Big Ideas for Curious Minds, page 10
who is being a bit silly, just like
the girl is here.
Piano Practice Interrupted, Willem Bartel van der Kooi, 1813.
This painting is an
advert for looking at
clouds. By making the
clouds look interesting
and pretty, it wants
to explain to you how
much you might enjoy
looking at the sky.
It’s not trying to get
you to buy anything,
but it is trying to get
you to do something.
A Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church, Jacob van Ruisdael, 1665–70.
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This is an advert for crouching
down among weeds and mud,
looking closely at blades of
grass and seeing how each leaf
is a different shape. Looking at
this painting should make you
think about how interesting it
might be to do that, and to pay
close attention to the nature
around you.
Great Piece of Turf, Albrecht Dürer, 1503.
Friendship, Agnes Martin, 1963.
Sometimes a work of art
advertises a feeling. This one is
an advert for feeling quiet and
happy on your own. The artist
drew the lines by hand and
measured them all perfectly.
She enjoyed working alone and
concentrating very carefully on
her art, so this picture helps
remind us of how fun it can be
to do something by ourselves.
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Some people think that advertising is bad because it makes us want things
we don’t really need. They’ve got a point—some advertising does do that.
But that’s not the whole story. There are things we really do need that it’s
good to be reminded of as well. That’s where art comes in—it can make
us concentrate on some of the beautiful and important things in life. If
you want to make friends with a work of art, a good question to ask is:
what nice thing is this advertising?
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher who was born
just over two hundred years ago, in 1770. He worked very hard at school
and almost always got top grades. Later, he became the headmaster of
a school and then he was in charge of a newspaper before eventually he
became a university professor. He liked to stay up very late and if you
had visited him in his flat in Berlin at midnight, you would have found
him working hard. He loved playing card games and singing songs with
his friends and he wrote enormous, very complicated books. He became
very famous indeed.
Hegel liked ideas a lot, but he realised something quite sad about them:
we can very easily ignore them. He realised that usually we need to see
and feel things before we can get excited. If someone just tells you that
the beaches in Australia are great, that probably does not make much
difference to you—but if you see a picture it might. The picture shows
you the long, wide strip of soft sand, the rocks and waves and the warm
sunshine. That makes the idea of a nice beach come alive in your brain.
It makes sense if you think about it, because seeing and feeling are very
important to us. We see and feel even when we are little babies, but we
only start to think when we are older. So what art has to do, Hegel said, is
to join up an idea with our feelings. Hegel said that art makes ideas that
you can see and feel. And that makes them much more powerful.
BIG IDEA #23
People get paid very different amounts of money for the work they do. For
some jobs, you get a lot of money, but for others, only a little. Why is there
this difference? Why does a top football player or someone in charge of a
law firm get paid so much more than a bus driver or someone who works
in a café?
Pay does not depend on how nice a job is or how nice the person who
does it is. The really important question is: ‘How many people can do this
job?’ If lots of people could do a job quite well then the pay will often be
less. Most people could manage to drive a bus or be a waiter or waitress,
so if you were running a bus firm or a café and you needed a new worker
you wouldn’t have to offer much money to get someone to do it.
But suppose you are in charge of a football club and you want your team
to win a lot of matches. You have to get the very best players. There will
be hardly any players good enough. All the clubs want these people to
play for them, so they offer more and more money to attract the very few
really talented and skilled players. Or maybe you’re the boss at a law firm.
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Only a few people know enough about all the different laws to do the job
well, and lots of firms would like to hire them. So you would have to offer
more and more money to attract the best people. This explains why hardly
anyone makes a lot of money. The only jobs that pay really well are jobs
that hardly anyone can do well. Any job that a lot of people can do won’t
be paid very well, because they don’t have to convince people to do it—it
will just be paid an average, normal amount.
This is also why highly-paid jobs are not always particularly enjoyable.
They’re usually very stressful. If you’re being paid a lot of money, people
expect you to be very good at what you are doing, all the time. If a waiter
or waitress spills some juice on someone, that’s a bit annoying, but it’s
really quite a small problem. However, if the person in charge of a law
firm makes a mistake it could cost the firm millions of pounds. There is
always something big that could go wrong—and they know it.
Unfortunately, even if you are very good at something, you still might
not make a lot of money. It depends on how much people need you to do
it. Suppose you are very, very good at standing on one leg—you can do it
for hours. That’s amazing. But it’s probably not going to make you rich,
because there aren’t many people who need or want you to do that.
If you want to have a job that pays well, there are two things you have
to keep in mind: you have to work out what you can do very well that
lots of other people want done, and you have to work out how much you
would mind the stress that usually goes with a high-paying job. You also
have to remember that lots of jobs which don’t pay that well are still very
important and fun to do. Some of the greatest artists and writers who ever
lived were not very successful when it came to making money. There are
lots of important people in the world who are not rich.
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Adam Smith was born in Scotland about two hundred and fifty years ago.
He grew up in the countryside and loved exploring the hills and woods.
He was pretty good at school and when he was older he got a job teaching
in a university. He was a very good teacher. He was interested in kindness
and sympathy (being sensitive to what other people are feeling), but he
was also very interested in how money works and in how people (and
whole countries) can make more money. This was very important to him
because when he was younger, Scotland was quite a poor country—not
everyone had shoes or enough to eat.
Adam Smith said that the way to make money is to think about what
other people need, and then to make those things more cheaply. Everyone
needs shoes, for instance, but in Scotland a lot of people didn’t have shoes
because they cost so much to make (it took a whole day for one person
to make a pair of shoes). The trick, said Adam Smith, was to start a shoe
factory. Using machines and getting a lot of people organised means that
you can make a lot more shoes much more quickly and cheaply, so lots
more people can buy them.
Adam Smith realised something rather amazing: if you want to make
money, it is not enough just to ask, ‘What do people need?’ You have
to work out how to make a lot of those things cheaply so that they are
accessible to the greatest number of people.
BIG IDEA #24
Some families have more and some families have less. Some people have
swimming pools, while others do not even have a garden. Some people
go on lots of holidays and others have to stay at home. Some houses are
huge, but others are not very nice at all.
Is it fair that some people have lots of nice things and others do not?
Philosophers have thought a lot about what makes things fair. They are
called ‘political’ philosophers, and they try to work out how the world can
be fairer. But before they can do that, they have to ask a tricky question:
what is ‘fair’? What does ‘fair’ actually mean?
Imagine you are cutting up a pizza to share with other people. If there
are six people it seems only fair to cut it into six pieces that are all the
same size. Then everyone will get the same. If you were in charge of the
world, could you do the same with money and houses and nice holidays?
Would it be fair if you gave everyone exactly the same? You would think
so, but maybe not. Some people work much harder than others. Some
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people have very good ideas that help a lot of
other people. Maybe it’s OK if they get more.
Or what if someone’s parents are really quite
nice—they help their children lots and listen
carefully and take them on interesting trips.
Could you say: ‘It is not fair that you have such nice parents because
other people do not have such nice parents—your parents should not
be allowed to be so good to you’. Or, if someone is really good at maths
or running, is that fair? Would you say: ‘You’ll have to wear very heavy
shoes and miss all the maths lessons so that everyone can be the same
at running and at maths’? Probably not.
So maybe the idea of making everything the same doesn’t really work. Of
course there will be some differences. The problem is, how big will they
be? To make everything as fair as possible, you’d want everyone to be as
equal as possible. Think about this: what if, before you were even born,
you were able to look down from the sky at the whole world. You can see
all the lives that people are leading, but you don’t know which life was
going to be yours. You can see all the families, but you don’t know which
family you might be born into, what house you’ll live in or what school
you’ll go to. You might be lucky and land in a nice place and get some very
nice things, or you might be unlucky and get the worst ones.
Looking at one country, you might see some really great places you could
land. There are families with helicopters and amazing houses with two
swimming pools. But then you notice that most of the families in this
country have hardly anything, and most of the schools are crumbling.
The chances are that you could end up with something horrible, so that
country doesn’t seem very appealing.
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Then you look at another country. In this country, there are quite a lot of
good places (though no one at all owns a helicopter or has two swimming
pools). There are hardly any really awful places. Even the people who do
not have so much still have enough. Maybe their house is smaller but it’s
still OK; maybe there is a school that is not quite as good, but it is not
that bad. Probably you would think that it’s wiser to choose this country
—even if you end up getting the worst place here, your life will still be
pretty good.
Thinking about countries like this is an interesting test for how fair a
country is. Total equality and fairness might not be possible, and not
everyone will have the same, but at least in the second country no one is
having a really awful time while other people have everything.
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Imagine yourself before your birth. You can choose any country in the world to live in,
but you can’t tell whether you will be rich or poor. Where would you choose to live?
What does that tell you?
There was an American philosopher called John Rawls who lived not
too long ago—from 1921 to 2002. That is quite recent for a philosopher,
many of whom lived a long time ago. It might seem like all philosophers
are ancient, but the good thing about philosophy is that it doesn’t really
matter when a good idea was thought up. Some good ideas have been
around for a long time, while others are quite new—but what matters is
how helpful they are to us.
John Rawls grew up in Baltimore in the USA. His family was quite well off
and his parents were very good to him, but there were lots of very poor
and unhappy people who lived nearby and even as a child he was worried
about this. Why was his life so nice when other people had such a difficult
time? He decided he’d try to do something about it when he grew up.
One thing that really struck him was that even in countries that are rich,
there are usually still a lot of people who have terrible lives. The problem
isn’t how to make this country richer (it’s rich already), but how to split
up the good things it already has. Why doesn’t that happen? He thought
it was because we don’t have a shared idea of what’s fair. That’s why he
invented the test that we’ve just been looking at. He called this the ‘veil
of ignorance’. Would you think this was an OK country to live in, if you
didn’t know which bit of it you were going to have to live in? If we have
good ideas we can try to solve really difficult problems.
BIG IDEA #25
You probably know quite a lot about shyness. Children very often feel shy
around new people. If you start at a new school where you do not know
anyone, you probably feel like it’s going to be difficult to get to know the
other children there—what if they don’t like you? Or perhaps one time
your mum or dad takes you to visit some of their friends. They seem so
different. They come from another country. Maybe they have a daughter
who is older than you and has a name you don’t know how to say, ‘Marie-
Christine’. She seems so different. You cannot think of anything to say.
