The Wonderbox

‘Man only knows himself insofar as he knows the world,’ he wrote. This does not mean, though, that we should be filling our days with incessant activities, reducing ourselves from human beings to human doings. Rather, his point was that self-understanding comes not only from philosophical introspection but from experiential ‘outrospection’.

Living by our beliefs, says Singer, will sustain us more than commitment to self-centred desires such as wealth or social status, no matter how pleasurable they may seem

Cosseted within our peer group or social milieu, we may think it is perfectly normal and justifiable to own two homes, or to oppose same-sex marriage, or to bomb countries in the Middle East. We cannot see that such views may be perverse, unjust or untrue because we are inside a circle of our own making, which constantly reinforces our worldview. If we want to question our beliefs, we need to follow the example of Tolstoy, spending time with people whose values and everyday experiences contrast with our own. Our task must be to journey beyond the perimeters of the circle.

George Bernard Shaw recognised the absurdity of it all when he noted that ‘patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it’

Religious belief, then, is largely an accident of birth, geography and history

We value thinking for ourselves and making up our own minds. But if we delve into the origins of our cherished beliefs, we are likely to encounter a disturbing truth: that they have been shaped by forces outside ourselves, and often without our knowledge

Common sense,’ declared Albert Einstein, ‘is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen

Our beliefs are the mirror in which we can see our integrity or hypocrisy

The difference between man and beast was most sharply drawn by René Descartes, who in the 1630s argued that animals were mere machines or automata, like clocks, while humans had minds and souls. This soon became the standard view. Surely there could be nothing wrong with using soulless machines to plough your fields, or skewering a few for your evening meal. Medieval Britons rarely ate meat, but by 1726, Londoners were annually killing 600,000 sheep and 200,000 cattle

By the eighteenth century the country was covered with places named ‘forest’, ‘grove’ or ‘park’ which had been turned over to crops and pasture. This process was exacerbated by the most scandalous example of privatisation in British history, the ‘enclosure’ of common lands by the upper classes, which escalated from the Tudor period onwards. Between 1760 and 1837, using dubious Acts of Parliament, the elite stole some 7 million acres of land – much of it woodland – which had previously been publicly owned, and converted it to profitable agricultural use.6 The stately homes that so many people admire and visit today were often built with money made from destroying woods that had stood for centuries