According to Wikipedia, May 29th is National Paperclip Day. Which nation? I don’t know. But perhaps it should also be International Vaccine Scepticism Day.
Let us start with paperclips and then move onto vaccines. The 20th Century was the century of paper. G.K. Chesterton said that in the Middle Ages if a peasant had found a sheet of paper in the middle of a country lane he would have considered it a sacred object and taken it 30 miles to the nearest church or monastery; whereas in the 20th Century printed paper was so common it was used for wrapping fish and chips, drying boots or keeping tramps warm.
Paper has a long history: from papyrus (vegetable) and parchment (animal) to wood pulp (vegetable again), from scrolls to codices – that’s books, to you and me – and of course from manuscripts that took a month to copy to Gutenberg and his rapid printing press: and then the massed profusion of texts: publishers running around begging figures like Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Johnson let them print whatever they could write, and the newspaper. Meanwhile, official life had already benefitted from double-entry book-keeping: though it was in the late 19th Century that we saw the spread of two of the greatest inventions: the typewriter, which meant that one could produce ‘copy’ in one’s own house or shop, and the paperclip, which meant that one could assemble and store papers without requiring string or binding. What would the 20th Century have been without a sheaf of typed papers held together with a paperclip?
Then we had the personal computer, the word document, and the ‘cloud’, all of which has brought the great century of paper to an end. But I’ll write about the Antichrist another time.
The Wikipedia page on the paperclip engages with the complicated question of who invented it. There are some American candidates, and a Norwegian candidate. The first manufacturer of the paperclip we know now was apparently a British firm called Gem Manufacturing Company in the 1870s. I say ‘apparently’ as no one seems to know for sure. All we know is that the standard paperclip was well established by the 1890s, and that it acquired the name ‘Gem’. But I leave all this to one side. Except that one of the more interesting parts of the story is the claim of Herbert Spencer to have invented the paperclip.
Have you heard of Herbert Spencer? He is one of the Grand Old Men of the 19th Century that no one reads any more: along with Mark Pattison, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Scott, G.H. Lewes, etc. I once went on a pilgrimage to Highgate Cemetery to see Marx’s grave (excuse me, but we are all ‘cultural Marxists’ now; especially if Richard Dawkins is a ‘cultural Christian’): and got a surprise when I found Spencer’s much more humble grave opposite it.
Herbert Spencer registered a patent for a binding pin in 1846 and it was manufactured for a year. Spencer was one of the most famous men of his time, but he was quite proud of his little technological innovation, so much so, that he reproduced an image of it in Appendix I of his Autobiography, published in 1904, a year after his death. The pin looked more like a hairpin than a paperclip: and it clearly has nothing to do with the paperclip as we have come to know it. But Spencer did not pretend otherwise. The purpose of his pin, as he described it, was to bind together loose manuscript pages or sermons or sheets of music, weekly papers or any unstitched publications. The illustration shows that it was nothing like our standard paperclip: because it held together sheets not on the flat, as it were, but at a fold or crease, holding them for ease of turning pages. Contrast the standard paperclip, which, famously, if it has one weakness, is that the gain in firmness of grip is matched by a loss in our ability to turn pages.
Spencer added an explanation as to why his invention had not had much success:
Except in matters of prime necessity, the universal demand on the part of retailers, probably because it is the demand on the part of ladies, is for something new. The mania for novelty is so utterly undiscriminating that in consequence of it good things continually go out of use, while new and worse things come into use: the question of relative merit being scarcely entertained.
We may well tut and chuckle over Spencer’s slightly choleric blaming of the ‘ladies’ for the failure of his little invention.
Spencer, fortunately, had much else in his armoury besides a binding pin. He wrote countless books, and is perhaps the only Englishman since Francis Bacon to have ventured a system of absolutely everything. He invented the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. He wrote A System of Synthetic Philosophy in 10 volumes, ranging through biology, psychology, sociology and ethics. He wrote a famous political diatribe entitled Man Versus the State in 1884: a book which makes him the godfather of libertarianism. And he also wrote many essays – one of which concerned our second subject – vaccines.
Spencer was a vaccine sceptic. In his collection of essays, Facts and Comments, published in 1902, he included a little essay written some years earlier on ‘Vaccination’. This essay of a few pages registers a very simple objection to vaccines. He had noticed that between around 1850 and 1875 deaths-from-all-causes had dropped in number, while deaths-caused-by-specific-diseases had risen in number as a proportion of the population. He speculated that the cause of the first might be general improvement of conditions; and the cause of the second might be vaccines.
His argument was very interesting. It was that vaccines were implausibly supposed to be what we would now call a ‘magic bullet’: a reagent which would shield a patient from a particular disease – there was no such thing as a ‘virus’ when Spencer wrote – and have no other discernible effect on the patient. He thought this was highly unlikely. He wrote:
The argument that vaccination changes the constitution in relation to smallpox and does not otherwise change it is a sheer folly.
Nowadays we speak of ‘vaccine side effects’. The problem with ‘side effects’ is that it suggests that the vaccine is somehow programmed to take out a virus like a sniper. But is it not the case that the vaccine is rather more like a shotgun than a rifle? Spencer thought it very likely that we would have to watch vaccines for a long time to see how they affect our entire constitution.
Let us call this Spencer’s principle. It is a more brilliant contribution to human civilisation than his binding pin. The vaccine is no more a magic bullet than the British national debt is a magic money tree. The vaccine may – may, I say – cause all manner of effects, not side effects, but central effects. And this may be so of not only our glorious mRNA technology, but also the simple vaccines we have been taught for a century or more to queue up for at school or clinic.
Let us hope that someone will soon, in honour of Herbert Spencer, declare May 29th International Vaccine Scepticism Day.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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