 win against Austria on Thursday.
That simple purchase unexpectedly led me down one of the most fascinating rabbit holes I have explored in a while.
It began with two Latin words embroidered on Spain’s coat of arms: Plus Ultra.
I knew from my school-Latin what the words meant, further beyond, but I still needed some context to understand the meaning.
A little research revealed that they are a reference to the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar. For the ancient world, these marked the edge of the known earth. The old warning was “Non Plus Ultra” — nothing lies beyond.
Then came the voyages of exploration.
The warning became an invitation.
There was indeed more beyond.
That discovery prompted another question.
Christopher Columbus sailed for Spain. Yet I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that he was Italian. Was that right?
It was. I kept digging.
Born in Genoa, Columbus spent years trying to persuade different European rulers to finance his ambitious plan to reach Asia by sailing west. It was only when the Spanish Crown agreed to back him that history changed forever.
Then I discovered something even more surprising.
Ferdinand Magellan, whose expedition first circumnavigated the globe, wasn’t Spanish either. He was Portuguese. And he himself was killed in the Philippines before the expedition was completed.
Like Columbus, he simply happened to be sailing under the Spanish flag.
As I kept digging, I also learnt for the first time why America is called America and why the Pacific is called the Pacific. I learnt why Brazil speaks Portuguese while much of South America speaks Spanish, why Spain became one of history’s great global powers, how its sudden enormous wealth became a resource curse, and, most strikingly of all, how all these historical facts are mirrored in the events happening in the world today.
By now, all this led to another kind of question:
Why was I only learning this as I approach retirement?
None of these are obscure historical curiosities.
They explain the world we live in.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that perhaps history has often been taught backwards.
Schools understandably devote considerable attention to national history. In Britain, we studied the Tudors, the Industrial Revolution and the Second World War. In Germany, where I spent many years teaching, National Socialism understandably occupies a central place throughout secondary education.
These are all profoundly important topics.
But too often history becomes an exercise in remembering names, dates, battles and treaties.
The examination rewards recall.
Real understanding often comes later.
History is not simply the story of what happened.
History can be the highly relevant explanation of why today’s world looks the way it does.
Why does almost an entire continent speak Spanish?
Why is Brazil different?
Why was Córdoba (Spain) once much bigger and more important than London?
Why are Europe and Latin America still so culturally intertwined?
Why and how did globalisation begin centuries before the Internet?
Those are historical questions too.
They just happen to illuminate the present rather than merely describe the past.
While I was training teachers at the University of Sussex, one of the finest history lessons I have ever witnessed contained almost no conventional history.
The young trainee teacher warned parents in advance that the lesson would be unusual.
She darkened the classroom. She played the sound of air-raid sirens followed by distant explosions. Beforehand, she asked the children to climb underneath their desks and lie silently on the floor with their eyes closed.
For several minutes they simply listened.
Afterwards she asked them to write, not about dates, military strategy or political leaders, but about how they had felt.
For a brief moment, those children had experienced uncertainty, vulnerability and fear. Not the reality of war, of course, but enough to begin imagining what it might feel like to be a child living through one.
I have forgotten countless historical dates since leaving school. I have never forgotten that lesson.
Nor, I suspect, have the children who experienced it.
That teacher wasn’t merely teaching history.
She was teaching empathy and vividly demonstrating how history is so relevant to life in the 21st Century.
As I have grown older, I find myself increasingly drawn to education that asks questions rather than rewards memorisation.
The same thought has appeared repeatedly in my recent writing about economics.
It is about understanding why economies behave as they do.
Likewise, history should not simply teach us to remember what happened.
It should help us understand why our world became what it is.
Perhaps that is why I have found these discoveries in Spain so unexpectedly exciting.
I wasn’t simply learning historical facts.
I was discovering connections.
The voyages of Columbus and Magellan were not isolated adventures.
They marked the beginning of the first great wave of globalisation.
Trade routes expanded.
Ideas travelled.
Plants, animals, diseases and cultures crossed oceans.
The Mediterranean outside my window here was once dry land – another fact I was unaware of. It is only thanks to the Zanclean Flood that water entered from the Atlantic through the Strait of Gibraltar and opened up the possibility of a future global trade highway.
The world became permanently interconnected.
Five centuries later we are still living with the consequences.
History also reminds us that no civilisation remains permanently at the top.
Sometimes I wonder whether schools unintentionally leave us with the impression that education ends when we pass our examinations.
In reality, the opposite is true.
The most rewarding learning often begins afterwards.
It begins when curiosity replaces obligation.
When we are no longer asking, “Will this be in the exam?”
Instead we ask, “Why did nobody ever explain this?”
