If I say, he’s there to take the blame for human wrongdoing, I suspect you will instinctively collapse ‘blame’ back into ‘penalty’, and decide that I’m a devotee of a kind of penal-substitution-lite. (All the moral squalor! None of the gusto!) But ‘blame’ does not necessarily mean something that has been imposed by a judge; it does not have to denote a consequence of breaching a law code, or having power breathe down your neck with punishment on its mind. Some crimes are sins, but not all sins are crimes, and guilt (though certainly culturally conditioned) also arises spontaneously as a consequence of the shit we humans do. Unless you’ll consent to a picture of human life in which guilt is sometimes the appropriate response to our own actions, it will be impossible to tell you any story of redemption that makes sense. The massively misleading present-day association of ‘sin’ with sexual behaviour no-one should be upset about gets in the way here, which is why Unapologetic goes to town on the task of manufacturing an artificial substitute word that doesn’t carry sin’s frou-frou overtones; but, beyond the argument over terminology, there does in fact still remain – naturally, I’d say – a list of human acts we all agree to take seriously as evils. You mention rape, child abuse, torture, genocidal massacre. I couldn’t agree more: but then I’d want to add, as sources of proper and spontaneous human guilt, all sorts of less spectacular cruelties.
It is this mass of guilt that the man on the cross is inviting us to pass over to him instead, not so that he can suffer the penalty for it, not because he becomes the wronged party in all those acts of cruelty (which would be presumptuous indeed), but because he claims the proper, the appropriate, the spontaneous guilt, apart from all law, of the rapist, the torturer, the SS man, the wife-beater, the child-molester; and also the guilt of the everyday lying, bullying, humiliating, and so on, which (if we’re honest) forms a fairly standard occasional element of almost all lives. He’s there for the wrongdoers, not just the wronged. And since, says faith, he’s also God on the cross, he has the reach and the capacity for forgiveness which humans do not.
You ask why we can’t just leave forgiveness and mending to people, ‘instead of dragging all this contentious theology into everything’. The answer is that people’s capacity to forgive, to act for each other, is always limited, is always contingent, always comes up against our needs for self-preservation or for justice. Rape victims should not be asked to forgive rapists. The crucifixion, for far more Christians than sign up to penal substitution, is the site of the outrageous claim that God regards all wrongs, no matter how vile, as forgivable. It does, indeed, represent a breach of justice, but in the opposite direction to the one you perceive (rightly) in penal substitution.
This is not fluffy. It is, however, visibly and centrally present in the orthodox theology of redemption, once you let the language of sin refer to something tragically observable rather than to nasty, antique codes of punishment by a big boss in the sky. I don’t always manage to believe that Christ died for the sins of the whole world; I waver and I wobble, and assurance comes and goes, even in Holy Week. But that’s what’s there to be believed, for me. That’s the transmitted, orthodox core of faith.
So, no, I don’t think I’ll be demoting the atonement to a handy myth or metaphor. I can’t banish mystery, though. I feel I can know what the cross did, and why, but not how, since I lack by definition the God’s-eye view that would be required ever to know that. Again, faith requires the acceptance of a diagram of the world in which, even after the maximum success we could possibly have in the great war on marshmallow, there would still be things that we, temporary creatures that we are, aren’t ever going to be in a position to understand.
I wish you a happy Easter, if only for the chocolate.
Francis Spufford
(2013)
Technical
My experiments in science writing have been centred round my pleasure in explaining things. To myself first and most urgently, as part of my sense that as an adult and a citizen I really ought to be minimally able to understand the physical (and chemical, and biological) functioning of the world I inhabit. Then, if they will sit still and listen for long enough, other people.
My own slowness and mathematical illiteracy have, perversely, been a help here. The metaphors and other mental devices for translating the non-verbal that I need, to get a process fixed comprehensibly in mind, often seem to be transferable. And explanation of course is a form of narrative. The flowchart of necessary realisations, to be imparted in the right order and with the right degree of emphasis, is a kind of story, highly specialised. Maybe, with its lack of characterisation and vital dependence on sequence, it most resembles Vladimir Propp’s bare-bones universal structure for the folk tale. The hero must meet the princess before the villain can threaten him with the loss of her; the reader must grasp the essentials of thermodynamics before a book can get to the difference between a heat engine using the Carnot cycle and one based on the Stirling cycle.
On the whole, I have been more interested in writing about applied sciences than the pure kind. Technology is making, and therefore has useful affinities with the sort of making I know about, in words. Technological history is the gloriously impure record of science’s interaction with the constraints and possibilities of human societies; and it too is rich in lost worlds, untaken paths, and pasts orphaned by later paradigm shifts.
DIFFERENCE ENGINE
Despite government grants of unprecedented size, and expectant coverage in the technical press of the day, Charles Babbage did not build the Difference Engine, and he never even came close to realising his plans for its programmable successor, the Analytical Engine. Visit the computing history section of the Science Museum in London to see the Difference Engine, as Doron Swade and his team have made it possible for you to do, and you witness a rich historical paradox.
The handle cranks, and industrialised mathematics takes place before you. The gear wheels turn; sword blades clunk up and snick down, keeping each gear registering a whole, determinate number; at the back the rotors on the main columns turn circles at staggered intervals from one another, sending silvery sine waves rising the height of the engine with each step of the operation. The brass and steel of the engine weigh more than a ton, but at the same time the thing seems curiously insubstantial once you think through its presence on a reinforced upper floor of a South Kensington museum. (In one of the public palaces reserved by the Victorians for just this sort of edifying spectacle – though not this exact one.) It is so Victorian in its visual impact; almost exaggeratedly so. It looks like an elaboration, a raising to the nth degree, of every Victorian device you ever saw, from a fob watch with its case open to a steam locomotive whose jointed connecting rods delicately transform enormous linear thrust into huge rotary motion. It expands on every specimen of purposeful nineteenth-century metal. It even delivers a ridiculously clear lesson in Victorian industrial philosophy. It situates its operator, who need only count the number of times the engine has been cranked to produce this or that order of polynomials, in a perfected version of the position labour was supposed to occupy in the Victorian factory system. Here is an abstruse operation of the calculus, previously the province of a trained mathematical mind, made over into a job of machine-minding, at the cost of perfect alienation from the task. Yet you are seeing a quintessentially Victorian object on which no Victorian ever laid eyes, including Babbage, whose craftsmen could not cut gears to the necessary fine tolerances.
What can you call it? A fictitious antique? In one sense, it is the relic of an non-existent history, an artificially created survival from a past in which Babbage, after all, succeeded. Babbage faced tangible and intangible obstacles, both problems with materials and problems with ideas. Having conceived a machine some technical stages in advance of his era’s power to manipulate metal, he lacked a whole set of supporting technologies for the Engine, which was why he was constantly sidetracked by questions that had to be answered first, about alloys and temperatures and bras
s-turning equipment. His design was balanced, so to speak, on the single pole of his own determination, instead of fitting comfortably atop a pyramid of assured skills. Likewise, he could not refer the intellectual endeavour represented by the Engines to any established context of ideas. There was the analogy (beloved of his mathematical collaborator Ada Lovelace) between the Analytical Engine’s proposed card-storage for information and the card-hopper of a Jacquard loom, but analogy – individual illuminating comparison, constructed for the occasion by a specific effort of perception – was about the limit of what the Engine could draw on from the culture. There existed no shared vocabulary available to describe Babbage’s intentions, and make them obvious; no already existing notation, no convenient mathematical shorthand, no canon of procedures. The Science Museum’s department of computing history found itself in a position to remove both obstacles, supply both lacks, solve both problems. Supervising the production of several hundred identical brass gears only proved to be interestingly tricky for them. And so far as ideas went, they possessed the very significant power to name Babbage’s enterprise as part of, well, the history of computers, in which his thinking made perfect, retrospective sense. They furnished him a belated context from current computer science – they could simply refer (a tiny illustration in itself) to his hardware and software difficulties.
So the Engine is in effect a collaboration between times. Its functional, successful existence here and now vindicates Babbage’s design, but the design alone. The Science Museum did not mean to test the Engine’s feasibility then, only its feasibility now. They abolished, rather than recreating, contemporary constraints. They acted on their own power to complete what had been uncompleted, to realise what had been unrealised. The object in the gallery therefore says nothing decisive about whether Babbage could have succeeded. Instead it pays a tribute to a man who has been retrospectively organised into being an ancestor; and it brings the might-have-been to the surface, all the more powerfully for not being decided one way or the other. When we look at it, this synthetic thing made from now’s response to then, we are dealing with a relationship to the past, with our own ability to imagine and retrieve, and with the fluctuating process by which, at different times, different parts of history seem to come to prominence as we recognise unfinished business there. In fact we are seeing a peculiarly concrete, peculiarly provoking exercise of the historical imagination, something just as alive in the history of science as in the history of manners or the history of speech. And the imagination we use alike to ‘enter’ the past idly, and to reason about it carefully or proportionately, does not possess the history it works upon as some uniformly dead or distant object. There are constant transactions involved, like the transaction between Babbage and the museum: exchanges and barters in a sort of imaginative economy. We nominate some times as livelier than others because, like the living present, they seem to contain unexhausted possibilities, of which our sense that at a certain point things could have gone otherwise gives a perverse sort of index.
The Difference Engine still radiates a feeling of possibility which cannot easily be accounted for. Certainly not from the functional point of view: by any modern standard of comparison, the Engine has negligible powers. Any programmable pocket calculator can be instructed to calculate the polynomials, and it can solve any other equation you program it to as well; while Babbage’s metal beast is a one-task tool, hard-wired or rather hard-cogged for its single purpose. The shining, immovable architecture of the Difference Engine actually embodies its program. The thing’s beauty in fact declares how thoroughly it is obsolete. But even if it were the open-ended Analytical Engine we were looking at, the same functional comparison would produce the same result. It is not what the Engine can do that is really at issue, but some quality of promise we see in it independent of its actual function. This quality, interestingly, the established and ordinary technologies of the present completely fail to produce. Neither a calculator, nor – say – the motherboard of an office PC (a piece of kit infinitely removed from Victorian tech in complexity and performance) promise anything except that they will perform the tasks we know they can. The Engine, on the other hand, obstinately promises wonders, and the domain of wonders is the domain of the unspecified, the rich-because-uncertain. In part, perhaps, this only amounts to an old delusion about complex systems. Unlike printed microcircuits, the components of the Engine fall within the range of scale at which made things can be readily admired. A cog of the Engine is accessibly fist-sized; yet there are so many of them that the eye cannot immediately tally the total, a much more aesthetically impressive bemusement when you lose your way in an object the size of a small bathroom. And the same sub-rational hope begins to operate that alchemists felt when they had multiplied the rules and formulae of their craft beyond the mind’s capacity to hold them all at once: that the whole may magically become greater than the sum of the parts, and complexity tell on itself to secrete the philosopher’s stone.
But the promise we perceive has another side, tied to the development of technologies and the juncture in their development when wonder plays a proper part. It is the promise of beginnings. As a technological vista opens for the first time, before the journey into it has really begun that will prove each step to be prosaic, one by one, the possibility of the whole line of development can be felt at once. Often the anticipations turn out to be inaccurate, but that knowledge has not yet been forced upon us, likely and unlikely consequences have not yet been sifted apart. For a brief moment, for that very reason, modest results of an invention and frankly utopian results can have equal likelihood in our minds, and are rolled together intoxicatingly, almost lyrically.
If the Difference Engine had been built, it would have represented that phase in the development of computers. Since it now has been, it enables us to glimpse the chance for the same information technology that we actually have as it would have appeared from the vantage point of anticipation – as a wonderful prospect, an opening box which could contain anything. The Difference Engine re-enchants computers. It doubles our vision: all the while word processors and accounting software go on being dull and familiar, yet simultaneously we sight on them as shadowy promises at the edge of plausibility. We can look forward to the present (a mental sleight rather like Flann O’Brien’s ‘art of predicting past events’) in the spirit of the 1840s manual of technical breakthroughs, written for the use of alert artisans, which described the Analytical Engine even in the absence of a working model as bringing ‘metal close to rationality’, bounding on towards artificial intelligence at the slight hint from Babbage that such things could now be hoped for. Wonder includes terror as well as delight. It isn’t the sleep of reason that brings forth monsters after all, but reason’s first confused awakening to a line of inquiry. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein from the equivalent tangled moment at the birth of the life sciences. ‘Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured . . .’ Perhaps, perhaps. If we want to find the present counterpart to the Difference Engine, we have to look not at the achieved technologies it might have pointed towards, but at technologies now passing through the same phase, where the perhapses still cluster and the dispensation of wonder still obtains. Virtual reality, say, or the internet, though the bloom of unlimited possibility is already passing from them. The internet begins to shrinks back from its ecstatic characterisations (a web for democracy, a surfable sea of data, an instrument of expanded perception), and settle down as a very large database-cum-techie salon.23 The smart idolatry is moving on. Nanotechnology, maybe? Still, whatever should be the next locus of wonder, the Difference Engine will resemble it more than it resembles any strictly comparable device for crunching numbers. Phases of change remain curiously in phase with each other, where the imagination is concerned.
But the history the Difference Engine stands for is of course an imaginary one.
Imaginary histo
ries offend against seriousness. They lead the mind away, most historians have thought, from what can be studied into what by definition cannot; from solid actuality, quite difficult enough to document and comprehend, to a terrain of nebulous possibility governed by wishes and other illegitimate impulses. We humans can know history in a profound sense, argued Vico, because we made it, in however complex and collective and half-intentional a way. What did not happen, we did not make, and cannot know from within, as we can know (or grope towards knowing) the acts and omissions even of the most distant and different peoples. This leaves thinking about them as a hobby at best, a peculiarly ethereal recreation, a confessed preference for unreality. Yet it must be admitted that the foolish question of how things might have happened is certainly involved with, attached to, the sensible question of how in fact things do happen: how necessity and chance, the quick foreground incidents of history and the slow background shifts in the regimen of human societies, luck and weather, material factors and intellectual factors, the sequence of scientific discovery and the effect of popular novels, all combine – differently, according to different contending theories and understandings of history – to shape an outcome and produce this event rather than that one. Only a belief that all events are rigidly predetermined can entirely exclude the possibility that things could have been otherwise. And most historians are not pure determinists. So the same qualities that make imaginary histories ridiculous have occasionally commended them, and made some people wonder if they could be useful.
True Stories Page 23
