Conflict and labour are inextricably linked. But the link is not straight-forward, and nor are the symptoms of conflict. This essay is concerned with how both the link and the symptoms have changed. And the change has been very substantial. Strike levels are currently remarkably low in historical terms, both in Britain and worldwide. But despite this, I shall argue that the significance of conflict to the relationship between employer and employee is undiminished. Indeed, the implication of my argument is that the fall in strikes is itself a matter for concern.

Let me start by emphasizing two sharply contrasting aspects of labour. The image of industrial conflict with which anyone over the age of about thirty will be familiar is one of rowdy picket lines, locked factory gates, indignant banners and even police in riot gear. But it is now twenty years since the bitter national coal-miners' strike ended. That year-long dispute, which split and broke a once-powerful trade union, both symbolized and hastened the end of a period of British history during which overt labour conflict was rarely out of the headlines.

Contrast that with a far more familiar employment scene in Britain in the twenty-first century, to be found, for example, anywhere in the Fens of Eastern England; one of recent migrant workers, tending, picking and packing vegetables. They come from all over the world: Lithuanians, Poles, Chinese, Brazilians, Portuguese, Kurds and so on. Some are directly employed by the farmers, more are employed through gang-master agencies.

Why should the topic of sex differences in mind have any relevance to the theme of conflict, the focus of this book and lecture series? In my view, there are two links.

First, some consider that the male and female mind are so intrinsically different that conflict in some form – for example, mutual misunderstanding – is inevitable. I will argue that there are interesting differences between the average male and female mind but that recognizing these need not lead to conflict and instead could lead to mutual respect of difference. In using the word ‘average’, I am from the outset recognizing that such differences may have little to say about individuals, a point I will return to. In addition, the features that define the average male and female mind are not like chalk and cheese. The average male and female mind contains both chalk and cheese, as it were. The differences are subtle, and are to do with the relative proportions of chalk and cheese in the typical male and female mind. Fear not. I will get away from this metaphor quite soon, and define the qualities that we can quantify. But it does mean that because the male mind is not all chalk, and the female mind all cheese, the two sexes are not destined to be mystified by the other.

During 2005, scientists working with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory reported detecting the biggest cosmic explosion ever. A galaxy situated 2.6 billion light years away has been ravaged by a monstrous black hole that has swallowed the equivalent of 300 million suns in an orgy of destruction that has been going on for 100 million years. This ingested material isn't going quietly. As the scattered debris plunges to oblivion within the black hole, it releases vast amounts of energy, creating a pair of high-speed jets that have blasted twin bubbles 650,000 light years across in the host galaxy. You wouldn't want to be living anywhere nearby that monster!

Violence is the leitmotif of the universe. It was born in a big bang. Its fundamental structure was forged in the first split second, in a searing maelstrom of unimaginable ferocity, at temperatures exceeding a trillion degrees. Its history is one of cataclysmic explosions, implosions and collisions of literally astronomical proportions, of titanic forces and enormous energies. Yet amid this cosmic mayhem, life has not only emerged, but flourished – at least it has on one planet. How has something so delicate and precious as biology made a home amid the chaos of a violent universe?

The take-home message of my essay is that violence has a creative as well as a destructive aspect, and that without exceedingly energetic and powerful processes that seem so awesome to human beings, life would be impossible.

In his Principles of Psychology, William James discussed five types of decisions. Most decisions he noted are decisions without effort, but in the

After consideration of the kinds of decisions that are made with, and without, effort, James concluded that ‘effort complicates volition … whenever a rarer and more ideal impulse is called upon to neutralize others of a more instinctive and habitual kind’ (p. 1154).

Years ago, as a member of the National Youth Theatre, I recall watching rehearsals of Richard III from the wings as the Alarums and Excursions of Bosworth Field were being conjured up by an over-enthusiastic scrum of lads laying about each other with sword and mace at the back of the stage. The director was bellowing above the din, ‘Boys and girls, please do not kill each other. This is drama. No one need die.’

Conflict of all kind runs through Shakespeare's plays, many of the plots turning on it – emotional, historic, martial. He knew how to keep the audience's attention. And at the final curtain, the audience left the theatre and returned to a world which they knew was uncertain and shaped by war, but was incalculably different to the world of the stage.

Television also presents a kind of stage. We can witness both comedy and tragedy. However, it is as if the back wall of the stage dissolves every so often – and the real life that is walking past is thrust centre-stage, on-screen. Such is the technique of television that it is not always obvious what is reality and what is fiction. I have only to refer you to the constant enquiries to the BBC of those people who wish to have a drink in the Queen Vic pub in EastEnders.

Space, time and power are fundamentals of physics that determine the dynamic structure of our lives. Recent publications from the Darwin College Lecture Series have addressed two of these topics: Space in the 2001 lecture series and Time in 2000. Each of those volumes included a range of perspectives that span the arts, humanities and sciences. Now, in this new volume, we have invited seven international authorities to analyse and interpret the theme of Power as it is understood in their different fields of learning. The subjects that they consider include not only the sources of power that humanity has at its disposal, but also the forms of power that are exerted over us by cultural products and societies.

Life on earth, and of course all human activity, depends on the availability of sufficient power to support that activity. Mary Archer starts our exploration of power by considering where this power comes from. Drawing both on her academic work as a researcher in chemistry and Professor of Energy Policy, and on her public life including presidency of the National Energy Foundation, Archer reviews and forecasts human power usage and supply. Her chapter on the future of sustainable power sources addresses the rate with which we consume fossil fuel resources, and the alternatives that might supply the hundreds of exajoules we consume each year.

In the opening sequence of his 1968 film 2001 – a space odyssey, Stanley Kubrick offers a stunning image of the beginning of warfare when one of his ape men picks up a long bone from a decaying animal carcass and uses it to bludgeon an opponent to death. In Kubrick's brilliant orchestration of this moment there is a palpable sense of awe and wonder among the creatures as their minds come to terms with the magnitude of the discovery. To Kubrick, it is a defining moment – the beginning of man's progress to civilization. This is a stark, uncomfortable, message which we need to examine in some detail.

Enter the philosophers

The nature of human aggression has long fascinated philosophers. One of the first to confront the problem head on was the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Oxford-trained, he lived through, and survived, the Civil War, an experience which cannot have failed to have had an impact on his thinking. Politically he walked a difficult tight-rope. He was a firm believer in strong government, and therefore supported the King against Parliament, but he was not prepared to accept the divine right of kings. His basic philosophy was that of a materialist who believed that rational explanations could be found for all human behaviour.

In his famous work Leviathan, published in English in 1651, he addresses the question of ‘the state of nature’.

Perhaps the most popular perception of music's power is as a force acting upon or representing emotions such as love, hate, fear, joy and sadness. Because of its emotional impact, music also possesses a political power that can be exerted in the forging of national and social class identities. The British National Anthem offers a telling case study of such power. A subject frequently linked to politics is economics, and here again music exerts its might. The value of the music sector to the UK economy was an estimated £2.5 billion in 1995, according to a National Music Council Report (Eliff, Feist and Laing 1996: 5). Four record companies (BMG, Universal, Sony and Time-Warner) currently control over 80 per cent of the global record market. When the Spice Girls split up, the price of EMI shares fell immediately by 10 pence. Their recovery was helped by pop star Britney Spears. Alas, on 28 January 2002 EMI's shares fell again, this time slipping 14 pence after Deutsche Bank warned that the shareholders' dividend was likely to be halved. This was a consequence of the company's decision to pay one of its artists not to sing. The sales of Mariah Carey's latest album had been disappointing, but EMI were locked into a deal to fund several more of her albums, so offered her instead a pay-off of £19.6 million. Major record companies are dealing with stars whose financial value is greater than the gross domestic product of some small countries.

This is the definition of the Middle East given by a dictionary widely used in the United States. For the authors of this dictionary, as for many of its users, conflict is not merely a descriptive attribute of what we call the Middle East, but part of its very definition.

How did this come to be? Can it be that a geographical region is actually defined by the quality of its politics? Would there be no Middle East were there no turmoil there? Would we call this region South-west Asia perhaps? What is in a name? And what, in the final analysis, is all this turmoil?

I will suggest that this place we call the Middle East – which now seems to be both East of nowhere and yet in the Middle of everything – has been, since the very term arose, as much an imaginative invention as an actual geographical place. As Ghassan Salame, one of the region's leading political scientists, put it:

Previous chapters have described how the recording became a new consumer product, a status symbol that conferred good taste on the listener, and a vehicle for the diffusion of American popular culture. It could also serve as a cultural artifact. Thomas Edison toyed with the idea of using the phonograph to record the voices of Victorian worthies, in order that their words of wisdom could be saved for posterity, but the program was forgotten when the commercial potential of recorded music was discovered. It was left to the academic community to use recorded sound to save a people's cultural heritage.

Anthropologists took Edison phonographs out west to record the songs and music of the American Indians. J. W. Fewkes of Harvard University made the first records in the 1890s. The phonograph played a vital part in preserving the musical folklore of America, creating ethnomusicology as a separate branch of anthropology. Ethnomusicologists travelled the continent, from the frozen north to the steamy jungles of central America, in search of the musical folklore of the indigenous population. They recorded Eskimos, Indians, and the descendants of the Maya. While the gramophone and the disc took over the commercial recording business, anthropologists preferred the spring-motor phonograph because it was sturdy and stood up to the demands of field work.

Native American music was sporadically recorded by the record companies: Emile Berliner made some recordings of Indians in the 1890s, Victor made some more around 1905, the Gennett Company distributed records of Hopi Indians in 1925, and Edison committed the sounds of the Seminoles to wax record in 1926 so that future generations could study them.

In the early years of the twentieth century, a heavy Edison machine was again tied onto a saddle and taken out to record the ethnic music of the far West, but this time it was cowboy songs that were to be saved on the phonograph's cylinder.