The omphalos: what’s the defining idea of a particular era?

In his book Stranger Than We Can Imagine, cultural historian John Higgs outlines the concept of the omphalos – the guiding philosophical idea that dominates an age or a culture – and asks: is such a thing still possible?

In February 1894, a 25-year-old anarchist named Martial Bourdin blew himself up in Greenwich Park with a homemade bomb. He didn’t plan to do so – rather, his chemical explosives, which he had concocted in a boarding house and carried with him on the tram from Fitzrovia, had detonated prematurely. Bourdin’s target had almost certainly been the Royal Observatory, the place where Greenwich Mean Time had been adopted in the 1880s, standardising global time measurement around the world. Though he never revealed the motive for his attack, Bourdin is believed to have opposed the regimented concept of “universal time”, and the restrictions the dedicated anarchist believed it placed on human liberty. Measured time, he thought, was the ultimate tyrant.

This is the opening anecdote in John Higgs’s 2015 book Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, and it’s also the best placed to explain the guiding principle behind Higgs’s work: that over the course of the 20th century, every easy explanation for the way the world disappeared, and uncertainty – anarchy, even – became dominant.

Bourdin’s was a type of rebellion against organising principles, if you ask Higgs, and the beginning of a long century of other figures taking a hammer to what he calls the omphalos. A Greek term, Higgs explains that the omphalos is “the centre of the world or, more accurately, what was culturally thought to be the centre of the world…An omphalos is a universal symbol common to almost all cultures, but with different locations.” To the ancient Japanese, it would be Mount Fuji – a symbol of Japanese-ness. To a medieval person, it would be Jerusalem or perhaps Rome – the heart(s) of the Christian world, and therefore a symbol of the idea that would inform that person’s entire worldview. To the Sioux, it might be the spiritually significant Black Hills in South Dakota, Higgs suggests. His first chapter, the one which features Bourdin’s abortive bombing attack, is entitled “Deleting the Omphalos”.

Throughout the 20th century, writes Higgs, systems that provided people around the world with an omphalos were dismantled through technological innovation, war, social change and, occasionally, individual moments of brilliance. After Bourdin, we meet Einstein and his wife Mileva Marić to hear how they pioneered relativity and called even linear time into question. Higgs explores how Marie Stopes’ obscenity trial normalised birth control for women and set the stage for the sexual revolution, even against the backdrop of Stopes’ – to use a generous phrase – Victorian attitudes towards population control. Marcel Duchamp’s decision to turn a urinal into a work of art upends any shared concept of Western aesthetics, while Stravinsky, Aleister Crowley and Ayn Rand all take turns dismantling the old omphaloi. Even Shigeru Miyamoto, the Japanese creator of Super Mario, is cited as one of the heralds of a meaning-free postmodernism.

All of which is fascinating as an account of where we lost our collective understanding of the world. But what exactly did we replace it with? Higgs spends less time on this question – his is essentially a fast-paced history book with a healthy dose of pop psychology thrown in, after all – but it’s something worth considering. What is the modern-day omphalos?

One suggestion might be technology. Technological innovation is equated with progress in a way that’s accepted by most people in the world, and likewise, technological solutions to problems that arise globally are our usual first course of action. All the best-known and most valuable brands in the world – Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon – are ultimately tech companies, though this might change in future decades. Right now, it’s not a leap to describe these companies as omphaloi, as cultural touchstones that we rely on for our understanding of how the world works. Imagine trying to work without their products for even a day.

Elsewhere, the power of the global market could be another choice for omphalos status: even as global shocks like Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine continue to shake markets around the world, the idea of interlocking global networks of trade and exchange have only proven more and more essential. Egypt can’t currently feed its population of 109 million on food grown on the narrow strip of fertile land along the Nile; naturally it can buy grain from Ukraine; its ability to import has been hit by a shortage of dollars in the country; naturally it can go to the IMF and borrow $3bn. The market has a solution for everything, according to those who see it as their omphalos. The deal just needs to be right.

A final choice: the climate. For many, particularly those born in the last three decades, climate change informs every single decision they make, even subconsciously. From what car to buy to what to order in a restaurant to whether to have children, the omphalos that is the climate debate can be applied to almost any question and will give it a newfound ethical charge. Open any climate-sceptical tabloid after Greta Thunberg has made a public statement and you’ll find charges of “zealotry” and references to “cults” like Extinction Rebellion – overblown charges, perhaps, but it’s no coincidence the terminology is the same as one might use to talk about someone whose omphalos is religious. The phenomenon might be the same.

Or perhaps the fact it’s so hard to pick a single omphalos is the very lesson of Stranger Than We Can Imagine – that the situation Higgs describes in the 20th century persists today, and there’s no overarching principle for organising the world. It’s a fragmented world, certainly – but that just means there’s endless scope for new ideas.