Letters To Lily [Kindle Edition]

Anthropologist Alan Macfarlane writes a series of letters to his granddaughter, Lily, on his view of how the world works at the beginning of the 21st century. Each letter tackles a different topic, from love and friendship, to violence and fear. We learn the history of how we have built our current beliefs in relation to these issues and how a British perspective varies from other cultural views. Macfarlane highlights the common mistake we make in assuming that there has been a direct path through history to our current point in time. Of course in reality human history has involved many coincidences and crossroads at which the world could have turned out very differently. By helping us to recognise this Macfarlane reminds us that it is vital that we continually adjust the way we view the world and not assume we have already reached the right conclusions.

An interesting and thought provoking book, we are lucky that Macfarlane has decided to share his thoughts with all of us and not just Lily.

Letters to Lily is a series of thirty letters in which the historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane tries to show his grand-daughter Lily how the world works, how our lives are shaped by biology, society and economy. He demonstrates how the boundaries between animal and human, the social and the natural, the natural and the artificial are largely arbitrary, why good and evil are in many cases social constructs, how sexuality and other learned behaviours function within different societies. He also touches on such subjects as love, war, violence, technology and play. In many ways, this is an enjoyable read. Macfarlane's scathing comments on democracy, terrorism and witchcraft, on electoral processes and the discovery of Evil Ones among us, are serious as well as topical.

Engagingly written, lively and informative, Letters to Lily is both an outpouring of affection and a textbook. Full of references to poetry and children's books, from hobbits to Harry Potter, it is intended to be read in ten years time, when Lily will be seventeen.

Lily is "an English girl", "a free spirit". Contrasting her life with that of a sick, pregnant peasant, Macfarlane compares England with other countries where he has worked, China, India and Nepal. In this West versus the Rest panorama of history and culture, distance lends enchantment to the view. English history becomes oddly flattened, its discontents smoothed over by an old-fashioned narrative of liberty and progress. This is history and anthropology as seen from the big house. Everything interesting is tolerable because it poses no threat to the observer. The aversion to moral judgements skates over the incontrovertible evidence that some societies, lifestyles, and people, are qualitatively better than others. Macfarlane favours Buddhism: otherwise, his ethical and religious curiosity stops at functional explanations of why certain beliefs are useful in certain societies. Christianity is treated as synonymous with Anglicanism. Macfarlane implies that only Protestantism emphasises inward repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He says Christians are less concerned with praying for the dead than with services of commemoration and thanksgiving.

Like Lily, I am English yet the assumptions underlying these letters make me uneasy. First, I am unconvinced that good and evil can be reduced to a mixture of survival-based projections and social constructs. Second, England's Catholic history, overshadowed by the violence and repression of the Reformation, has an agrarian, communitarian past whose folklore lives on among the hobbits and fairies of children's books. The fairies, Richard Corbet wrote, "were of the old profession." Macfarlane ignores Catholicism and other forms of dissent, seeing not change but continuity.

The usefulness of this book lies in the way it ties together disparate pieces of information, allowing glimpses of explanatory theories for so many things. It counterbalances the dangerous naivety often found among young people whose teachers and parents represent individual and global problems as coming more from moral choices than from biological imperatives and socio-economic forces. It will provoke endless arguments from Lily's fellow-readers, especially Catholic ones.