I scored poorly on the standardized “thirteen plus” — a placement test taken at age thirteen — and was consigned to a nonacademic “secondary modern” school to learn a trade. After a year we moved to the small picturesque university town of Cambridge, where, thanks to private tutoring, I was accepted into the academic Cambridge Grammar School for Boys. It was an enlightened institution that had abolished corporal punishment and had been chosen to pioneer the integrative Nuffield approach to science education. My teachers were young, well qualified, some with PhDs, and fired up about the rapidly growing fields of evolutionary biology, cosmology, quantum physics, and biochemistry. They enjoyed teaching, and I started loving school.
However, I had escaped the cave of apartheid only to find myself in another — an exclusively human-shaped environment devoid of wilderness. The town had the pretty River Cam running through it, and like Port Elizabeth, it was comfortably human scale. But it was surrounded by a relentless patchwork of field, hedgerow, pasture, and village; everywhere worked by human hand. There would be no weekend escape into the miles of deserted beach and mountain, no encounters with the animals of the veldt. At times I felt as if I was suffocating, and I pitied my English school friends who had never known the ecstatic expansion of the soul when alone in truly wild places.
My efforts to assimilate put me in the position of Plato’s returning prisoner. During my infrequent visits to South Africa, it became obvious that I could no longer step into my old life. In some important ways I had seen a larger, “truer” reality, and I had a critical perspective on both England and South Africa unavailable to those who had never left either cave. Every new experience was changing me. South Africa was also changing. Like it or not, I was out of the cave and on the journey. There was no going home.
While one part of me was successfully being educated in science and becoming English, the Jewish exile in me was becoming a passionate nationalist. I helped found a Cambridge branch of Habonim, which was already well represented in the larger European cities. My life out of school was taken up by the movement’s program of self-education, seminars, campouts, and campfires. At the end of the day we would gather for hours of wild Israeli folk dancing, shouting out Hebrew songs, spinning in circles of horas. We felt part of a creative vanguard of history, drawing energy and enthusiasm from the counterculture of the sixties, but amplified and focused by a three-thousand-year-old Jewish narrative climaxing in liberation here, now. Unlike much of the youth revolt, we had a utopian model under construction — the democratic, self-organizing, idealistic kibbutz. Increasingly I identified with the new State of Israel — a place I had never actually visited.
Meanwhile, science was capturing an unrelated track of my imagination. In my senior year of high school I started realizing that the compelling perspective of quantum physics, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology were interlocking pieces telling a story of a single evolving reality. I have a glowing memory of an epiphany walking home from school on one of those rare sunny English afternoons thinking about what we were learning and, in a flash, realizing that the wilderness I thought I had left behind in Africa was present right there, in every glistening rain-washed piece of vegetation. Inside every green cell were the same chlorophyll-containing chloroplasts — invented by evolution two billion years ago. They were still silently at work, absorbing photons of light traveling from the nuclear furnace of the sun, ninety-three million miles away, energizing the conversion of water and carbon dioxide into sugars. I could visualize the molecular structure of the simple sugars being joined together into the more complex starches and celluloses that make up the green living matter of all the plants on which the rest of life feasts. All of it, every sunlit, fluttering leaf on the poplar trees in the backyard, every green blade of grass on the lawn, every clod of earth, indeed every animal and every human being that had ever lived — including my own idiosyncratic self — was part of our one and only, still-evolving biosphere. This single reality had been steadily growing and unfolding for millions, indeed billions, of years before there were human eyes to gaze at it, human hands to work it, and human consciousness to be amazed at it all.
It was a vision beyond words — utterly astounding — a true revelation. It was made all the more astonishing by the fact that no one, Christian, atheist, or Jew, seemed to notice. Even the teachers who had convinced me of its scientific truth were primarily concerned about the usefulness of the information. No one cared about the big picture. I vaguely sensed that if people really took the time to see and feel this larger reality, everything would have to suddenly stop and change. Business as usual depended on keeping our eyes averted and our thoughts to ourselves. How and why this should be was beyond me. But more importantly, the vision seemed to have nothing to do with the other track of my imagination — the Zionist narrative that was giving my life meaning. The evolutionary revelation was left hanging.
By the time I graduated, the carpet had been rolled out, my choices made by my success in the sciences. I followed the urging of parents and teachers and accepted a scholarship to study medicine at Cambridge University. Barely three weeks into the term, it hit me that I had made a terrible mistake. After my recent initiation into the beauties of cosmology, medicine seemed mundane, like a kind of biological mechanics. I came from a family of doctors — including almost all my uncles and one of my aunts — in a world that seemed to have no shortage of doctors. I felt no passion to heal sick bodies. I did, however, feel a compulsion to understand and respond to human-inflicted misery, particularly that playing out in the drama of Jewish persecution and its recent heroic redemption in the creation of the State of Israel.
The packed medical curriculum with its labs, lectures, and tutorials left me little time to think. I went into depression and then panic. Finally I rebelled. I considered a variety of options, from philosophy to archaeology and even Arabic (which seemed an obvious choice, since I planned to live in the Middle East), but I realized I had no gift for languages, and finally I shocked family and friends by getting accepted into the history department. At that point, my anatomy professor and director of studies, Bernard Towers, intervened. He had been educated in the best tradition of the public school “good-all-rounder” and had come to medicine after a degree in the classics — Greek, Latin, and philosophy. He offered a compromise. Instead of burning my bridges with medicine, and risking my relationship with both my parents and common sense, he reminded me I could gain a respectable, practical medical degree after two years. I could then use my third year of the Cambridge Tripos system to specialize in the history and philosophy of science, deal with some big questions, and still graduate with honors.
In one of those coincidences whose meaning would only become clear many years later, Towers also happened to be president of the British Teilhard Association. He encouraged my compromise with medicine by giving me a copy of a slim biography of Teilhard de Chardin he had recently authored. Teilhard had the distinction of being both a Jesuit priest and a paleontologist. He was also one of the most original theologians of the past century and one of the first thinkers to recognize that the scientific discovery of the evolutionary narrative could itself constitute an evolutionary leap in self-reflective consciousness, with enormous implications for human affairs. Here at last was a Cambridge-sanctioned intellect who could put words to my wordless high school revelation.
Teilhard’s genius was to be able to take in the detailed big picture as a whole and recognize in the entirety of the evolution of the universe a single direction. That is, over time there is a gradual unfolding from simplicity to complexity, and with complexity of structure there is an increase in that mysterious interior aspect of reality we recognize in ourselves as consciousness. For example, we can understand the evolution of life on earth as the successive appearance of concentric spheres, each compounding the complexity of what previously existed. Four and a half billion years ago the earth started as a molten ball, of which the core — the barysphere — still persists today at the center of the planet, periodically erupting as volcanic lava. Over the eons the planet cooled and crusted over, creating the lithosphere. As the cooling continued, millions of years of rain created the layer of oceans covering the earth — the hydrosphere. Within the water layers, molecules aggregated into more complex megamolecules, which in turn self-organized in the primeval soup into the first simple cells and then organisms, all of which constituted another layer of complexity — the biosphere. Each new layer was an emergent property of the preceding layers that compounded the number of possible relationships with those preceding layers,