During his stay in Tahiti in the 1890s, Paul Gauguin created a painting that is regarded as among his masterpieces: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? His focus was on the cycle of life, but these big existential questions apply just as well to societies and their institutions, and they have often come into my mind as I’ve been working on the What is it for? series over the past half dozen years. In essence, they are the questions the series sets out to address in a wide variety of domains, the questions that humanity needs to come up with answers to, and quickly.
The world in which the series was conceived feels remote today. The first Trump term was almost over and it seemed unlikely that there would be a second. Few people knew the terms ‘novel coronavirus’ or ‘large language model’. Russia and Ukraine had agreed a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. Despite his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the US president insisted he didn’t seek war. In his 2019 State of the Union address he said, ‘Great nations do not fight endless wars’.
It was a few more years before ‘polycrisis’ was contender for the word that best defined the year, but there were already signs of one brewing: climate catastrophe, authoritarianism, right-wing populism, rising tensions in the Middle East … Historian Adam Tooze said of polycrisis in 2023, ‘If you’ve been feeling confused and as though everything is impacting on you all at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience.’ Indeed, it may be a near universal one. It is this shared experience – though I have probably only realised this in retrospect – that the series has attempted to tackle through its interrogation of purpose.
Of course, a series of paperback books won’t solve the world’s problems. As well as keeping Gauguin’s big existential questions in mind, I also frequently remember the satirist Peter Cook’s remark about ‘those wonderful Berlin cabarets …, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War’. So a dose of realism is healthy. But in the state that Tooze describes, books still have an important role as an antidote to doomscrolling and, more positively, as an intimation that things could be different. Things can be different.
Now the series is over 20-strong, it’s worth reflecting on where we have got to. We’ve published books on subjects as diverse as veganism and counterterrorism, war and the welfare state, the Olympics and cybersecurity, always keeping the examination of purpose to the fore. Why is it like this? How did it get this way? How could it change for the better? We have, I hope, shown that these questions are worth asking, that the status quo is not inevitable and, without succumbing to easy solutionism, that imagining alternative paths is a prerequisite for positive change.
One of the pleasures for me of working on the series has been seeing how each author has approached the brief differently and put their own stamp on it. Jon Sleigh’s book on museums, for example, is conceived as a virtual tour of museum objects; Jon Allsop’s on journalism includes material from his interviews with fellow professionals not just in the UK and the US but also in Myanmar, a very different media environment; and Rhodri Davies chose to explore the nature of philanthropy in a series of chapters that juxtapose it with concepts with which it is often compared: charity, the market, the state and so on. There are many different ways, it turns out, of answering Gauguin’s questions.
So, what of the future? We have around the same number of titles again under contract or in development (on statues, anarchism, religion, music and parents, to name just a few), and potential to grow beyond that. Once you begin to apply the ‘what is it for?’ lens to the world, it can be hard to know where to stop. I keep a running list of possibilities on my phone (some more likely than others), which extends from justice and progress to dogs, gardens and insects.
Further off, there looms of course, the meta-question: What are books for? Can we resist comfort-eating a diet of AI pabulum, the intellectual equivalent of ultra-processed foods? I hope and believe so. No AI comes close to matching the insight and reflection of a human author – nor their lived experience: One of the authors of What Are Zoos For? is a former zookeeper; the author of Prisons is an HM inspector of prisons … That means the experience for the reader and the potential for intellectual nourishment are, I believe, qualitatively different. Of course, they maybe said something similar in those ‘wonderful Berlin cabarets’ of the Weimar years.
George Miller is the editor of the What Is It For? series published by Bristol University Press.
All titles in the What Is It For? series are available for £9.99 on the Bristol University Press website here.
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