Back to my presumptuous lecture to the science documentary makers. I included a brief section called ‘Science as poetry or science as useful’. Nobody could deny the usefulness of science – frequently cited in terms of the myth that the space programme was justified by the spin-off of the non-stick frying pan – but I was keen to advocate the Carl Sagan, ‘visionary’ or ‘poetic’ end of the spectrum rather than the ‘non-stick frying pan’ end. As I put it on an earlier occasion: ‘Concentrating only on the usefulness of science is a bit like celebrating music because it is good exercise for the violinist’s right arm.’
One of my final sallies was an attack on the conventional wisdom among TV professionals that ‘people don’t want to watch talking heads’. I had no data to support my scepticism. But I remember the huge success of John Freeman’s Face to Face series on BBC TV, in which even the interviewer’s face was not seen – only the back of his head and one shoulder from behind. All the concentration was on the face – and, of course, the words – of the interviewee. The series has become legendary. Subjects included Bertrand Russell, Edith Sitwell, Adlai Stevenson, C. G. Jung, Tony Hancock, Henry Moore, Evelyn Waugh, Otto Klemperer, Augustus John, Simone Signoret and Jomo Kenyatta. I was interviewed by the wittily articulate sociologist Laurie Taylor, in a recent revival of the show. On a smaller scale, my ‘mutual tutorial’ videos (see pages 256–63) have been well received, and they are nothing but talking heads.
Nearly a decade before that Manchester conference, in fact, I had been lucky enough to take part in a project that used the ‘talking heads’ format to maximum effect. In the spring of 1997, I was approached by Graham Massey, sometime head of BBC Science and a previous BBC Horizon producer. He had had a lovely idea, inspired by his friend Christopher Sykes’s celebrated interview with the great physicist Richard Feynman. He wanted to make a video archive of distinguished scientists talking at length about their careers. The format was to be an interview of each individual by a younger scientist who knew the field well enough to draw them out. The point was not to make programmes for immediate broadcasting, but to compile a record for the future: something that would survive perhaps for a very long time and be of interest to historians of science in later generations. I loved the idea and consequently felt hugely honoured to be invited to be the interviewer of John Maynard Smith.
The interview took place over two days, in John’s house in Lewes in Sussex. John and his wife Sheila invited me to stay the night, and we all, including Graham and the crew, had lunch, on both days, in the local pub. The two days of conversation were divided into 102 ‘stories’, each lasting a few minutes.1 Each story has its own title and can be separately viewed, although they form a definite sequence and, if watched sequentially, form a wonderfully absorbing picture of the great man’s scientific life. They include autobiographical accounts of his early life, education at Eton, wartime employment as an engineer designing aeroplanes, Marxist politics at Cambridge, and returning to university as a mature student after the war to read biology.
Some of the later ‘stories’ uncovered John’s occasionally strained relations with Bill Hamilton. John told the story with disarming frankness. Neither he nor his famously idiosyncratic mentor, the great J. B. S. Haldane, recognized that the shy young man working in another department of their university was a consummate genius. John quoted Huxley on closing the Origin of Species: ‘How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that.’ He reproached himself for not having offered support to Hamilton when the younger man needed it. In subsequent ‘stories’ he compared Bill Hamilton’s concept of ‘inclusive fitness’ (a measure of what an individual organism is expected to maximize) with the ‘gene’s-eye view’ adopted by Bill in other papers – the view which I, along with John, prefer (see page 319), and which eventually arrives at the same answer as the inclusive fitness approach.
It was at University College London after the war that John came under the sway of J. B. S. Haldane, and the interview is peppered with lovely stories of that formidable eccentric. I’ll quote one, to give the flavour:
He and his wife, Helen, had the rather nice habit that on the night when we’d all finished our finals examination . . . of taking the class after the last exam, to The Marlborough, which is the pub just down the other side of the road, and buying us all a drink until closing time. It was very pleasant. And I went there the night I took finals. And when the pub shut, he said to me and to Pamela Robinson, who was also going to become a graduate student in, in fact, in palaeontology, would we like to go back to his flat and continue drinking, because we clearly hadn’t had enough. And rather foolishly we said we would. So we went back to Prof’s flat and we continued to drink and talk about the world, until about two o’clock in the morning Pamela said: ‘Look, Prof, John and I really have to go home, but the tubes have stopped running and you’re going to have to drive us home.’ So Haldane said, ‘All right, I’ll drive you home.’ So we piled into Prof’s car . . . It was a typical Haldane possession, it was extremely old and ramshackle and decrepit. And we started driving up [Parliament] hill. And about halfway up the hill, the car started filling with smoke. And I didn’t like to say anything, I thought this was normal. But Pamela said, ‘Prof, I think the car’s on fire.’
‘Oh? Oh well.’ So we drew up . . . And, as an engineer, I was told to find out what was wrong. And it was clear nothing very serious was wrong. What had happened was that the carpeting had fallen down on the transmission and was burning, underneath the front seat. So, we looked at this for a bit. And Haldane said, ‘The ladies will go and stand behind yonder lamp post.’ I thought: What next? And he then turned to me and said, ‘Smith, the method of Pantagruel. You have had more beer than I have. Put it out.’ Now, part of this is, of course, you had to know the classical quotation, you had to know that Pantagruel had, in fact, put out Paris on fire by peeing on it. So I did. And I don’t know, you know, if you’ve had a lot of beer and you start peeing, it’s kind of hard to stop. He said, ‘That’s enough, boy, that’s enough.’
But my point is that if you were going to work and live with Haldane, you had to be prepared to live in this slightly unpredictable environment, and I . . . I was . . . the other thing about Haldane was that if he said something you disagreed with, you could tell him to shut up and stop being such a silly old fart, he didn’t mind. But you had to treat him like that, it was no good being polite, you had to fight back if he said things you didn’t agree with.
The transcript is nice, but you really have to listen to John, he was such a wonderful raconteur.
The ‘story’ straight after that one reduced John to tears, as he recalled the moment when Haldane, about to depart to end his days in India, had confessed his affection for John’s wife Sheila, and asked John to tell her because he was not able to do so himself. The emotion, actual and recollected, is powerful and moving. And all this was done by the method of ‘talking heads’.
DEBATES AND ENCOUNTERS
I AM not a fan of the debate format, certainly not the rigidly structured and timed debate ending in a vote. As an undergraduate I regularly attended the Thursday evening debates at the Oxford Union, and I heard guest speeches, some of them extremely good, from leading politicians and orators of the day: Michael Foot, Hugh Gaitskell, Robert Kennedy, Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Harold Macmillan, Orson Welles, Brian Walden – even Oswald Mosley proved to be a mesmerizing speaker, however unpleasant his politics. Some undergraduate speakers, too, were extremely accomplished, for example Paul Foot, Michael’s nephew, who later became a penetrating investigative journalist. But I have become disillusioned with the lawyer-style adversarial format of formal debates. Universities enter debating teams in competitions where the speakers are told, on the toss of a coin, which side they are to advocate. Good training for lawyers, no doubt, but I find something akin to whoring in young people learning to hone rhetorical skills in the service of an arbitrarily allocated cause in which they don’t believe – maybe, indeed, ad
vocating the opposite of what they believe. If I am moved by oratory, I want it to be sincerely meant.
But wait. Does a stage speech by an accomplished actor give the lie to my stricture? Does a rousing Henry V at the breach, or a Mark Antony ‘come to bury Caesar’, fail to convince because we’re listening to an actor and not the real thing? I’d like to think not. I’d like to think that a great Portia transports herself into the skin of her character so deeply that her ‘quality of mercy’ speech really feels sincere in a way that a lawyer advocating a defence in which he doesn’t believe cannot – indeed, should not. Lalla tells me crying on stage comes easily if you really live your character and embrace her pathos.
English law (and, I think, Scottish and American law too) is founded on the ‘tug-of-war’ principle: in any disagreement, pay somebody to put the strongest possible case for a proposition, whether they believe it or not, pay somebody else to put the strongest possible case against it, and see which way the tug-of-war moves. That’s as opposed to the ‘court of inquiry’ principle more characteristic of west European law, which seems to me, in my naivety perhaps, more honest and humane: let’s all sit down together, look at the evidence and try to work out what really happened here. English and American lawyers speak with unabashed admiration of legendary advocates from the past, so good that they even managed to get (fill in name of obviously guilty party) off. So much the better for the lawyer’s reputation if any fool could see that his client was guilty but the great advocate still managed to win over the jury.
I was deeply shocked by a conversation with a bright young American defence lawyer who was exultant because the private detective she’d hired had found evidence that proved, beyond any doubt, the innocence of her client. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘What would you have done if your detective had found evidence that conclusively proved your client guilty?’
‘I would have ignored it,’ was her unabashed reply. It’s up to the prosecution to find their own evidence: I’m not paid to give help to the other side’ (my italics).
This was a murder case, and she was blithely happy to contemplate suppressing evidence, thereby letting a murderer go free perhaps to kill again, rather than lose a tug-of-war with the prosecuting lawyer ‘on the other side’. How could any decent person fail to be shocked by that story? But I have yet to find a lawyer prepared to condemn it. They’ve inhaled the ‘our side’ versus ‘the other side’ smoke so deeply, they don’t even notice it any more. I choke on it.
Incidentally, a version of the tug-of-war approach to getting at the truth has been adopted by a school of television interviewers, beginning (in Britain at least) with Robin Day. Only yesterday, as I write, I was in a BBC television studio waiting for my turn in the hot seat. As it turned out, I was not treated in this way, but in the minutes while I waited the interviewer was getting through a series of politicians, representatives of all three main political parties, on the topic at hand. His style of questioning was truculent from the outset. The presumption seemed to be that all three of them were lying, or at best incompetent. Maybe he believed they were. But I suspect the real reason was his training in a school of journalism which holds that the best way to get at the truth when interviewing somebody is to provoke him as hard as you can in order to see where the tug-of-war ends up. Perhaps that is indeed the best way, but it’s not obviously so and it needs justifying.
Anyway, although I have occasionally accepted invitations to speak at both the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, I don’t like the adversarial style of debating. My first experience of it was in 1986 at the Oxford Union, when John Maynard Smith and I took on a pair of creationists, Edgar Andrews and A. E. Wilder-Smith. The motion was ‘that the doctrine of creation is more valid than the theory of evolution’. I certainly wouldn’t agree to debate such a motion today, and even in 1986 I did it only to support a valued pupil from New College, Daniela Sieff, who had agreed to be the lead undergraduate speaker on the science side. Neither of the two guest speakers on the other side had any qualification in biology. Wilder-Smith, a chemist, turned out to be a harmlessly genial buffoon. Andrews, a physicist (and less genial), had written a number of books advocating fundamentalist creationism (including ‘flood geology’: yes, that’s Noah’s flood!), which I took the precaution of reading before the debate. Of course, naive creationism would be an instant debate-loser at the Oxford Union, so Andrews pretended to a more sophisticated philosophy-of-science approach. Nobody would have guessed that he – a professor of physics – could seriously be a naive creationist . . . until I began reading out passages from his books. Pathetically, and repeatedly, he stood up and tried to persuade the president to stop me reading from his own writings. Very properly she overruled him, and he sat with his head in his hands as I read out the significant passages, giving the lie to his philosophical pretensions. At the drinks after the debate, he had an altercation with John Maynard Smith, the only time I ever saw that beloved good man flush red with anger.
The more specific reason why I now refuse to take part in formal debates with creationists is that every time a scientist agrees to such a debate it creates an illusion of equal standing. An audience is fooled by the presence of two chairs side by side on the platform, the allocation of equal time to ‘both sides’: fooled into thinking there really are two ‘sides’, fooled into thinking there is an issue of real substance to debate. It was Stephen Jay Gould who first opened my eyes to this ‘two chairs effect’. I had been invited to debate with a creationist in America and I telephoned Steve to ask his opinion. ‘Don’t do it,’ was his friendly advice. The moment a real scientist agrees to such a debate, the creationist has won his main objective, no matter what actually happens in the debate itself. ‘They need the publicity,’ Steve pointed out to me; ‘you don’t.’ Robert May put the same thought with characteristically blunt Australian wit. When invited to participate in such a debate, his favoured reply is: ‘That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine!’ I’ve told that story so often that quite a few people think the witticism is mine. I wish it were!
So powerful is the ‘two chairs effect’ that it has actually, with petty malice, been turned around and used against me. I was once invited to have a debate, in Oxford, with an American Christian apologist called Craig, who had been badgering me for years to have a second debate with him (the first was at a big event in Mexico, where he was the least impressive of the three speakers on his side). As it happened, I had another speaking engagement in London on the evening of his proposed Oxford debate, but I would have refused in any case, for reasons I’ll mention in a moment. So his supporters placed an empty chair on the stage in Oxford and pretended I’d been too cowardly to turn up!
In his case, I had already published in the Guardian a very particular reason for not wishing to share a platform with this individual ever again: my disgust at his justification of the biblical slaughter of the Canaanites. I wasn’t complaining about the alleged massacre itself (like most of Old Testament ‘history’ it never happened). My point was that Craig, believing that it happened, justified it on the grotesquely immoral grounds that the Canaanites were all sinners, so they deserved what was coming to them. Moreover, all they had had to do was hand over their land to the invading ‘Israelis’ (sic) and their lives would have been spared.
I have come to appreciate as a result of a closer reading of the biblical text that God’s command to Israel was not primarily to exterminate the Canaanites but to drive them out of the land. It was the land that was (and remains today!) paramount in the minds of these Ancient Near Eastern peoples. The Canaanite tribal kingdoms which occupied the land were to be destroyed as nation states, not as individuals. The judgment of God upon these tribal groups, which had become so incredibly debauched by that time, is that they were being divested of their land. Canaan was being given over to Israel, whom God had now brought out of Egypt. If the Canaanite tribes, seeing the armies of Israel, had simply chosen to flee, no one would have been killed at al
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So it was the Canaanites’ fault: they had it coming to them because God wanted their land for his pet tribe’s Lebensraum and the incumbents just refused to get up and abandon their homes of their own accord. Craig even justified the slaughter of the children since they’d go to heaven anyway.
In passing, my Guardian article mentioned the ‘empty chair’ tactic (which had been well publicized in advance):
In an epitome of bullying presumption, Craig now proposes to place an empty chair on a stage in Oxford next week to symbolise my absence. The idea of cashing in on another’s name by conniving to share a stage with him is hardly new. But what are we to make of this attempt to turn my non-appearance into a self-promotion stunt? In the interests of transparency, I should point out that it isn’t only Oxford that won’t see me on the night Craig proposes to debate me in absentia: you can also see me not appear in Cambridge, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and, if time allows, Bristol.1
Brief Candle in the Dark Page 23
