The Science of Discworld II - The Globe tsod-2

by Terry Pratchett

  Then it went dark. After a moment, a book slipped out of the pile, and it collapsed, the books tumbling to the floor, and there was nothing left but a bare wall.

  And, of course, a banana.

  32. MAY CONTAIN NUTS

  We are the storytelling ape, and we are incredibly good at it.

  As soon as we are old enough to want to understand what is happening around us, we begin to live in a world of stories. We think in narrative. We do it so automatically that we don't think we do it. And we have told ourselves stories vast enough to live in.

  In the sky above us, patterns older than our planet and unimaginably far away have been fashioned in gods and monsters. But there are bigger stories down below. We live in a network of stories that range from 'how we got here' to 'natural justice' to 'real life'.

  Ah, yes ... 'real life'. Death, who acts as a kind of Greek chorus in the Discworld books, is impressed by some aspects of humanity. One is that we have evolved to tell ourselves interesting and useful little lies about monsters and gods and tooth fairies, as a kind of prelude to creating really big lies, like 'Truth' and Justice'.

  There is no justice. As Death remarks in Hogfather, you could grind the universe into powder and not find one atom of justice. We created it, and while we acknowledge this fact, nevertheless there is a sense in which we feel it's 'out there', big and white and shining. It's another story.

  Because we rely so much on them, we love stories. We require them on a daily basis. So a huge service industry has grown up over several thousand years.

  The basic narrative forms of drama -the archetypal stories -can all be found in the works of the ancient Greek playwrights: Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles ... Most of the dramatic tricks go back to ancient Greece, especially Athens. No doubt they are older than that, for no tradition starts in fully developed form. The 'chorus', a gaggle of bit-players who form a backdrop for the main action and in various ways reinforce it and comment on it, is of Greek or earlier origin. So is the main division of the form of a play, though not necessarily its substance, into comedy and tragedy. So, possibly, is the invention of the huge stuffed joke willy, always good for a laugh from the cheap seats.

  The Greek concept of tragedy was an extreme form of narrative imperative: the nature of the impending disaster had to be evident to the audience and to virtually all of the players; but it also had to be evident that it was going to happen anyway, despite that. You were Doomed, as you should be -but we'll watch anyway, to see how interestingly you'll be Doomed. And if it sounds silly to watch a drama when you know the ending in advance, consider this: how likely is it, when you settle down to watch the next James Bond movie, that he won't defuse the bomb? In fact you'll be watching a narrative as rigid as any Greek drama, but you'll watch anyway to see how the trick is done this time.

  In our story, Hex is the chorus. In form, our tale is comedy; in substance, it is closer to tragedy.

  The elves are a Discworld reification of human cruelty and wickedness, they are evil incarnate because -traditionally -they have no souls. Yet in their various aspects they fascinate us, as do vampires and monsters and werewolves. It'd be a terrible event if the last jungle yields up its tiger, and so it would be, too, when the last forest yields up its werewolf (yes, all right, technically they don't exist, but we hope you know what we mean: it'd be a bad day for humanity when we stop telling stories).

  We've piled on to elves and yetis and all the other supernatural aspects of ourselves; we're happier to say that monsters are out there in the deep dark forest than locked in here with us. Yet we need them, in a way we find hard to articulate; the witch Granny Weatherwax tried to summarise it in Carpe Jugulum, when she said 'We need vampires, if only to remind us what garlic is for'. G.K. Chesterton did rather better when, in an article defending fairy stories, he disputed the suggestion that stories tell children that there are monsters. Children already know there are monsters, he said. Fairy stories tell them that monsters can be killed.

  We need our stories to understand the universe, and sometimes we forget that they're only stories. There is a proverb about the finger and the moon; when a wise man points at the Moon, the fool looks at the finger. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, possibly out of a hope that this may be true, but the storytelling ape has a tendency to confuse moons and fingers.

  When your god is an ineffable essence that exists outside of space and time, with unimaginable knowledge and indescribable powers, a god of boundless sky and high places, belief slips easily into the mind.

  But the ape isn't happy with that. The ape gets bored with things it can't see. The ape wants pictures. And it gets them, and then a god of endless space becomes an old man with a beard sitting in the clouds. Great art takes place in the god's honour, and every pious brush gently kills what it paints. The wise man says 'But this is just a metaphor!', and the ape says 'Yeah, but those tiny wings couldn't lift a cherub that fat!' And then not so wise men fill the pantheon of heaven with hierarchies of angels and set the plagues of man on horseback and write down the dimensions of Heaven in which to imprison the lord of infinite space[78]. The stories begin to choke the system ...

  Seeing is not believing.

  Rincewind knows this, which is why he encourages Shakespeare to make elves real. Because once you're called Mustardseed, it's downhill all the way ...

  The elves cannot understand Rincewind's ploy. Not until his thoughts give it away to the Queen of the Elves, and the salvation of the world rests upon 300 pounds of plummeting orangutan.

  Nevertheless, the plan worked very well. This is Oberon, near the end of the play: Through the house give glimmering light, By the dead and drowsy fire; Every elf and fairy sprite Hop as light as bird from brier; And this ditty, after me, Sing and dance it trippingly.

  There's no hope for them. Next stop, nursery wallpaper. Whereas witches, now: Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witch's mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg'd I'th' dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Silver'd in the moon's eclipse, Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-delivered by a drab—

  Make the gruel thick and slab; Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For th' ingredience of our cauldron.

  No contest. What's a chaudron? Entrails. Definitely no contest. The witches appear on stage in Macbeth only three times, but they steal the show. They probably got fan mail. The fairies are present for a large part of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it is Bottom that steals the show and only Puck has a glimmer of the old evil. They've been parcelled, stamped and sent on their way to Tinkly Wood.

  To be sure, Shakespeare's Oberon is not all sweetness and light. He uses the juice of a herb, the flower known as Love-in-idleness, to enchant Titania, Queen of the Fairies, because she has gained possession of a changeling child, and he wants it. He makes her fall in love with Bottom, who at that point in the story is an ass. And he is appeased, and she is entirely happy with the turn of events, when she gives him the child. But that's low-level, sanitised nastiness, a fretful squabble, not a war.

  The allure of the unknown fades into the tawdry reality of a specific representation, once you see it dripping sequins. Abraham's God of Extelligence was far more compelling than a few golden

  (probably just gold leaf) idols. But when the Renaissance artists started to paint God as a bearded man in the clouds, they opened the way to doubt. The image just wasn't impressive enough. The pictures on radio are always so much better than those on TV.

  For the last few hundred years, humanity has been killing its myths. Faith and superstition have been giving way, slowly and against considerable resistance, to the critical assessment of evidence. They may, perhaps, be enjoying a bit of a revival: many rational thinkers have bemoaned the slide into cults and the weird offshoots of New Ageism ... But those are all very subdued versions of the old myths, the old beliefs; their teeth have been drawn.

  Science alone is not The Answer. Sc
ience too has its myths. We have shown you some of them, or at least what we believe to be some of them. The misuse of anthropic reasoning is a clear example, as in the case of the carbon resonance, but argued with no thought for the fudge-factor of the red giant.

  The ideal of the scientific method is often not realised. Its usual statement is an oversimplification in any case, but the basic worldview captures the essence. Think critically about what you are told. Do not accept the word of authority unthinkingly. Science is not a belief system: no belief system instructs you to question the system itself. Science does. (There are many scientists, however, who treat it as a belief system. Be wary of them.)

  The most dangerous myths and ideologies, today, are the ones that have not yet been destroyed by the rising ape. They still strut their stuff on the world's stage, causing grief and havoc -and the tragedy is that it's all to no purpose. Most of it doesn't matter. Issues like abortion do matter, to some extent; even 'pro-choice' adherents would prefer that the choice should not be necessary.

  Issues like short skirts or lengths of beards do not matter, and it's foolish and dangerous to make a big fuss about them on a planet that is bursting at the seams with an excess of people. To do so is to promote the memeplex above the good of humanity. It is the action of a barbarian mind, a mind sufficiently removed from reality that the consequences of its resident memeplex do not affect it directly. It is not the actions of the naive young men who carry the suicide bomb, or fly the airliner into a skyscraper, that are the root of the problem; it is the actions of the evil old men who lead them to behave like that, all for the sake of a few memes.

  The key memes are not religious, in this case, we suspect, even though religion is often blamed: that's mostly a smokescreen. Those old men are motivated by political memes, and the religious memeplex is merely another of their weapons. But they are also trapped in their own stories, and this is high tragedy. Granny Weatherwax would never make that mistake.

  The elves are still with us, in our heads. Shakespeare's humanity, and the critical faculties encouraged by science, are two of our weapons against them. And fight them we must.

  And to achieve that, we need to invent the right stories. The ones we've got have brought us a long way. Plenty of creatures are intelligent, but only one tells stories. That's us, Pan narrans.

  And what about Homo sapiens? Yes, we think that would be a very good idea ...

  Примечания

  1

  And in this short statement may be seen the very essence of wizardry.

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  2

  This one was apparently the result of a curse some 1,200 years ago by a dying Archchancellor, which sounded very much like 'May you always teach fretwork!'

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  3

  Lord Vetinari, the Patrician and supreme ruler of the city, took proper food labeling very seriously. Unfortunately, he sought the advice of the wizards of Unseen University on this one, and posed the question thusly: 'Can you, taking into account multi-dimensional phase space, meta-statistical anomaly and the laws of probability, guarantee that anything with absolute certainty contains no nuts at all?' After several days, they had to conclude that the answer was 'no'. Lord Vetinari refused to accept 'Probably does not contain nuts' because he considered it unhelpful.

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  4

  And you'd be in the position of the horrible Discworld 'Auditors', who are anthropomorphic representations of the rules of the universe, who in Thief of Time reduce paintings and statues to their component atoms in a fruitless search for 'beauty'.

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  5

  PET - Positron Emission Tomography, meaning that the machine picks up tiny particles emitted by the tissues of the brain and reconstructs a map of what's going on inside it.

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  6

  And many things that there aren't, such as Dark.

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  7

  It would have been an exit hole, but he didn't.

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  8

  In the simplest picture of an atom, the nucleus is a relatively small central region made from protons and neutrons. Electrons 'orbit' the nucleus at a distance. The triple-alpha process takes place in a plasma, where the atoms have been stripped of their electrons, so only their nuclei are involved. Later, as the plasma cools, the nuclei can acquire the necessary electrons.

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  9

  1 MeV is one million electron-volts. An electron-volt is a unit of energy, obviously, and for our current purposes it doesn't really matter what that unit is.

  For the record, it's the energy of an electron when its potential is raised by one volt, and is equal to 1.6 x 10-12 ergs. And the energy referred to here is the excess energy compared to the lowest energy state of the atom, its 'ground state'. What's an erg? Look it up if you really need to know.

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  10

  Not hand and glove, the fit isn't that close.

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  11

  Others found by research wizards include Objects In The Rear View Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, No User Serviceable Parts Inside and, of course May Contain Nuts.

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  12

  There's a Special Theory as well, but no one bothers with it much because it's self-evidently a load of marsh-gas. [This footnote is a footnote in the original quotation. So this is a metafootnote.]

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  13

  The bean-counters don't even know how to count beans sensibly. Are we surprised?

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  14

  A tour of any airport bookshop will show that this is reasonable.

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  15

  But Joycean scholars would be furious if we excluded Finnegan's Wake, which reads exactly like that.

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  16

  See The Science of Discworld, 'A giant leap for moonkind'.

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  17

  An extremely common and versatile substance, unfortunately not available in all universes.

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  18

  The sad histories of these hitherto unknown civilisations, along with the tale of the two-mile limpet, can be found in The Science of Discworld.

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  19

  Isn't 'Bombastus' a lovely name? Well-chosen, too.

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  20

  Headers who have not met this felicitous phrase, for reasons of youth or geography, should be told that the three Rs are Reading, Riting and Rithmetic.

  What this tells us about the educational establishment is unclear, but it could be a joke. The three Rs, not the educational establishment, that is. Though, come to think of it...

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  21

  Hidden knowledge at that time was spectacularly practical knowledge, exemplified by the Guild secrets and especially by the Freemasons. It was dressed up in ritual, because it was mostly passed on verbally and not written down.

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  22

  Carers even encourage or berate the child: 'What's the magic word? You forgot the magic word!'

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  23

  Years ago, Jack wrote a book called The Privileged Ape about just this tendency. What he wanted to call it -and should have, but the publisher got cold feet - was The Ape That Got What It Wanted. (When it gets it, of course, it no longer wants it.)

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  24

  A system of mystic beliefs based on the Jewish Kabbala.

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  25

  And new diseases, although it was quite hard to make bamboo models of these.

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  26

  The Librarian, on the other knuckly hand, held the view that humans were apes who had given up trying. They were the ones who simply couldn't cut the mustard when it came to living in harmony with their environment, maintaining a
workable social structure and, above all, sleeping while holding on.

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  27

  On his first visit to England in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi was asked 'What do y think of modern civilisation?' He is said to have replied 'That would be a good idea.'