Meet Cliff Edge

Funny old world. You steam along doing what has to be done and then you meet Cliff Edge.

Cliff Edge however, despite the use of capitals here, isn't a person. If he was, you might find way to get past him. No, cliff edge is what you reach when you can't go any further on the road of progress.

Cliff edge is when you have done everything you can and you face a crisis. Traditionally (and in this I mean a recent tradition) the 'cliff edge' occurs in taxation where the tax-payer meets a point where a small increase -- or step -- leads to a huge loss. Or fall, if you prefer. Usually it is a tax-payer moving into a bigger tax band but as he or she has just entered it at the very bottom the corresponding penalties are enormous.

I know... we shouldn't talk about taxation as a penalty. What was I thinking? It's obviously a boon to society because now the feckless can be plied with free cash. For heaven's sake, where's my socialist upbringing?

But putting taxes aside there is another cliff edge we are increasingly encountering. It's the one on the road to progress, and I don't mean fiscal progress towards the nirvana of millions of people who don't do anything being rewarded generously by the state from taxation imposed on the fewer numbers who work. No, this is about progress in matters mechanical and achievements achievable.

I was once talking to some students and they were a little gob-smacked to learn from me that by and large all the major discoveries in science have been done, and they were done between about 1875 and 1925 or so. In a window of a little over fifty years human beings came up with how to generate electricity, the internal combustion engine, radio and television, heavier-than-air flight, the telephone, splitting the atom, plastics and a whole host of 'smaller' inventions and triumphs that make life what it is today.

I do accept that matters like glass and paper and stainless steel came before this time and the discovery of DNA and use of fibre-optics came after. There's a whole bunch of things we did before 1875 that are important and work continued after 1925 on many exciting issues. But the essential point is this small slice of history was the window in which we saw huge advances in the everyday things we have and use. It was a turning point for the world. Many of the achievements listed in the previous paragraph you will encounter every day (though possibly encountering rapidly-splitting atoms may not be good, even if our kissy-lovey world has kindly given regimes like the one in Iran the green-light to carry on trying to split them over the heads of other nations.) Anyway, the point is you use the technology of this golden age of invention and discovery every day.

Oh no, what about tinterwebz? Surely not, you cry! There's something that has come along that your golden age didn't have. Okay, well it relies on the telephone, and electricity shielded with plastics, radio waves and probably an adaption of television technology.

But, but... wait... my keyboard contains aluminium!

Oh yes, aluminium. The Greeks knew about it and could be made by 1840, though if it hadn't been for improved ways to efficiently smelt the mineral in the 1880s thanks to electricity, we might not use it much these days due to the expense.

My argument is that when it comes to the things we use we have already done the hard stuff. A lot of what we get now, such as the ubiquitous mobile phone, is an adaptation of things we already had. That doesn't mean we don't redefine and adapt, but it does mean we owe an enormous debt to the bewhiskered men (and resolute women) who made the breakthroughs.

So, why are we at a cliff edge? Well, we can't take the next step. We made the engine and we made aircraft and we made rockets and we made computers and we put a man on the moon and...

And nothing much more. We aren't likely to go back to the moon because of the cost, and anyway we are too busy banning lightbulbs and shouting at people to save energy. The next step is at the cliff edge and we don't fancy the effort to take a leap over it. Sure we can teeter and inch forward but it isn't really step forward again. The spirit and energy that drove man to make huge discoveries has largely gone, and been replaced with the ability to write memos to each other.

We don't like entrepreneurs and pioneers and adventurers any more, because they consumed resources and colonised people and spent money that would be far better off going to the poor who are struggling to watch TV on piddling little 40 inch plasma screens and could really do with a hand out so they can have a new 50 inch screen.

I could argue with myself that all this is irrelevant because we don't know what else to invent or discover, but then if we don't look we won't see. There is also the problem that probably a lot of those pioneers and discoverers broke all sorts of health and safety rules and ignored diversity in their workplace and almost certainly didn't fully support unionised labour. They were just so... well, so selfish.

Fortunately for us however the view from the cliff edge is wonderful. Providing we don't start thinking we ought to take a leap into the unknown we can feel quite safe.