The Science of Discworld II - The Globe tsod-2

by Terry Pratchett

  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'[22]. 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'[23]. 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 baronial class, who are in many respects allowed to remain in the nursery personas by being surrounded by servants and slaves and other parent- surrogates. Rich people in more complex societies, a high-status people in general (knights, kings, queens, princesses, Mafia bosses, operatic divas, pop idols, sports stars) seem to have set 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[24]; he took the naive 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 ... a 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 s learning from this failure, and
shows the listener -the learner -ho difficult the task is.

  Nevertheless, again he fails, because learning 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 Spinoza enlightened world of observation and experience. Stories in which people learn from the failures of others are a hallmark of a civilised society.

  Narrativium has entered our Make-a-Human kit. It makes a different kind of mind from the tribal one, which is all 'do this because we've always done it that way and it works' and 'don't do that because it's taboo, evil and we'll kill you if you do'. And it also differs from the barbarian mind:

  'That way lies honour, booty, much wealth and many children (if I can only get a djinn, or a dgun); I would no demean myself, dishonour these hands, with menial work.' In contrast, the civilised child learns to repeat the task, to work with the grain of the universe.

  The reader of tales that have been moulded and informed by narrativium is prepared to do whatever an understanding of the task requires. Perhaps, in the universe of the story, qualifying for princesses' hands in marriage isn't the preoccupation of the average middle-class but the attitude of the third prince will serve him well down the mine, in the Stock Exchange, in the Wild West (according to Hollywood, a great purveyor of narrativium), or as father and baron.

  We say 'he' because 'she' has a more difficult time: narrativium has not been mined and modelled for girls, and the way the feminist myths are shaping it does not seem to address the same questions as the old boy-oriented models. But we can put that right if we realise that narrativium trains by constraint.

  Discworld, although technically a world run on fairy tale rules, derives much of its power and success from the fact that they are consistently challenged and subverted, most directly by the witch Granny Weatherwax, who cynically uses them or defies them as she sees fit. She roundly objects to girls being forced by the all-devouring 'story' to marry a handsome prince solely on the basis of their shoe size; she believes that stories are there to be challenged. But she herself is part of a larger story, and they follow Riles, too. In a sense, she's always trying to saw off the branch she's sitting on. And her stories derive their power from the fact that we have been programmed from an early age to believe in the monsters that she is battling.

  7. CARGO CULT MAGIC

  The phrase that kept occurring to Rincewind was cargo-cult. He'd run across it -he encountered most things by running across them - on isolated islands out on the big oceans.

  Say that, once, a lost ship arrived, and while taking on food an water it handed out a few goodies to the helpful locals, like steel knives, arrowheads and fish-hooks[25]. And then it sailed away, and after a while the steel wore out and the arrowheads got lost.

  What was needed was another ship. But not many ships came to these lonely islands. What was needed was a ship attractor. Some sort of decoy. And it didn't much matter if it was made out of bamboo and palm leaves, so long as it looked like a ship. Ships would be bound to be attracted to another ship, or else how did you get small boats?

  As with many human activities, it made perfect sense, for certain-values of 'sense'.

  Discworld magic was all about controlling the vast oceans of magic that poured though the world. All the Roundworld magicians could do was to build something like bamboo decoys on the shores of the big, cold, spinning universe, which pleaded: please let the magic come.

  'It's terrible,' he said to Ponder, who was drawing a big circle on the floor, to Dee's fascination.

  'They believe they live in our world. With the turtle and everything!'

  'Yes, and that's strange because the rules here are quite easy to spot,' said Ponder. 'Things tend to become balls, and balls tend to move in circles. Once you work that out, everything else falls into place. In a curved movement, of course.'

  He went back to chalking the circle.

  The wizards had been staying in Dee's house. He seemed quite happy about this, in a mildly bemused way, like a peasant who had suddenly been visited by a family of unexpected relatives from the big city who were doing incomprehensible things but were rich and interesting.

  The trouble was, Rincewind thought, that the wizards were explaining to Dee that magic didn't work while, at the same time, doing magic. A crystal ball was giving instructions. An ape was knuckling in and out of, for want of a better word, fresh air, and wandering around Dee's library making excited 'ook' noises and assembling the books to make a proper entrance in L-space. And the wizards themselves, as was their wont, prodded at things and argued at cross-purposes.

  And Hex had tracked down the elves. It made no sense, but their descent on Roundworld had plunged through time and come to rest millions of years in the past.

  Now the wizards had to get there. As Ponder explained, sometimes resorting to hand gestures for the hard of comprehension, this wasn't difficult. Time and space in the round universe were entirely subordinate. The wizards, being made of higher-order stuff, could quite easily be moved around within it by magic from the real world. There were additional, complex reasons, mostly quite hard to spell.

  The wizards didn't understand almost all this, but they did like the idea of being high-order stuff.

  'But there was nothing back there,' said the Dean, watching Ponder Work on the circle. 'There wasn't even anyone you could call people, Hex says.'

  'There were monkeys,' said Rincewind. 'Things like monkeys, anyway.' He had his own thoughts on this score, although the accepted wisdom on Discworld was that monkeys were the descendants of people who had given up trying[26].

  'Oh, the monkeys,' snapped Ridcully. 'I remember them. Completely useless. If you couldn't eat it or have sex with it, they just didn't want to know. They just mucked about.'

  'I think this was even before that,' said Ponder. He stood up and brushed chalk dust off his robe.

  'Hex thinks that the elves did something to ... something. Something that became humans.'

  'Interfered with them?' said the Dean.

  'Yes, sir. We know they can affect people's minds when they sing-'

  'You said became humans? said Ridcully.

  'Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I really don't want to have that argument all over again, sir. On Roundworld, things become other things. At least, some of some things become other things. I'm not saying that happens on Discworld, sir, but Hex is quite certain that it happens here. Can we just pretend for a moment, sir, that this is true?'

  'For the sake of argument?'

  'Well, for the sake of not having an argument, sir, really,' said Ponder. Mustrum Ridcully on the subject of evolution could go on for far too long.

  'All right, then,' said the Archchancellor with some reluctance.

  'And we know, sir, that elves can really affect the minds of lesser creatures ...'

  Rincewind let the words go over his head. He didn't need to be told this. He'd spent far more time in the field -and the ditch, the forest, hiding in the reeds, staggering across deserts -and had run into and away from elves a couple of times. They didn't like all the things that Rincewind thought made life worthwhile, like cities and cookery and not being hit over the head with rocks on a regular basis. He'd never been certain if they actually ate anything, other than for amusement; they acted as if what they really consumed was other creatures' fear.

  They must have loved humanity when they found it. Humanity was very creative, when it came to being frightened. It was good at filling the future full of dread.

  And then it had gone and spoiled everything by using that wonderful, fear-generating mind for thinking up things to take the fear away -like calendars, locks, candles and stories. Stories in particular. Stories were where the monsters died.

  While the wizards argued, Rincewind went to see what the Librarian was doing. The ape, shorn of his dress but still wearing his ruff to conform to local clothing standards, was as happy as, well, as happy as a librarian among books. Dee was quite a collector. Most of the books were abou
t magic or numbers or magic and numbers. They weren't very magical, though. The pages didn't even turn by themselves.

  The crystal sphere had been placed on a shelf, so that Hex could watch.

  'The Archchancellor wants us all to go back and stop the elves,' said Rincewind, sitting down on a stack of titles. 'He thinks we can ambush them before they do anything. Me, I don't think it's going to work.'

  Ook?' said the Librarian, sniffing a bestiary and laying it aside.

  'Because things generally don't, that's why. Best laid plans, and all that. And these aren't best laid plans, anyway. "Let's get back there and beat the devils to death with big iron bars" is not, in my opinion, a best laid plan. What's funny?'

  The Librarian's shoulders were shaking. He passed a book across to Rincewind, who read the passage that had been pointed out by a black fingernail.

  He stopped reading, and stared at the Librarian.

  It was uplifting. Oh, it was uplifting. Rincewind hadn't read anything like it. But ...

  He'd spent the day in this city. There were dog fights and bear pits and that wasn't the worst of it.

  He'd seen the heads on spikes over the gates. Of course, Ankh-Morpork had been bad, but Ankh Morpork had thousands of years of experience of being a big city and had become, well, sophisticated in its sins. This place was half farmyard.