Stupidity

Stupidity

A

gainst stupidity, even the gods themselves struggle in vain,” said Aeschylus, a sentiment later voiced by Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), who appears to have passed it off as his own (Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens). For Aeschylus, this verse is not just a condemnation of humanity, but also a sly thrust at the gods themselves. One has only to read Homer or the classical Greek dramatists to see how stupid even the gods can be. If even those who rule us are stupid, then what hope is there for us? Then I recall that we are actually lambs ruled by wolves – and wolves are cunning, not stupid. (Orwell described us as “rabbits ruled by stoats”, which comes to the same thing).

            In An Enemy of  the People, Ibsen says, “I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible, overwhelming majority the whole world over. But damn it, it should surely never be right that the stupid should rule over the clever” (Act 4). Ibsen comes close to the truth here. Fools are certainly in a majority, but it is generally not the stupid who rule over the clever, but the cunning and unscrupulous; wolves are not averse to having a fool as a figurehead pack leader.

            “Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities,” said Voltaire. One has only think of Marxism and Fascism to realise he was right.

            Confucius encountered a woman who had seen her three sons devoured by tigers. When he asked her why she did not leave this remote region, she told him that there, at least, she was safe from governmental misrule. Confucius then pointed out to his disciples that bad government was worse than a tiger. He could have added that, of all the forms of bad government, stupid government was one of the commonest and the worst.

            The Arabs say, “When Allah gave you a fool’s mind, luckily for you, he also gave you a fool’s face”. This is brilliantly insulting, for it implies that since people can tell you are feeble-minded simply by looking at you, nobody will expect you to act otherwise.

“When the Americans landed men on the moon, Brezhnev called in the Soviet astronauts and informed them that he was going to go one better and out them on the sun.

‘But Comrade Brezhnev, we shall be incinerated!’ they cried, aghast.

Brezhnev was angry. ‘Do you take me for a fool? Naturally, we shall land you there at night.’”

            During the latter years of the Soviet period, Soviet underground humour – the oral equivalent of samizdat literature – abounded in such jokes about the asinine stupidity of their leaders. This was a sure sign that the regime was withering. Nobody ever joked about Stalin and lived. Yet Stalin’s stupidities far exceeded Brezhnev’s. The enormity of the catastrophes that befell the USSR during Stalin’s rule, above all the catastrophe of the German invasion, can be laid directly at Stalin’s door. For instance, had Stalin not removed all of the thirty-mile deep Soviet border defences (the Stalin Line) as a preliminary to his own projected invasion of the Third Reich, scheduled for late July 1941, Hitler would probably never have dared to launch Operation Barbarossa in June that year. Stalin’s stupidity killed around twenty-seven million Soviet citizens and laid much of the country to waste.

            People did joke about Hitler’s stupidity, but only at the beginning of his reign. By 1939, there were no more jokes, for all those who had made them were either dead or in concentration camps. This is an effective of ensuring that everyone agrees you are intelligent, though it leads you to believe you are infallible. However, Hitler was not stupid, but ignorant, as shown by his vacuous table-talk.

            Intelligence tests given to the Nazi leaders on trail at Nuremberg revealed that all of them were well above average intelligence, with Hjalmar Schacht (Stanford-Binet 144) leading the field. This goes some way to proving my earlier point about our being ruled by wolves, not by fools. Schacht was intelligent enough never to have become too incriminatingly involved with the Nazis. As a result, he was acquitted.

            In spite of being given endless warnings and good advice, my wife’s elderly and pious aunt has spent her whole life throwing meat to her wolfish relatives, in the vain hope that they will leave her sled alone. Once a rich woman, she is now impoverished, but the wolves will not give up the chase until they have stripped the very flesh from her bones. This is real stupidity, disguised as ‘turning the other cheek’ and ‘giving your cloak away as well as your jacket,’ as the New Testament advises. Christ was not stupid, however; he was simply advising his followers on the only feasible way to deal with their brutal Roman masters, hoping that they would avoid the terrible fate he foresaw for them and the whole Jewish people. Unfortunately, his sound counsel was misinterpreted as a general rule of behaviour. In fact, such conduct can only be justified in exceptional circumstances, like a Nazi or Roman occupation. Normally, it is suicidal. ‘An eye for an eye,’ is much wiser advice, as game-theory has conclusively demonstrated.

            The Taliban must surely go down as one of the stupidest ruling groups ever to have existed, stupider even than those puritans who ruled Calvin’s Geneva and Cromwell’s England, because more extreme and life-denying. To antagonize about eighty percent of the population one is oppressing, including all the women, is the height of idiocy. Notice that here, as always, stupidity allied itself closely with megalomania – Afghanistan was seen as invincible because protected by Allah – and cruelty.

            The new regime in Afghanistan recently announced (December 2001) that it would not rule with the cruelty shown by the Taliban. For example, those stoned to death for adultery would henceforth be pelted with smaller stones, while the bodies of executed criminals would be displayed in public for only fifteen minutes, not four days. This announcement surely disproves the saying that one should be grateful for small mercies. I expect the next decree will be that the starving who have their hands cut off for stealing bread, as prescribed by Sharia law, will only have to run ninety-five meters to a waiting doctor, not the usual one hundred.

            Pol Pot’s regime also combined stupidity with megalomania and cruelty. The central aim of the Khmer Rouge was to reduce Cambodia – renamed Kampuchea – to a Marxist state with a medieval, peasant economy. “We are a model for the whole world. Is there any other country that would have dared abolish money and markets as we have?” boasted one Khmer Rouge cadre. They succeeded, thus facilitating their own speedy overthrow by the modernizing Vietnamese.

            The megalomania of Pol Pot is well documented. His brother-in-law, Ieng Sary, said, “Pol Pot thought he was an incomparable genius in military and economic affairs, in hygiene, in song-writing, in music and dance, in cookery, in fashion, and in everything else, even in the art of lying….Pol Pot though that he was above everyone else on the planet. He was a god on earth." [1] Hitler, Stalin and Mao harboured much the same illusions about themselves.

            When the Khmer Rouge came to power on 17 April 1975 (‘a day that should live in infamy’), a Cambodian student of my acquaintance told me he was planning to return to Democratic Kampuchea immediately, along with his wife and two children, “to take part in the revolution”. Nothing I said could dissuade him from his insane plan, especially since no one else in the university seemed to think there was anything wrong with it. He dismissed all my warnings about the Khmer Rouge as “capitalist propaganda”. Year later, I learnt that he and his family had been sent to the Bung Tra Beck camp for “a study session” the day he arrived in Cambodia. None of them survived, thanks to this man’s idealistic stupidity.

            Of all the stupid actions of the Khmer Rouge, the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh was the stupidest. Out of a total city population of some three million, 41.9 percent perished. It was this evacuation that brought home the realities of the regime, and turned public opinion, world-wide, against it.

            The Khmer Rouge had a mystical belief in the power of rice, which they saw as almost sacred. Yet such was their incompetence, rice production fell so drastically that, only one year after their seizing power, people were rationed to four teaspoons of rice a day, if they could get it. By the time the regime fell, at least 700,000 had starved to death. This brings to mind the bitter Soviet joke: “What would happen if our government took over the Sahara? Nothing, for ten years. Then there’d be a shortage of sand.”

            Some academics in Western universities – notably in the USA, Britain and, of course, in France (the Khmer Rouge leaders had studied in Paris [2]) – were among the most vociferous supporters of the regime. I was not sure whether to place this item under ‘Academia’ or ‘Stupidity’, before deciding that it really did not make much difference either way. The Khmer Rouge take-over came just in time to revive the hopes of these ideological idiots for a real ‘people’s revolution’ for by 1975, after the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, much of the glamour was beginning to wear off the Maoism they had so fervently embraced. Anyone who questioned their glowing praise of the regime was shouted down as a ‘fascist reactionary’. After all, they argued, as the Dean mentioned earlier remarked to me, “Mass killing is necessary sometimes." [3]

            This century, the crown and sceptre of the realm of stupidity among leaders must go to Mao, China’s ‘Great Helmsman’, who came close to destroying China, especially during the years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Some forty million people paid with their lives for this man’s cruelty and stupidity, even while a couple of billion others, in the West as well as in China, were stupidly extolling his genius.

            Were the butcher generals of the First World War really as stupid as they are often made out to be? I do not believe so, especially when one considers the German generals, though a case might be made out for Haig. They were merely completely indifferent to human life. “Every position must be held to the last man…” ordered Haig, in 1918, and then was driven back to his chateau, caviar and champagne.

            I long wanted to write a book about stupidity in history. However, I abandoned the project in my thirties, realising that I would have to devote the rest of my life to the subject, and even then would only have scratched the surface. I never even considered writing a book on cruelty in history. Even in my teens I knew that was a lifetime project for a large team of hard-working historians.

            Like the Kennedy assassination, the September 11 attack on the WTC and the Pentagon has left many questions unanswered. How was it, for example, that only one of the planes’ eight black boxes (two to each plane) were recovered, though they are so designed as to be virtually indestructible? Why was the tail of Flight 93 found eight miles away from the crash site, when the plane was supposed to have dived into the ground after a group of passengers diverted it from its target? No crash could fling a tail eight miles! How could a passport of one of the terrorists have miraculously survived the crash, to be found a couple of blocks away from the WTC? Why did Bush tell us he saw the first plane crash into the tower on TV, when there is no TV record of the impact? Why did Bush go on reading a story to primary school children for twenty minutes after he was informed of the attack? These and many other questions have never been answered. It is only the stupidity and apathy of the general public that permits the authorities to get away with an account that clearly bristles with serious anomalies.

            The quintessential bureaucrat is surely the legendary official who set up a placard on a Yorkshire moor, which read:

It is strictly forbidden to throw things at this Notice.

Penalty 20 pounds.

By order.

This is a work of bureaucratic genius, masquerading as stupidity. I like to imagine that it has been translated into 211 languages and bureaucrats now come from all over the world to admire it. There may even be talk of converting it into a shrine, under the little-known Council By-law 3196, section 14, subsection F, para. 3 (D). A cartload of stones, places beside the notice for the benefit of natural anarchists, was used up in a single Bank Holiday weekend last year, to the delight of the Council treasurer.

            The stupider people are, the more intelligent they believe themselves to be. The same applies to the ugly, the incompetent and the malicious. Most of them firmly believe they are the opposite of what they are in reality. Psychologists have verified this unpalatable truth. All of us should find this sobering.

            “I have no enemies,” a clever young student told me once. “I get on well with everyone”. In fact, James was heartily disliked – even hated – by most of his classmates for his arrogance, competitiveness and ostentatious brilliance. Few women of his age would ever have been naïve enough to believe they had no enemies. Even highly intelligent men are often fools where human relations are concerned.

            Stupidity is no bar to success, especially if one is a pop-star, a profession for which one needs only a modicum of talent, since most popular music is now composed and arranged by computers. George Harrison, whose recent death was treated like the demise of the Pope or an American president, only composed one memorable song [4] (Something) in his life. He appears to have been of subnormal intelligence, for he was not allowed to sit for his GCSE, having gained zero in all subjects in his preliminary examination, except for English in which his score was two per cent. Nevertheless, he was worth over 200 million dollars when he died.

When truth conflicts with intellectual fashion, truth loses. Fashion, not truth, rules the world and fashions are set by idiots, as George Crabbe (1754-1832) observed in The Library:

Fashion, though Folly’s child, and guide of fools,

Rules e’en the wisest, and in learning rules.

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[1] Phnom Penh Post, 2/9/96, p.7. Quoted in S. Courtois et al. 1999. The Black Book of Communism, Cambridge Mass. And London, Harvard University Press, p.809.

[2] See Jerome Steinbach and Jocelyne Steinbach, 1976, Cambodge, l’autre sourire, Paris, Editions Sociales.

[3] The facts were readily available by 1978, even to those who did not read French, with the publication of Francois Ponchaud’s devastating expose, Cambodia: Year Zero, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

[4] My Sweet Lord, though deservedly praised, seems to have been derived, unconsciously or not, from another song, She’s So Fine. A court case resulted in Harrison’s having to pay costs and damages to the composers for plagiarism.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM

Sex

Sex

T

he postmodern world is obsessed with sex. This obsession, ironically, springs directly from modernism’s insistence on abolishing sexual repression. To have replaced repression with obsession is hardly the liberation we were so enthusiastically promised. There was, however, a reason for such obsession. In a desacralized world, sex had  become our only hope for salvation. Sex was the Tao and the Tao was nothing but sex [1]. According to the Holy Writ proclaimed by Reich and others, only the Orgasm could save us.

            As Foucault has demonstrated [2], Modernity’s preoccupation with sex as liberation goes back to the Romantics. This is one of the reasons we may view modernism as ‘spilt Romanticism’. The preceding Enlightenment had viewed sex quite differently, seeing the libido as a flood which could at any time overwhelm the dikes which civilisation had built to hold it in check.

            So the eighteenth century trivialised sex to disempower it, forgetting that Venus “toute entiere a sa proie attachee,” will not be mocked and that orgasm (la petite mort) and death are closely linked. The goddess took her revenge through the French Revolution. The statue of the Goddess of Reason worshipped in Notre Dame was in reality that of Venus, who has dominated us ever since.

            “Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex” (Julian Barnes). Still, it’s interesting that after so many years of the sexual revolution, people should still want to reserve the illusion of affection, even after a one-night stand.

            It is said that Sophocles (c.496-406 BCE), when asked about his sex-life, reported that he was glad to be rid of it, “as though he had escaped from a mad and savage master”. We should remember, however, that this supposed conversation was reported by Plato (429-347 BCE) in his Republic, (1, 329b), and Plato has never struck anyone as being particularly interested in Eros. My own bet is that Sophocles, who lived to at least ninety, would almost certainly have taken Viagra, had it been available to him. The sexual drive is not so easily mastered. Nor does old age much diminish its insistence.

            Deficiencies in lexis reveal a lot about a culture. For instance, English has only a medical term denoting the clitoris. There is no common term for it, though within the last forty years or so the word has come into more frequent use and so been abbreviated to ‘clit’. In this deficiency, English differs from all other languages with which I am acquainted. In French, for example, the slang term la praline (‘almond’) is in common use. There exists an English term in the anti-language used by prostitutes (‘the man in the boat’), but this clumsy metaphor could not have been used much or a simpler term would have been devised. I have only once heard the latter expression used and that was on that notoriously deviant show, South Park, which specialises in breaking taboos. There is no trace of any term for clitoris in Partridge’s monumental Dictionary of the Underworld. No wonder the French though the English sexually clumsy and naïve.

            “Sex and drugs and rock and roll”, to quote  the title of a once popular song (1977) by Ian Dury, have been the preoccupation of the young since the sixties. Prior to that it was sex and alcohol and inanely lachrymose pop songs. Plus ca change… The real difference is that efficient contraception has made young women far readier to have sex, generally with multiple partners. Drugs and rock and roll are often merely preliminaries and subsidiaries to intercourse. The result is a welcome lessening of sexual neurosis and a sharp rise in sexual diseases, from AIDS to gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes and the now almost universal chlamydia. As antibiotics lose their efficacy, we may yet return to a more puritanical era, out of fear.

            The puritanism and hypocrisy of English society, even after the war, is almost unbelievable nowadays. In 1949, on leave from my regiment and wearing uniform, I was ejected from a London city cinema for refusing to take my arm from around my girlfriend’s shoulder. This was at a time when prostitutes hung around outside such cinemas, with the tacit approval of the management, who got a cut from their earnings. As William Empson remarked, after reading of a similar incident, “It takes a lot of cold nerve to live in a country like this”. Repression was still fighting a strong rearguard action in England until the sixties.

            English Puritanism, however, was as nothing compared with that of the Irish. In a Dublin dominated by priests and nuns you would be unceremoniously thrown out of a pub full of uproarious drunks – some of them priests – if your wife dared to sit on your knee because there were no chairs available. Drunkenness was acceptable to the Church, while anything even vaguely suggestive of sex, married or not, was anathema. A priest might vomit, but never fornicate.

            Ignorance of sex was widespread among well-brought up young women, especially Roman Catholics, even in post-war Britain. In the late forties, an eighteen year old Catholic girl of my acquaintance believed that babies were born through the navel, though how they got there she did not know, except that it had something unmentionable to do with sin. Presumably her honeymoon would have been spent like that of the Victorian bride, who was found half-naked and hysterical on top of the wardrobe in her hotel suite, screaming “Help me! My husband has gone raving mad!”

            Today we have swung to the other extreme. My fifteen-year-old-niece, a pupil at a prestigious private school, told me the other day that her class had spent a boring afternoon fitting flavoured condoms onto carrots in a sex education class. It was perhaps one of her classmates, a well-groomed young lady sitting at the next table to me in a smart beach café, who was wearing a tee shirt bearing the slogan, ‘A stork brings babies; a swallow brings no babies’. Fifty years ago she could also have displayed this enlightening message without fear of censure, for only a prostitute would have understood it.

            In the space of thirty years or so, attitudes to sex have changed dramatically throughout Europe, but especially in Britain. A survey of December 2001 revealed that over twenty-fiver percent of British women had sex regularly in cars, while one in three had enjoyed intercourse in the back of taxis. Such behaviour is not confined to Britain. Over thirty per cent of Swedes revealed that their favourite place for sex was in public places or on public transport. European society is reverting to types of sexual behaviour not seen since the eighteenth century, though in that era the women involved were almost invariable prostitutes. Boswell’s London Journal (1753) has some graphic entries describing his encounters with “shilling girls” in the alleys and back streets of London. During the French Revolution, especially in its early years, sexual license became extreme, as it generally does in societies menaced by mass death. Contemporary observers commented on both the revealing nature of women’s fashions, which utilized transparent or semi-transparent materials, and the abandoned sexual behaviour apparent in all classes. It could be that, subconsciously, people feel that we too are moving inexorably towards some sort of cataclysm and are changing their sexual habits accordingly.

            The cataclysm itself may well be sexual. Pandemics of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) invariably accompany sexual license. In the space of twenty years, AIDS has now become the fourth largest cause of mortality, worldwide, with over forty million people infected by the end of 2001, one third of whom are aged between fifteen and twenty-four. In the third world, heterosexual sex has no become the main means of transmission, in contrast to the industrialized nations where homosexual sex is the predominant vector. Africa is by far the worst affected region, for Africans account for almost seventy-five percent of all cases of AIDS. Elsewhere, AIDS is also growing exponentially, especially in China, India and countries of the former Soviet Union. The miniscule strip of RNA that constitutes this virus has a tropism about one thousand times greater than the influenza virus, which means that it is almost impossible to control it, let alone destroy it, since it mutates so rapidly. Since we can barely keep up with the mutations of the latter, how can we hope to keep up with the mutations of the former? AIDS is turning out to be the most deadly killer the human race has encountered, with the possible exception of malaria, which has killed about one person in four, so it is estimated, since the emergence of our species. Should it eventually mutate to an aerosol form – which is not impossible – it might well exterminate the whole human race. In spite of this, there is still widespread apathy about AIDS. In the majority of countries, it is not even a notifiable disease. As a species, we have still not learnt to think globally, still less think exponentially, in the face of looming threats to our existence. Our collective inability to do so may yet bring about the end.

            I still wince when I hear teenage girls using language which was once employed only by drunken servicemen and whores. In 1949, I recall attending a dinner party at my girlfriend’s, hosted by her primly conventional parents, in the course of which her sixteen year old younger sister, Jacinta, told me that someone had scrawled a four-letter word on the walls of her convent school. 
“What does ‘Fuck’ mean?” she asked, curiously. 
I broke the Arctic silence that followed by explaining that this was a dialect form of ‘yuck’, probably scrawled there by bowler-hatted and belligerent Orangemen to express their distaste for Papists. I was just silently congratulating myself on my ingenuity when the Irish maid brought in the second course.

“Oh, fuck!” exclaimed Jacinta. “I hate broccoli!”

The crash of china as the horrified maid dropped the tureen helped cover the resulting confusion. It was a long time before I was invited to dinner again.

           

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[1] Oddly, this doctrine had been proclaimed in China, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries of our era, by a sect which read the Dao De Jing as a treatise on sexual hygiene. The close connections between sex and Taoism are well documented.

[2] See M. Foucault, 1978, The History of Sexuality, vol.1, N.Y: Random House.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM

Self-Scrutiny

Self-Scrutiny

I

think writing aphorisms suits me because I have a fundamentally untidy mind. I keep promising myself I will find the time to tidy it up, but so far have never managed to get round to it. Procrastination, of course, is one of the symptoms of an untidy mind.

            I was pleased to learn from a psychologist when I was doing military service that I had a Stanford-Binet IQ of 164 (160 Wechsler). Unfortunately, he did not tell me that I was lacking in a quality which such IQ tests did not measure, namely, simple common sense. Nor did he tell me that I was selfish, ungrateful and often unreliable, as my mother and sister frequently pointed out. If only I had been able to trade off some IQ points for some common sense and a better character, I would have been spared a great deal of later suffering.

            I now realize that certain masters who disliked me at school were quite right. I daresay that, had I met myself in my teens, I should have been tempted to administer a good thrashing. Looking back, I can see that whatever my other strong points, my friends and family were right in telling me that I was devoid of common sense. It took me decades to acquire it, painfully. A pity it couldn’t have been made into an academic subject and taught in school, where I could have acquired it quickly and systematically and later produces a certificate to show I possessed it.

            Why is it that students who least need common sense always study subjects like Law, which helps to inculcate it common sense, while students who lack it study subjects which cannot make up for this deficiency, like Arts or Science? The answer is to be found in the New Testament, namely that “To them that hath it shall be given, while from them that hath not it shall be taken away”.

            I was lucky to be educated in a single-sex school. The presence of girls in the class would have made it almost impossible for most of us to concentrate. We would crowd to the window if a girl so much as appeared on the drive. Boys in co-educational schools seldom do as well as those in their single-sex rivals. Testosterone needs isolating.

            My natural religion is Buddhism. I am completely at home in it, as I could never be in any other creed. Past lives (many in East and Southeast Asia) have wrought this. I am struck by the fact that K., my closest friend for years when I was younger, has also become a Buddhist, having arrived at Buddhism from Marxism via Existentialism. He claims he remembers our being together, centuries ago, in a monastery. We were both rather rebellious monks.

            I dreamt about Cambridge for years after I went down. I owe that university an immense, forever unpayable, debt. My seven years there (four as an undergraduate Major Scholar, three as a Bachelor Scholar of my college) shaped my intellectually for life. I have never found a university that came near it, except perhaps for the American Ivy Leaguers. No wonder it consistently ranks as Britain’s top university. Most universities today have become over-crowded intellectual refugee-camps, filled with the bewildered intellectually displaced, many of whom are travelling on false passports.

            In my day, Oxbridge was heavily afflicted with young fogies. “Is there life before death?” I used to murmur despondently, as I listened to their self-satisfied platitudes in the Junior Common Room debates. They were invincibly conservative public school or grammar school boys who wore sports coats and cavalry twill trousers; sported old school or college ties; derived their limited opinions from the Daily Telegraph; went to church of college chapel regularly on Sundays, clad in three-piece suits; avoided sex or even heavy petting before marriage; took rugger, rowing and cricket with devout seriousness and behaved decorously at all times, even during May balls. Typically, these young geriatrics were reading Classics, Law, Medicine or Estate Management. They almost never read Natural Sciences, Moral Sciences or English. They were prone to writing irate comments in the Junior Common Room complaints register about members of the college who behaved in one of the many ways of which they did not approve. The predominance in the Establishment of such young fogies who had mellowed imperceptibly into old fogies eventually drove me in desperation to leave England.

            I once applied for a post with the British Council, hoping to find refuge overseas from Anthony Eden’s England. When I appeared before the interviewing panel, my heart sank. It appeared to be composed entirely of middle-aged Oxbridge fogies, one of whom I recognized as a former young fogie from my own college. Need I say that I did not get the job?

            I took five Firsts in four years at Cambridge, in English and Oriental Languages, taking parts I and II of the Oriental Languages Tripos together in my final year. Since for over half this time I was married, living on a shoestring, my second child being born on the day my final results appeared, I still wonder how I accomplished it.

            I fell into sinology almost by mistake. I went to the Senior Tutor of my college, Peter Hunter-Blair, an Anglo-Saxon scholar, to ask him permission to sit for the Charles Oldham Shakespeare scholarship examination, which I was pretty sure I could get. To my astonishment he said, contemptuously: “Is this the best you can do, Frodsham? Pot-hunting!”

            Taken aback by this unexpected reception, I replied, somewhat lamely, that it was a highly prestigious pot. He then asked me if there wasn’t some other subject I should like to study, pointing out that if I took another First in English (the results were due out the following week), the college would continue my major scholarship. To this day I do not know why I told him I should like to study Chinese, a desperately recondite subject in those days. Surprisingly, he was enthusiastic about it, for reasons which still escape me. Probably he though, rightly, that I needed taking down a peg or two and that the difficult Oriental Languages Tripos might administer a salutary drubbing.

            That morning I walked over to Selwyn Gardens, to see Gustav Haloun, a German scholar who held the Chair of Chinese. He grilled me for half an hour or so before accepting me and then sent me off with a letter of introduction to the Oriental Languages Library in Brooklands Avenue, where I borrowed a dozen or so grammars and histories. By the time term opened in October, four months later, I had already ploughed my way enthusiastically and autodidactedly through the classical Chinese of the Xiao Jing (Classic of Filial Piety) and a large chunk of Mencius and The Analects, as well as being somewhat acquainted with 3,000 years of Chinese history, philosophy and art. I could also read simple modern Chinese, though I found the texts boring after the classical ones. Perhaps all this was simply due to the karma of a previous life – or lives – finally coming to fruition. Many of the major decisions of our lives are taken for reasons of which we are consciously unaware, though like hypnotised subjects, we always have a semi-plausible explanation for our actions.

            I was lucky to have encountered a benevolent Professor of Chinese who would take students. The story goes that an earlier incumbent of the Chair had sat stony-faced listening to students explaining why they wanted to read Chinese before replying: “There are about 100,000 Chinese books in the University Library. When you have read them all, come back here and I’ll recommend some more”. I have the uneasy feeling that this story might well be true. All too often, some Cambridge academics saw students as simply a damned nuisance and were under no compulsion to accept them.

            Professor Haloun died of a coronary on his fifty-second birthday, a few months after I had begun to study under him. His death shocked me so greatly I could not open a book for a week, but simply walked around in a daze. This was my first close encounter with the death of someone I knew and greatly admired. Some deaths, the Chinese say, are as heavy as Mount Tai. His was one of them.

            The time I have frittered away watching TV or indulging in idle conversation would have sufficed to enable me to master at least half a dozen languages. But what would I have done with them except perhaps to watch TV or chatter idly in the languages I had acquired?

            

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM

Science and Philosophy

Science and Philosophy

H

ugh Everett’s Many Worlds theory (1957) changed my life in a way normally only affected by a religious conversion. Scientific truths can be no less powerful than religious truths. Everett should have a posthumous Nobel Prize, if there is such a thing. David Lewis would have found my attitude puzzling, since he believed that the existence of an infinite number of other worlds, quintillions of which contained our exact counterparts, should make no difference to our lives on this world (On the Plurality of Worlds, 1986, Oxford, Blackwell). Logically, I can accept this, emotionally, I cannot.

            The Many Worlds theory, in which all possibilities are realized, allows for low measure universes, that is, universes of low probability. Ours is surely one of them. This planet should have become a radioactive wasteland during the Cold War and in the majority of universes it is precisely that.

            The idea that there are at least 10>500 identical copies of ‘me’ (Lewis calls them ‘counterparts’), all typing these words together, reminds me of the Buddhist Net of Indra, the Net of Pearls like mirrors, each reflecting all the others. Even as I type, some of these counterparts are dropping dead, going insane or simply not bothering to finish this sentence because they have decided to make love to their wives or mistresses. More prosaically, some pause for a cup of tea or take the dog for a walk. I stubbornly keep on typing. If I suddenly decided to toss a coin and then perform some crazy action like standing on my head and signing the Polish national anthem if it turned up heads, or locking myself in the wardrobe and singing in Welsh if it turned up tails, in what way would the fall of the coin alter the measure of this particular world?

            Some philosophers argue that the existence of an infinity of worlds subverts all ethics. This is untrue. We can be concerned only with the ethics of our own world. Our duty is to ensure that we help to maximise the total good of this world. The rest do not concern us.

            Much of what passes for thinking is no more than speculation. ‘There might be fairies at the bottom of my garden’. There might, but I would have to prove it to myself and to others before I could take this thesis seriously. A thesis must be falsifiable, as Popper says and this one is not falsifiable. Some critics of David Lewis’s brilliant On the Plurality of Worlds, which puts forward a thesis he arrived at through modal realism, not through scientific observation, argue that if this is true then, since there are worlds where we are wrong about almost everything and this may be one of them, we should all be sceptics. In my darker moments I suspect ours may be just such a world.

            The Earl of Kildare was dottily convinced in 1938 that both Serbia and the non-existent Austro-Hungarian Empire would attack Hitler! Since he had a seat in the Lords, he was one of the people running the British Empire. No wonder it did not survive the war. The marvel is that Britain did. Another argument for the Many Worlds theory? In most worlds, a country run by people like Kildare would not have survived. I recall the way in which Britain almost lost WWI because the counterpart Kildares at the Admiralty would not adopt the convoy system until April 1917, when an upstart Welshman, Lloyd George, compelled them to start doing so. In most universes, I suspect we lost the war because Lloyd George was not elected.

            Lewis’s theory advocates “genuine modal realism without overlap, and with qualitative counterpart relations” (On the Plurality of Worlds, 259). I am not so sure about the lack of overlap. It is possible that UFOs come from parallel universes.

            Lewis says we should believe in possible worlds “because the hypothesis is serviceable, and that is a reason to accept it is true” (ibid. 3). Similarly, Paul Dirac used to say that we should accept an equation because it was beautiful and that was a reason to believe it was true. Keats would have agreed with Dirac (Beauty is truth, truth beauty…), Jeremy Bentham with Lewis. I am with Keats and Dirac. It is gratifying to see poetry link hands with mathematics. Empson, a mathematician and a poet, would have enjoyed this.

            The Many Worlds theory exemplifies the Aristotelian principle of plenitude. ‘If a proposition P is possible, then at some time P is true’.  Possible here can be understood in various ways – logically, metaphysically, nomologically, epistemologically, temporally and conceivably. A thing being nomologically possible is the most convincing of these.

            Just as a successful criminal lawyer needs to be something of a crook, so a successful philosopher needs to be something of a cynic. Otherwise, like Mencius, who thought human beings were all born good, he will go wildly astray on the question of human nature. But one has to be cynical to begin with to aspire to become a cynic.  

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM