The Science of Discworld II Read online

  As we’ve said, the word ‘Renaissance’ refers not just to rebirth, but to a specific rebirth, that of ancient Greek culture. This, however, is a modern view, based on a mistaken view of the Greeks, and of the Renaissance itself. In ‘classical’ education, no attention is paid to engineering. Of course not. Greek culture ran on pure intellect, poetry and philosophy. They didn’t have engineers.

  Oh, but they did. Archimedes constructed great cranes that could lift enemy ships out of the water, and we still don’t know exactly how he did it. Hero of Alexandria (roughly contemporary with Jesus) wrote many texts about engines and machines of various kinds of the previous three hundred years, many of which show that prototypes must have been made. His coin-operated machines were not too different from those that could be found on any city street in 1930s London or New York, and would probably have been more reliable when it came to disgorging the chocolate, if the Greeks had known about chocolate. The Greeks had elevators, too.

  The problem here is that information about the technical aspects of Greek society has been transmitted to us through a bunch of theologians. They liked Hero’s steam engine, and indeed many of them had a little glass one on their desk, a sort of Theologians’ Toy that they could spin with a candle flame. But the mechanical ideas behind such toys just passed them by. And, just as Greek engineering has not been transmitted to us by theologians, the spiritual attitude of the Renaissance has not come down to us through our ‘rational’ schoolteachers. Much of the attempted spirituality within the alchemical position was basically a religious stance, marvelling at the Works of the Lord as they were exposed by the marvels of changes of state and form, when materials were subjected to heat, to ‘percussion’, and to solution and crystallisation.

  This stance has been taken over by today’s innocents of rigorous thinking, the New Agers, who find spiritual inspiration in crystals and anodised metals, spherical spark-machines and Newton’s pendulums, but do not ask the deeper questions that lie behind these toys. We find the very real awe inspired by science’s quest for understanding to be considerably more spiritual than New Age attitudes.

  Today there are mystic massage-therapists, aromatherapists, iridologists, people who believe that you can ‘holistically’ tell what’s wrong with someone by examining their irises or the balls of their feet – only – and who root their beliefs in the writings of Renaissance eccentrics like Paracelsus and Dee. But those men would have been horrified to be cited as authorities, especially by such closed-minded descendants.

  Prominent among those who refer back to Paracelsus for authority are homeopathists. A basic belief of homeopathy is that medicines become more powerful the more they are diluted. This stance lets them promote their medicine as being totally harmless (it’s just water) but also extraordinarily effective (as water isn’t). They notice no contradiction here. And homeopathic headache tablets say ‘Take one if mild, three if painful’. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

  Such people see no need to think about what they are doing, because they base their beliefs on authority. If a question is not raised by that authority, then it’s not a question they want to ask. So, in support of their theories, homeopaths quote Paracelsus: ‘That which makes disease is also the cure.’ But Paracelsus built his entire career on not respecting authority. Moreover, he never said that a disease is always its own cure.

  Contrast this modern spectrum of silliness with the robust, critical attitude of most Renaissance scholars to the idea that arcane practices can lay bare the bones of the world. People such as Dee, indeed Isaac Newton, took that critical position very seriously. To a great extent, so did Paracelsus: for example he repudiated the idea that the stars and planets control various parts of the human body. The Renaissance view was that God’s creation has mysterious elements, but those elements are hidden,3 implicit in the nature of the universe, rather than arcane.

  This view is very close to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s marvelling at the animalcules in dirty water, or semen: the astonishing discovery that the Wonders of Creation extended down into the microscopic realm. Nature, God’s Creation, was much more subtle. It provided hidden wonders to marvel at as well as the overt artistic vision. Newton was taken with the implicit mathematics of the planets in just this way: there was more to God’s invention than was apparent to the unaided eye, and that resonated with his Hermetic beliefs (a philosophy derived from the ideas of Hermes Trismegistos). The crisis of atomism at the time was the crisis of pre-formation: if Eve had within her all her daughters, each having within her her daughters like a set of Russian dolls, then matter must be infinitely divisible. Or, if not, we could work out the future date of Judgement Day by discovering how many generations there were until we got to the last, empty daughter.

  A characteristic of Renaissance thinking, then, was a degree of humility. It was critical about its own explanations. This attitude contrasts favourably with such modern religions as homeopathy or scientology, creeds that arrogantly claim to offer a ‘complete’ explanation of the Universe in human terms.

  Some scientists are equally arrogant, but good scientists are always aware that science has limitations, and are willing to explain what they are. ‘I don’t know’ is one of the great, though admittedly under-utilised, scientific principles. Admitting ignorance clears away so much pointless nonsense. It lets us cope with stage magicians performing their beautiful, and very convincing, illusions – convincing, that is, while we keep our brains out of gear. We know they have to be tricks, and admitting ignorance lets us avoid the trap of believing the illusion to be real merely because we don’t know how the trick works. Why should we? We’re not members of the Magic Circle. Admitting ignorance similarly protects us against mystic credulity when we encounter natural events that have not yet caught the eye of a competent scientist (and his grant-awarding body), and that still seem to be … magic. We say ‘The magic of nature’ … more the Wonder of Nature, or the Miracle of Life.

  This is a stance that nearly all of us share, but it’s important to understand the historical tradition it is grounded in. It isn’t simply a case of admiring the complexity of God’s works. It implies the attitudes of Newton, van Leeuwenhoek and earlier; indeed, right back to Dee. And, doubtless, to some Greek, or several. It involves the Renaissance belief that if we investigate the wonder, the marvel, the miracle, then we’ll find even more wonders, marvels and miracles: gravity, say, or spermatozoa.

  So what do we, and what did they, mean by ‘magic’? Dee spoke of the arcane arts, and Newton was committed to many explanations that were ‘magickal’, especially his commitment to action at a distance, ‘gravity’, which derived from the mystical attraction/repulsion basics of his Hermetic philosophy.

  So ‘magic’ means three things, all apparently quite different. Meaning one is: ‘something to be wondered at’, and this ranges from card tricks to amoebas to the rings of Saturn. Meaning two is turning a verbal instruction, a spell, into material action, by occult or arcane means … turning a person into a frog, or vice versa, or a djinn building a castle for his master. The third meaning is the one we use: the technical magic of turning a light switch on, and getting light, without even having to say ‘fiat lux’.

  Granny Weatherwax’s recalcitrant broomstick is type two magic, but her ‘headology’ is largely a very, very good grasp of psychology (type three magic carefully disguised as type two). It brings to mind Arthur C. Clarke’s phrase ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, which we quoted and discussed in The Science of Discworld. Discworld exemplifies magic by spells, and indeed is maintained as an unlikely creation by being immersed in a strong magical field (type two). Adults of Earthly cultures, like Roundworld, pretend to have lost intellectual belief in magic of the Discworld kind, while their culture is turning more and more of their technology into magic (third kind). And the development of Hex throughout the books is turning Sir Arthur on his head: Discworld’s sufficiently advanced magic is now p
ractically indistinguishable from technology.

  We can see, as (fairly) rational adults, where the first kind of magic comes from. We see something wonderful and feel tremendously happy that the universe is a place that can include ammonites, say, or kingfishers. But where did we get our belief in the second, irrational kind of magic? How does it come about that all cultures have children that begin their intellectual lives by believing in magic, instead of the real causality that surrounds them?

  A plausible explanation is that human beings are initially programmed through fairy stories and nursery tales. All human cultures tell stories to their children; part of the development of our specific humanity is the interaction that we get with early language.

  All cultures use animal icons for this nursery tuition, so we in the West have sly foxes, wise owls and frightened chickens. They seem to come out of a human dreamtime, where all animals seem to be types of human being in a different skin, and talk as a matter of course. We learn what the subtle adjectives mean from the actions – and words – of the creatures in the stories. Inuit children don’t have a ‘sly’ fox icon; their fox is ‘brave’ and ‘fast’, while the Norwegian iconic fox is secretive and wise, full of good advice for respectful children. The causality in these stories is always verbal: ‘So the fox said … and they did it!’ or ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.’ The earliest communicated causality that the child meets is verbal instructions that cause material events. That is, spells.

  Similarly, parents and carers are always transmuting the child’s expressed desires into actions and objects, from food appearing on the table when the child is hungry to toys and other birthday and Christmas gifts. We surround these simple verbal requests with ‘magical’ ritual. We require the spell to begin with ‘please’, and its execution to be recognised by ‘thank you’.4 It is indeed not surprising that our children come to believe that the way to acquire or access bits of the real world is simply to ask – indeed, simply asking or commanding is the classic spell. Remember ‘open, sesame’?

  To a child, the world does work like magic. Later in life, we wish that we could go on like that, with our ‘wishes coming true’.5 So we design our shops, our webpages, our cars to fit this truly ‘childish’ view of the world.

  Coming home in the car and clicking the garage open, clicking the infrared remote to open or lock the car, changing TV channels – even switching on the light by the wall switch – are just that kind of magic. Unlike our Victorian forebears, we like to hide the machinery and pretend it’s not there. So Clarke’s dictum is not at all surprising. What it means is that this ape keeps trying, with incredible ingenuity, to get back into the nursery, when everything was done for it. Maybe other intelligent/extelligent species will have a similar helpless early life, which they will attempt to compensate for or relive through their technology? If so, they will ‘believe in magic’, too, and we will be able to diagnose this by their possession of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ rituals.

  We can see this philosophy surviving into adulthood in different human cultures. In ‘adult’ stories like the Arabian Nights, an assortment of djinni and other marvels grant the heroes’ wishes by magical means, just like those child-wishes coming true. Many ‘romantic’ adult stories have the same kind of setting, as do many fantasy tales. Fairness demands we add that, contrary to popular opinion, modern fantasy stories don’t; it’s hard to get much tension in a plot when anything is possible at the snap of a wand and so the practice of ‘magic’ therein tends to be difficult, dangerous and to be avoided wherever possible. Discworld is a magical world – we can hear the thoughts of a thunderstorm, for example, or the conversation of dogs – but magic in the pointy hat sense is very seldom used. The wizards and witches treat it rather like nuclear weaponry: it does no harm for people to know you’ve got it, but everyone will be in trouble if it gets used. This is magic for grown-ups; it has to be hard, because we know there’s no such thing as a free goblin.

  Unfortunately, adult beliefs about causality are usually contaminated by the less sophisticated wish-fulfilment philosophy that we carry with us from the tinkly magic of our infancies. For example, scientists will object to alternative theories on the grounds that ‘if that was true, we wouldn’t be able to do the sums’. Why do they think that nature cares whether humans can do the sums? Because their own desire to do the sums, which lets them write papers for learned journals, contaminates their otherwise rational view. There’s a feeling of feet being stamped; the Almighty should change Her laws so that we can do the sums.

  There are other ways to set up beliefs about causality, but they are difficult for creatures immersed in their own cultural assumptions: nearly everything that an adult human being is required to do is either made magical by technology, or it is to do with another human being, serving or being served.

  These management, leadership and aristocracy issues have been handled very differently in different societies. Feudal societies have a baronial class, who are in many respects allowed to remain in their nursery personas by being surrounded by servants and slaves and other parent-surrogates. Rich people in more complex societies, and high-status people in general (knights, kings, queens, princesses, Mafia bosses, operatic divas, pop idols, sports stars) seem to have set up societies around them that pander to their needs in a very child-pampering way. As our society has become more technical, more and more of us, right down to the lowest status levels of society, have come to benefit from the accumulating magic of technology. Supermarkets have democratised and validated the provision of all we could want to each of our child-natures. The child-magic has been appropriated by more and more adults, through technology, and the legitimate kind, the ‘wonder of nature’ magic, has lost out.

  In the mid-seventeenth century there was a philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who derived from the synthetic Renaissance position, and from his criticism of Descartes’ publications, a wholly new view of causality. He was one of several figures who bridged the Renaissance and helped engender the Enlightenment. He developed his critical view of his own Jewish cultural authorities into a new rational view of universal causality. He rejected Moses’ hearing God’s voice, and angels, and lots more ‘occult’ thinking, particularly early cabbalism;6 he took the naïve magic out of his own religion. He was a lens-grinder, an occupation that requires the persistent checking of performance against reality. So he put in the artisan’s view of causality, and he took out the magic of God’s word. The Jewish community in Amsterdam excommunicated him. They’d learned about that from the Catholics, but it didn’t translate very well into Jewish practice, even of those times.

  Spinoza was a pantheist. That is, he believed there is a little bit of God in everything. His main reason for believing this was that if God were separate from the material universe, then there would be an entity greater than God, namely, the entire universe plus God. It follows that Spinoza’s God is not a being, not a person in whose image humanity can be made. For this reason, Spinoza was often considered to be an atheist, and many orthodox Jews still view him that way. Despite this, his Ethics makes a beautiful, logically argued case for a particular type of pantheism. In fact, Spinoza’s viewpoint is almost indistinguishable from that of most philosophically inclined scientists, from Newton to Kauffman.

  Before Spinoza, even his supposed predecessors like Descartes and Leibniz had God moving things in the World by the power of his Voice: magic, child-thinking. Spinoza introduced the idea that an overarching God could run the universe without being anthropomorphic. Many modern Spinozans see the set of rules, devised, described or attributed by science to the physical world, as the embodiment of that kind of God. That is to say, what happens in the material world happens that way because God, or the Nature of the Physical World, constrains it to do so. And out of that come ideas resembling narrativium instead of magic and wish-fulfilment.

  A Spinozan view of child development sees the opposite of wish-fulfilment. There are rules
, constraints, that limit what we can do. The child learns, as she grows, to modify her plans as she perceives more of the rules. Initially, she might attempt to cross the room assuming that the chair is not an obstacle; when it doesn’t move out of her way, she will feel frustration, a ‘passion’. And throws a paddy. Later, as she constructs her path to avoid the chair, more of her plans will peaceably, and successfully, come to fruition. As she grows and learns more of the rules – God’s Will or the warp and woof of universal causation – this progressive success will produce a calm acceptance of constraints: peace rather than passion.

  Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe is a very Spinozan book, because Spinoza saw that we do indeed make our home, with the reward of peace and the discipline of passion and its control, each of us in their own universe. We fit the universe as a whole, we evolved in it and of it, and a successful life is based on appreciating how it constrains our plans and rewards our understanding. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ have no place in Spinozan prayer. That view melds the artisan with the philosopher, the tribal respect for tradition with the barbarian virtues of love and honour.

  And it gives us a wholly new kind of story with a civilising message. Instead of the barbarian ‘And then he rubbed the lamp again … and again the genie appeared’, we have the first king’s son taking on a task, to win the hand of the fair princess … and he fails. Amazing! No barbarian protagonist ever fails. Indeed, nobody ever ultimately fails except evil giants, sorcerers and Grand Viziers, in tribal or barbarian magical tales. However, the new story tells of the second king’s son learning from this failure, and shows the listener – the learner – how difficult the task is. Nevertheless, again he fails, because learning is not easy. But the third son – or the third billygoat Gruff or the third pig, with his house of brick – shows how to succeed in a Spinozan, enlightened world of observation and experience. Stories in which people learn from the failures of others are a hallmark of a civilised society.