The Science of Discworld II - The Globe tsod-2 Read online

  The faults, oddly enough, probably accelerate the process, because they are a source of creativity and innovation. An accidental misunderstanding may sometimes lead to an improvement[32]. In this respect, cultural evolution is just like genetic evolution: it is only because the DNA copying system makes mistakes that organisms can change.

  Culture didn't arise in a vacuum: it had many precursors. One crucial step towards the development of culture was the invention of the nest. Before nests came into being, any experimentation by the young either worked, or led to a quick death. Within the protection of the nest, however, young animals can try things out, make mistakes and profit from them; for example, by learning not to do the same thing again. Outside the nest, they never get a chance to try a second time. In this manner nests led to another development, the role of play in educating the young animal. Mother cats bring half-dead mice for their kittens to practise hunting on.

  Mother birds of prey do the same for their offspring. Polar bear cubs slide down snow-slopes and look cute. Play is good fun, and the kids enjoy it; at the same time, it equips them for their adult roles.

  Social animals, ones that gather in groups and operate as groups, are a fertile breeding-ground for privilege and for education. And with appropriate communication, groups of animals can achieve things that no individual can manage. A good example is dogs, which evolve the ability to hunt in packs. When such tricks are being played, it is important to have some recognition signal that lets the pack distinguish its own members from outsiders, otherwise the pack can do the work and then an outsider can steal the food. Each dog pack h its own call-sign, a special howl that only insiders know. The more elaborate your brain, the more elaborate the communication from brain to brain can be, and the more effectively education works.

  Communication helps with the organisation of group behaviour, and it opens up survival techniques that are more subtle than bashing others on the head. Within the group, cooperation becomes a far more viable option. Today's great apes generally work as small groups, and it seems likely that their ancestors did the same. When humans split off from the chimpanzee lineage, those groups became what we now call tribes.

  Competition between tribes was intense, and even today some jungle tribes in South America and New Guinea think nothing of killing anyone they meet who comes from a different tribe.

  This is a reversion to the 'bash on the head' option, but now one group cooperates to bash the other group's members on the head. Or, usually, one such member at a time. Less than a century ago, most such tribes did the same (one of the stories we've told ourselves throughout our tribal history is that we are The People, The True Human Beings -which means that everyone else isn't).

  Chimpanzees have been observed killing other chimpanzees, and they regularly hunt smaller monkeys for meat. That isn't cannibalism. The food is a different species. Most humans cheerfully consume other mammals, even quite intelligent ones like pigs[33].

  Just as dog-packs need an agreed recognition signal to identify their members, so each tribe needs to establish a distinct identity. The possession of big brains makes it possible to do this by means of elaborate, shared rituals.

  Ritual is by no means confined to humans: many species of birds, for instance, have special mating dances, or engage in strange devices to attract the female's attention, like the decorative collections of berries and pebbles assembled by the male bower-bird. But humans, with their highly developed brains, have turned ritual into a way of life. Every tribe, and nowadays every culture, has developed a Make-a-Human kit whose object is to bring up the next generation to adopt the tribal or cultural norms and pass them on to their own children.

  It doesn't always work, especially nowadays when the world has shrunk and cultures clash across non-geographical boundaries -Iranian teenagers accessing the Internet, for example -but it still works surprisingly well. Corporations have taken up the same idea, with 'corporate bonding'

  sessions. This is what the wizards were up to with their paintballs. Studies have shown that sessions of this kind have no useful effect, but businesses still waste billions on them every year.

  The second most probable reason is that such sessions are fun anyway. The first most probable is that everyone likes an opportunity to shoot Mr Davis in Human Resources. And one important reason is that it sounds as though it ought to work; our culture is full of stories where such things do.

  An important part of the Make-a-Human kit is the Story. We tell our children stories, and through those stories they learn what it is like to be a member of our tribe or our culture. They learn from the story of Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit's hole that greed can lead to constraints on food. From the Three Little Pigs (a civilising story, not a tribal one) they learn that if you watch your enemy for repetitive patterns, you can outwit him. We use stories to build our brains, and then we use the brains to tell ourselves, and each other, stories.

  As time passes, those tribal stories acquire their own status, and people cease to question them because they are traditional tribal stories. They acquire a veneer of -well, the elves would call it

  'glamour'. They seem wonderful, despite numerous obvious faults, and most people do not question them. On Discworld, precisely this process occurred with stories and folk-memories about elves, as we can illustrate with three quotations from Lords and Ladies. In the first, the god of all small furry prey, Herne the Hunted, has just come to the terrified realisation that 'They're all coming back!' Jason Ogg, who is a blacksmith, the eldest son of the witch Nanny Ogg, and not very bright, asks her who They are:

  'The Lords and Ladies,' she said.

  'Who're they?'

  Nanny looked around. But, after all, this was a forge ... It wasn't just a place of iron, it was a place where iron died and was reborn. If you couldn't speak the words here, you couldn't speak

  'em anywhere.

  Even so, she'd rather not.

  'You know,' she said. 'The Fair Folk. The Gentry. The Shining Ones. The Star People. You know.'

  'What?'

  Nanny put her hand on the anvil, just in case, and said the word.

  Jason's frown very gently cleared, at about the same speed as a sunrise.

  'Them?' he said. 'But aren't they nice and—'

  'See?' said Nanny. 'I told you you'd get it wrong!'

  You said: The Shining Ones. You said: The Fair Folk. And you spat, and touched iron. But generations later, you forgot about the spitting and the iron, and you forgot why you used those names for them, and you remembered only that they were beautiful ... We're stupid, and the memory plays tricks, and we remember the elves for their beauty and the way they move, and we forget what they were. We're like mice saying, 'Say what you like, cats have got real style.'

  Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.

  Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.

  Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.

  Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.

  Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.

  Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

  The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

  No-one ever said elves are nice.

  Elves are bad.

  For most purposes (though, admittedly, not when dealing with elves) it doesn't greatly matter if the traditional tales make no real sense. Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy make no immediate sense (on Roundworld, but see Hogfather for their Discworld significance). Mind you, it's clear why children are happy to believe in such generosity. The most important role of the tribal Make-a-Human kit is to provide the tribe with its own collective identity, making it possible for it to act as a unit. Tradition is good for such purposes; sense is optional. All religions are strong on tradition, but many are weak on sense, at least if you take their stories literally.

  Nevertheless, religion is absolutely cent
ral to most cultures' Make-a-Human kit.

  The growth of human civilisation is a story of the assembly of ever-larger units, knitted together by some version of that Make-a-Human kit. At first, children were taught what they must do to be accepted as members of the family group. Then they were taught what they must do to be accepted as members of the tribe. (Believing apparently ridiculous things was a very effective test: the naive outsider would all too readily betray a lack of belief, or would simply have no idea what the appropriate belief was. Is it permitted to pluck a chicken before dark on Wednesday?

  The tribe knew, the outsider did not, and sine any reasonable person would guess 'yes' the tribal priesthood could go a long way by making the accepted answer 'no'.) After that, the same kind of thing happened for the local baron's serfs, for the village, the town, the city and the nation. We spread the net of True Human Beings.

  Once units of any size have acquired their own identity, they can function as units, and in particular they can combine forces to make a bigger unit. The resulting structure is hierarchical: the chains of command reflect the breakdown into sub-units and sub-sub-units. Individual people, or individual sub-units, can be expelled from the hierarchy, or otherwise punished, if they stray outside accepted (or enforced) cultural norms. This is a very effective way for a small group of people (barbarian) to maintain control over a much larger group (tribal). It works, and because of that we still labour under its restrictions, many of which are undesirable. We have invented technique like democracy to try to mitigate the undesirable effects, but these techniques bring new problems. A dictatorship can generally take action more rapidly than a democracy, for example. It's harder to argue.

  The path from ape to human is not just one of evolutionary pressures producing more and more effective brains; not just a tale of the evolution of intelligence. Without intelligence, we could never have got started on that path, but intelligence alone was not enough. We had to find a way to share our intelligence with others, and to store useful ideas and tricks for the benefit of the whole group, or at least, those in a position to make use of it. That's where extelligence comes into play. Extelligence is what really gave those apes the springboard that would launch them into sentience, civilisation, technology, and all the other things that make humans unique on this planet. Extelligence amplifies the individual's ability to do good -or evil. It even creates new forms of good and evil, such as, respectively, cooperation and war.

  Extelligence operates by putting ever more sophisticated stories into the Make-a-Human-Being kit. It pulled us up by our own bootstraps: we could climb from tribal to barbarian to civilised.

  Shakespeare shows us doing it. His period was not a rebirth of Hellenistic Greece or Imperial Rome. Instead, it was the culmination of the barbarian ideas of conquest, honour and aristocracy, codified in the principles of chivalry, meeting its match in the written principles of a tribal peasantry, and disseminated by printing. This kind of sociological confrontation produced many events in which the two cultures meet head on.

  This was exemplified by the Warwickshire enclosure uprisings. In Warwickshire, the aristocracy carved up land into small parcels, and the peasantry got very upset because the aristocracy didn't give any heed to what kind of land was in each parcel. All the aristocrats knew about peasant farming was a simplistic calculation: this much land will suffice for that many peasants. The peasants knew what was actually involved in growing food, so that the only thing you could do with a small piece of woodland, for instance, was to chop down all the trees to make room to grow some food.

  Today's bean-counting managerial style in many businesses, and all British public services, is exactly the same. This kind of confrontation between the barbarian attitudes of the nobility and the tribal ones of the peasantry is precisely portrayed in many of Shakespeare's plays, as an illustration of low-life, with its folk wisdom as comic relief and pathos, set against the lofty ideals of the ruling classes - leading so often to tragedy.

  But also to high comedy. Think of Theseus, Duke of Athens, on the one hand, and Bottom on the other, in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

  9. THE ELVISH QUEEN

  In the heat of the night, magic moved on silent feet.

  One horizon was red with the setting sun. This world went around a central star. The elves did not know this. If they had done, it would not have bothered them. They never bothered with detail of that kind. The universe had given rise to life in many strange places, but the elves were not interested in that, either.

  This world had created lots of life, too. None of it had ever had what the elves considered to be potential. But this time ...

  It had iron, too. The elves hated iron. But this time, the rewards were worth the risk. This time ...

  One of them signalled. The prey was close at hand. And now they saw it, clustered in the trees around a clearing, dark blobs against the sunset.

  The elves assembled. And then, at a pitch so strange that it entered the brain without the need to use the ears, they began to sing.

  'Charge!' cried Archchancellor Ridcully.

  The wizards, all bar Rincewind, charged. He peered around from behind a tree.

  The elf song, a creative dissonance of tones that went straight into the back of the brain, ceased abruptly.

  Thin figures spun around. Almond eyes glowed in triangular faces.

  People who knew the wizards only as the world's most avid diners would have been quite surprised at their turn of speed. Besides, while it may take a little while for a wizard to reach maximum acceleration, he's then very hard to stop. And he carries such a cargo of aggression; the stratagems of the Uncommon Room at UU are guaranteed to give any wizard a maximum load of virulence just itching for a target.

  The Dean hit first, striking an elf a blow with his staff. A horseshoe had been wired to the end.

  The elf screamed and twisted back, clutching at its shoulder.

  There were many elves but they hadn't been expecting an attack. And iron was so powerful. A

  handful of flung nails had the effect of buckshot. Some tried to fight back, but the dread of iron was too strong.

  The prudent and the survivors took to their skinny heels, while the dead evaporated.

  The attack took less than thirty seconds. Rincewind watched it from behind his tree. He was not being cowardly, he reasoned. This was a job for specialists, and could safely be left to the senior wizards. If, later on, there was a problem involving slood dynamics or fretwork, or someone needed to misunderstand some magic, he would be happy to step forward.

  There was a rustling behind him.

  Something was there. What it was changed as he turned and stared. The first talent of the elves was their singing. It could turn other creatures into potential slaves. The second talent was their ability to change not their shape but how their shape was perceived. For a moment Rincewind caught sight of a slim, spare figure glaring at him and then, in one blurred moment, it became a woman. A queen, in a red dress and a rage.

  'Wizards?' she said. 'Here? Why? How? Tell me!' A gold crown glittered in her dark hair and murder gleamed in her eyes as she advanced on Rincewind, who backed up against his tree. 'This is not your world!' the elf queen hissed. 'You'd be amazed,' said Rincewind. 'Now!' The queen's brow wrinkled. 'Now?' she repeated. 'Yes, I said now,' Rincewind said, grinning desperately.

  'Now was the word I said, in fact. Now!'

  For a moment the queen looked puzzled. And then she somersaulted backwards in a high arc, just as the Luggage's lid snapped shut where she had been. She landed behind it, hissed at Rincewind, and vanished into the night.

  Rincewind glared at the box. 'Why did you wait? Did I tell you to wait?' he demanded. 'You just like to stand right behind people and wait for them to find out, right?'

  He looked around. There was no sign of any more elves. In the middle distance the Dean, having run out of enemies, was attacking a tree.

  Then Rincewind looked up. Along the branches, clinging to
one another and staring down at him in wide-eyed amazement, were dozens of what looked, in the moonlight, like rather small and worried monkeys.

  'Good evening!' he said. 'Don't worry about us, we're just passing through ...'

  'Now this is where it all gets complicated,' said a voice behind him. It was a familiar one, being his own. 'I've only got a few seconds before the loop closes, so here's what you have to do. When you go back to Dee's time ... hold your breath.'

  Are you me?' said Rincewind, peering into the gloom.

  'Yes. And I'm telling you to hold your breath. Would I lie to me?'

  There was an inrush of air as the other Rincewind disappeared and, down in the clearing, Ridcully bellowed Rincewind's name.

  Rincewind stopped looking around and hurried down to the other wizards, who were looking immensely pleased with themselves.

  Ah, Rincewind, I thought you wouldn't want to be left behind,' said the Archchancellor, grinning nastily. 'Got any, did you?'

  'The queen, in fact,' said Rincewind. 'Really? I'm impressed!'

  'But she - it got away.'

  'They've all gone,' said Ponder. 'I saw a blue flash on that hill up there. They've gone back to their world.'

  'D'you think they'll come back?' said Ridcully.

  'It doesn't matter if they do, sir. Hex will spot them and we can always get there in time.'

  Ridcully cracked his knuckles. 'Good. Capital exercise. Much better than magicking paint at one another. Builds grit and team interdependency. Someone go and stop the Dean attacking that rock, will you? He does rather get carried away.'