Added to the horror of it all is the ready perception that the arbitrary, bloody Queen of Hearts is an ineffective, abysmally stupid person. Yet she has the power. Her pointlessness is the point. Her gibberish conveys unmistakable meanings to those of us who read hidden messages. But sometimes, I admit, there is nothing but nonsense in nonsense. And sometimes the nonsense is just ridicule of stuffed shirts. Perhaps adults should take consolation in the underlying joyful certainty that they (the leaders) who are trying day and night with unstinted effort to control us are, after all, according to Alice, only a pack of cards.
More than one critic has commented on the similarities between Kafka’s other book, The Trial, and the trial of the Knave of Hearts and between Kafka’s Castle and the chess game in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which living pieces are ignorant of the game’s plan and cannot tell if they move of their own will or are being controlled by invisible strings moved by invisible fingers. This vision of the monstrous mindlessness of the powers that be can be grim and disturbing, especially to those who know history.
p. 312 The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming, “Off with her head!”[31]
All attempts to divert attention from real issues are irrelevant. All violence and all threats of violence are irrelevant. A chopped-off head is not a substitute for a logical argument. Nor is a chopped-off head a substitute for a trial on the issues. Official violence and oppression can be much more dangerous and difficult to control than individual private violence. Major checks are therefore required to prevent the major dangers of too much governmental power. That is why we have a constitution. That is why the Constitution must be followed exactly. “Eternal vigilance,” said George Washington, “is the price of liberty.” Eternal vigilance is probably also the price of everything else that we hold dear.
“Very true,” said the Duchess: “Flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is—Birds of a feather flock together.”[32]
Note the non sequitur based on confusion of bite and the error of concluding that since mustard and flamingoes both bite, and since the flamingo is a bird, mustard must be a bird, too, and therefore must flock with it.
“Only mustard isn’t a bird,” Alice remarked.
[Clever Alice! She defeated the false analogy by stating a fact.]
“Right, as usual,” said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything that Alice said.[33]
Oh my, my, that Duchess! She is something else. The Duchess is one of the most striking features of the book, especially if one reviews what was standard fare for children of the time. When one sees her in action, one gets a strong reaction against didacticism, which so many of the episodes illustrate. Carroll’s parodies of the instructive verse that children were made to memorize and recite is a ridicule of solemnity and a criticism of the practice of inflicting it upon the young.
In the croquet game, the Duchess’s motto is “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” This, of course, begs the question and is all inclusive, an overgeneralization, and an assertion that needs support by evidence. From that statement, the Duchess becomes more and more extravagant and nonsensical in her application of axioms and proverbs to everything. Alice catches on fast and reacts accordingly. And p. 313 the moral of that is: Adults—ugh! They aren’t consistent, and they aren’t fair.
It’s true that everyday language is largely arbitrary and unaccountable, but the Duchess’s puzzling use of language is one important illustration of adult bullying and condescension. This is, I believe, one of the underlying messages of the Alice books, the rejection of adult authority and the vindication of the rights of the child, even the right to self-assertion, clear instruction, and logical thoughts.
The Duchess continues, “There’s a large mustard mine near here. And the moral of that is—‘The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.’ ”[34]
Another non sequitur as well as a contextual modification of the word mine. But despite the change in the meaning of the word mine in this context, the Duchess is here describing the zero-sum game, in which the payoff to the winner exactly equals the losses of the loser—“the more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.”
Poker is a many-person zero-sum game because the total amount of money won equals the total amount of money lost. Bets on the outcome of chess and checker games are zero-sum. So are some forms of currency trading.
By contrast, a negative-sum game is one in which the total amount won is less than that bet, as in pari-mutuel betting on a horse race. The total amount bet (the handle) is 20 percent more than the total amount paid off because the state extracts 15 percent from the handle and the track takes 5 percent.
Stocks and bonds can be positive-sum games due to the addition of interest to the betted pool in the case of bonds and the addition of dividends in the case of stocks. But stocks and bonds are mainly negative-sum games because of commissions and trading fees, market manipulations, market timing, and withdrawal of money from corporations via fraud.
The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn’t going to begin at his time of life.[35]
Matter of fact: You can’t cut a head off when it has already been detached. The executioner’s argument is reality based, intelligent, valid, and sound. Why didn’t he stop there? Why didn’t he just stop while he was ahead?
p. 314 Instead of resting at the point of irrefutability, the executioner continued (by way of supererogation) with the irrelevant continuum argument: because we never did things that way, we shouldn’t start to do them that way now.
Prudence indeed will dictate that things should not be changed for light and transient causes, but experience dictates that they must change if they are required to change by the facts. Otherwise, nothing would change and progress would stop.
“Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn’t believe it—”
“I never said I didn’t!” interrupted Alice.
“You did,” said the Mock Turtle.[36]
The Mock Turtle is telling Alice that she has just said “I didn’t.” Never means never, and Alice just said “I didn’t.” Therefore, her statement that she never said what she obviously just did say has to be wrong. That is why the Mock Turtle called her on it.
Verbal traps like this are a significant diversion for Carroll. Humpty Dumpty, in the next Alice book, catches Alice in a similar verbal trap by referring to something that she didn’t say. The Mock Turtle continues:
“We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—”
“I’ve been to a day-school, too,” said Alice. “You needn’t be so proud as all that.”
[Another confusion: Going to school every day and a day school are in fact two different things, though Alice assumes they are the same.]
“With extras?” asked the Mock Turtle, a little anxiously.
“Yes,” said Alice: “we learned French and music.”
“And washing?” said the Mock Turtle.
“Certainly not!” said Alice indignantly.
“Ah! Then yours wasn’t a really good school,” said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief. “Now, at ours, they had, at the end of the bill, ‘French, music, and washing—extra.’ ”[37]
Out-of-context quotations are unfair and misleading. They partially select ideas or evidence and frequently lead to erroneous conclusions. The phrase “French, music, and washing—extra” often appeared on boarding school bills. It meant, of course, that there was an extra charge for French and music and for having one’s laundry done by the school. It did not mean washing was included in the course of instruction.
p. 315 Near our house in Texas, we have a storefront doctor whose sign reads: “Neurology, pain, and headache control center.” Pain and headache might need control, but one wonders if the goo
d doctor meant to control neurology as well.
The name Mock Turtle is like that, too—a confusion. The (incorrect) reasoning here is that if there is a mock turtle soup (that is, a soup that tastes and smells like turtle soup but is made of nonturtle ingredients), then there must be such a creature as a mock turtle. There must be a mock turtle if there is a mock turtle soup, in the same way as there must be a turtle if there is a turtle soup.
The analogy is false because although turtle soup and mock turtle soup share a certain property, namely, that they are both hot liquids that you drink from a bowl, they differ in that they are not both derived from a 200-million-year-old reptile species that has protective shells called the carapace and plastron. In fact, mock turtle soup was made from veal. An illustrated AAW shows Tenniel’s original drawing of the Mock Turtle with a calf’s head and hooves for feet, reflecting the actual ingredients that went into Victorian mock turtle soup.
On a deeper level, we are dealing here with a fundamental defect in human thinking called reification, or the propensity to convert an abstract concept into a hard belief. Because we can name something or because we have a name for something does not mean that that thing actually exists. It might exist, and it might not exist. It might merely exist in the realm of imagination and not in the real world. Some people think that Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, was a social-political idea to help organize the Jews out of Egypt, which then became a metaphor reified.
Mock turtles and real turtles—children in the world of adults often exhibit such confusions. For many years, we disciplined our daughter by saying, “Allegra, you’re not the only one!” Eventually, she wanted to know who was the Only One and how could she get to be the Only One.
When I worked at the National Institutes of Health, my boss was King Engel. At home at the dinner table, it was always “King said I should do this” and “King said I should do that.” King put me on night duty and so forth. One night, my son, Craig, piped up and asked, “Dad, when I grow up, will I have to work for the king?”
Other confusions in the Mock Turtle’s story are just pure fun.
“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the p. 316 subjects on his flappers—“Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography and then Drawling . . . Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.”[38]
Of course, Mystery = History; Seaography = Geography; Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils = Drawing, Sketching, and Painting in Oils.
“He taught us Laughing and Grief.”[39]
It is doubtful that there was much laughing in Latin, but the Grief sounds pretty real for Greek as taught in that era.
The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. “What are they doing?” Alice whispered to the Gryphon. “They ca’n’t have anything to put down yet, before the trial’s begun.”
“They’re putting down their names,” the Gryphon whispered in reply, “for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial.”
“Stupid things!” Alice began in a loud indignant voice. . . . Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their shoulders, that all the jurors were writing down “Stupid things!” on their slates, and she could even make out that one of them didn’t know how to spell “stupid,” and that he had to ask his neighbor to tell him. [40]
Here Carroll is playing with the double meaning of the phrase “writing stupid things”: You can write the words stupid things, and you can also write things that are stupid and, as in the case of the jurors here, you can do both those two things at the same time. It also appears that Carroll is making some sort of comment on the jury system. Its true import escapes me. Have you any ideas?
“Herald, read the accusation!”
“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer’s day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts
And took them quite away!”
“Consider your verdict,” the King said to the jury.[41]
Wait a second! No, not yet. That’s not right. The King is out of sequence. First comes the trial and then the verdict. What kind of court is the King running?
p. 317 In a legitimate court of law, the accused is entitled to a trial. Mere indictment does not prove guilt. The jury is required to evaluate the evidence to get to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The King of Hearts shows some of the impetuosity of leaders who feel they know the answers without needing to discuss the issues or evaluate the data or (and this is worse) consult with the people. Later on, the king again shows his impatience during the examination of the Mad Hatter: “Give your evidence . . . and don’t be nervous, or I’ll have you executed on the spot.”[42]
As we discussed, evidence given under duress or torture is no evidence at all. According to Charles Mackay, LLD, in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, thousands of women confessed to being witches and were burned at the stake during the inquisition. Their confessions said they could fly about, had sexual intercourse with the devil, could change into black cats and other familiars—all the things the torturers wished them to say, they did say. Now we know all those things are impossible. As versatile as some women are, none of them can change into a black cat.
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler discusses how, during the Stalin era in Russia, this problem led to confessions of guilt from perfectly innocent Communist Party members. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer handles the same subject in great detail during the Nazi era in Germany, and the novel 1984 (written by George Orwell) depicts a totalitarian society gone further awry by being able to extract any confession from anyone about anything, often for no real reason except to exert power and control or to maintain power and control or both.
“I’m a poor man,” the Hatter went on, “and most things twinkled after that—only the March Hare said—”
“I didn’t!” the March Hare interrupted in a great hurry.
“You did!” said the Hatter.
“I deny it! said the March Hare.
“He denies it,” said the King: “leave out that part.”[43]
Whether the Hatter is poor is irrelevant to the evidence that he is giving. Appeals to pity are emotionally based and irrelevant. All emotional appeals are unreasonable.
And what the devil does “and most things twinkled after that” have anything to do with anything, much less this trial? The Hatter is confused and nervously speaking nonsense.
p. 318 Notice the March Hare is so eager to deny things that we never get to know what he is denying. The king doesn’t care, however, and tells the jury to “leave out that part,” an impossible task, since they don’t know what “that part” was.
Respect for all the evidence must be the cornerstone of trials at law. We don’t see much of that respect here. The King believes that he is special, that somehow the rules do not apply to him or that he can just make them up ad hoc. Obviously, he is mistaken.
Denying counterevidence and ignoring any evidence produce inadequate evaluations and lead away from truth and toward error. Missing evidence is never adequate. The King of Hearts, as a judge, as a leader, is, like so many of our government officials, clearly inadequate, a failure.
Here one of the guinea pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court. They had a rather large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings; into this they slipped the guinea pig, head first, and then sat upon it.[44]
Why they picked on the guinea pig and not the others in the courtroom who were also out of order is not clear. This may have been another example of the arbitrary exercise of power, it could have been the manifestation of a prejudice against the guinea pig, or it could have been both those things or neither. Who knows?
Alice did have a thought about the matter, but it wasn’t particularly sympathetic or nice: “I’m glad I’ve seen that done. . . . I’ve so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials.”[45]
Suppressed evidence and sealing of files is common at the end of trials, especially civil suits. But what Alice is probably referring to is quash, meaning to set aside or annul, as in, “The court quashed the indictment.” Some supposedly educated attorneys say squashed instead of quashed, and that I suppose is the origin of what happened to the guinea pig.
“What are tarts made of?”
“Pepper, mostly,” said the cook.
“Treacle,” said the sleepy voice behind her.
“Collar that Dormouse!” the Queen shrieked out. “Behead that Dormouse!”[46]
Ignoring, denying, and suppressing counterevidence results in biased appraisals that are likely to be wrong. Here, the cook is giving p. 319 false testimony. The Dormouse tells the court so. Yet it is the Dormouse, not the cook, who is punished. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” said Lord Acton. Authorities can be wrong. Kings can be tyrannical. Queens ditto.
At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, called out “Silence!” and read out from his book, “Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.”
Everybody looked at Alice.
“I’m not a mile high,” said Alice
“You are,” said the King.[47]
Here we have a dispute about fact. Is Alice a mile high, or is she not? It should be easy to settle this issue by objective measurement. “Measurement began our might: Forms a stark Egyptian thought, forms that gentler Phidias wrought,” wrote the Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his Last Poems. Yeats was right: Measurement began our might. Numbers are nice. I like them, too. Numbers (if correct) often lead to truth. “I have always believed in numbers,” said John Nash, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics.[48]
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 38
