text:
All posts tagged Darwin
On the laws by Cicero
We are born for justice and what is just is based, not on opinion, but on nature.
(De legibus, book I, section 28)
Cicero began writing the De legibus or On the laws during the same period as the De republica, i.e. the late 50s BC, but suspended work on it when he was compelled to go and be governor of Cilicia in 51 BC, and possibly never resumed it. It is certainly unfinished. We have just two books of 60-odd sections each and most of book 3 (49 sections) then the manuscript stops in mid-sentence. The 4th century AD philosopher Macrobius refers to the existence of a book 5. Maybe it was intended to have 6 books to parallel the De republica to which it is obviously a partner.
Like most of Cicero's other works it is a dialogue though, unlike the De republica, it is set in the present and, instead of historical personages, features just the author himself, his brother (Quintus Tullius Cicero) and his best friend (Titus Pomponius Atticus, addressee of so many of Cicero's letters).
De legibus has a simple premise: since he is Rome's leading lawyer and advocate, Cicero's brother and friend suggest he is perfectly placed to write a book about The Law, and so Cicero sets off with the aim of establishing the fundamental basis of law, before considering specific laws, whether they need to be amended and, if so, how. From the start Cicero describes and explicates what was essentially the Stoic theory of natural law as amounting to right reason in action.
In the introduction to the Oxford University Press edition, Jonathan Powell explains that Cicero's theory of Natural Law was based on certain premises:
that the universe is a system run by a rational providence
that mankind stands between God and the animals so that in creating and obeying laws man is employing Right Reason
that human potential can only be realised in communities – Cicero derives this from Aristotle's view that humans are sociable animals
that man is a homogeneous species – we have more in common than separates us – therefore we are susceptible to the same, one, universal natural law which stands above (or lies beneath) all 'positive' i.e. merely local and culture-specific laws
that law is based on (human) nature not opinion – individual laws may come and go but the existence of a deep fundamental law of human nature can never change
Natural Law refuted
The objections to this are obvious and start with the counter statement that the universe is very much not a system run by a rational providence. Since Isaac Newton's discoveries of the basic forces which govern the universe, there has been no need to posit a God to create and keep the universe running; and since Darwin published On The Origin of Species in 1859, there has been no need to posit a God who created the extraordinary diversity of life forms we see around us, including humanity. Many other reasons may be found for adducing the existence of a God or gods, but the regularity of the cosmos and the diversity of the natural world are not among them.
If God does not exist, didn't create the universe and does not deploy a benevolent providence to watch over us, then humans cannot occupy a middle space between the animals and this God who doesn't exist. We are more accurately seen as just another life form amid the trillions teeming all over the earth.
Cicero displays towards human beings the same kind of anthropocentric chauvinism and exceptionalism which was first recorded among his Greek predecessors and persisted through most thinking about humanity and human nature up till very recently. Only in the last couple of generations has it become clear that humans may have invented language and maths and built skyscrapers and flown to the moon but that, deep down, we are just apes, mammals, animals, and behave much like all the other mammals, in terms of our fundamental behaviours – feeding, mating and fighting.
If you have a God, then you can establish a hierarchy with him at the top, then the angels, then humans sitting comfortably above all other species on earth. If you have no God, the hierarchy crumbles and we are just one among a million different life forms jumbled together on this small planet, engaged in the never-ending battle for survival. Nowadays we know that humanity is killing off the other species, destroying countless habitats, and burning up the planet as no other species possibly could. Some people characterise our arrogant lording it over life forms as speciesism, a view I share.
If there is one quality that distinguishes human beings from all other species it is our unique capacity for destruction.
The notion that humans are governed by Right Reason has always seemed to me self evidently false. Our values are inculcated by the society we grow up in. If some values are almost universal across most of these societies this is because they make evolutionary sense, they help the group survive, rather than being a Universal Law handed down by a Benevolent God.
Therefore premises 1, 2, 4 and 5 listed above are false. We are left with 3, the notion that humans naturally live in groups or communities, which seems to be objectively true, but gives us no guide on how we should conduct ourselves, or establish laws or rules for running these communities.
Lastly, the introductions to all these texts by Cicero tend to talk about Universal values, Universal laws, and Universal human nature very freely but I can't help feeling they only apply to the Western world. The terms of reference seem very Eurocentric or Anglocentric or whatever the word is for Western-centric. Meaning that my reading about African tribes, cultures, laws and traditions, or what I know about Chinese history, and my personal experience of travelling in the Muslim world, suggest that there are many non-Western cultures which don't share these ways of looking at the world at all. I'm guessing the same could be said about Indian culture, or the traditions of the native Americans of North or South America, the Australian aborigenes and any number of other cultures.
Liberals may be proud of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the recently founded United Nations, founded by the soon-to-be-victorious Allies during the Second World War, based in New York, a document drafted by a committee chaired by the American president's wife (Eleanor Roosevelt) – but the idea of universal set of values is not a fact about human beings but a high-minded aspiration.
I recently visited the British Museum exhibition on Stonehenge. This has a section describing life in Britain before the advent of the (first) agricultural revolution, which began in the Middle East 12,000 years ago. The human population of Britain was minuscule (maybe 5,000) arranged into tiny communities of hunter gatherers who lived deep amid nature as they found her, without the knowledge, means or incentive to change anything, to fell trees, clear land, burn forests and so on. Instead they considered themselves an integral part of nature, not set aside from it. They killed rarely and atoned for their killings with offerings. And the exhibition says this was the way of life for most hunter-gatherer societies for most of human history i.e. going back hundreds of thousands of years, back through all the various species of the genus Homo.
So I'm saying that Cicero's premises are not only wrong in the theoretical/theological way that they posit the existence of One Universal God to explain the world around us, an explanation which has been utterly superseded by the scientific worldview – but wrong in all his factual claims about human nature, above all that it is universally the same, whereas we now know that there have been, and currently are, many, many, many more human cultures than Cicero could ever imagine.
The Romans thought the world amounted to one continent completely surrounded by a vast Ocean, punctuated by the middle-earth or Mediterranean Sea. They hugely underestimated the size of Africa, and thought the world ended with India and a little beyond the Ural mountains, so forming one circular continent. The historical examples Cicero bases his notion of a universal human nature on amount to a tiny sub-set of the actually existing cultures of his own time, and a minuscule sub-set of all the human cultures and societies which have existed over the face of the earth for the past several hundred thousand years.
So: this book is clever and interesting in all kinds of ways but it is based on multiple types of ignorance – deep, deep ignorance – which lead to false premises and wrong deductions on every page.
Cicero's motivation
As we saw in De republica Cicero was a very practical-minded Roman. He wasn't interested in airy-fairy philosophical speculations for their own sake. He was a staunch Roman patriot who wanted to preserve the Roman state. The practicalness of his motivation is stated explicitly mid-way through book one:
You see the direction which this discussion is taking. My whole thesis aims to bring stability to states, steadiness to cities, and well-being to communities. (I, 37)
He is not seeking 'the truth', so much as cherry-picking arguments from the range of Greek philosophy in order to shore up his practical and patriotic aim.
Book one
Cicero asserts that:
human beings are blessed with the ultimate gift of the gods, Reason
humans have a single way of living with one another which is universal
all people in a community are held together by natural goodwill and kindness (I, 35)
As you can see, all these axioms are wrong and he goes on to deliver a slew of equally high-minded, fine-sounding sentiments which are equally false:
Law is the highest reason, inherent in nature, which enjoins what ought to be done and forbids the opposite. (I, 18)
Law is a force of nature, the intelligence and reason of a wise man, and the criterion of truth and injustice. (I, 19)
The creature of foresight, wisdom, variety, keenness, memory, endowed with reason and judgement, which we call man, was created by the supreme god to enjoy a remarkable status. Of all the types and species of living creatures he is the only one that participates in reason and reflection whereas none of the others do…Since there is nothing better than reason, and reason is present in both man and God, there is a primordial partnership between man and God. (I, 22-23)
No, humans were not created by God but evolved through natural processes. We now know that numerous other species certainly have memory, and many appear capable of thought and calculation. Who says there is nothing better than reason? A philosopher whose central subject is reason, which is like a carpenter saying there's nothing better in the world than working with wood. Why is there nothing better in the world than reason. How about, say, love?
Since there is no God, the statement 'since reason is present in both man and God, there is a primordial partnership between man and God' is meaningless. Or more accurately, it has a meaning, but a meaning made out of words, in the same way that a poem about blue guitars floating up to the moon makes sense, but refers to nothing in the real world. On it goes:
Those who share reason also share right reason; and since that is law, we men must also be thought of as partners with the gods in law. (I, 23)
Those who obey the same laws effectively live in the same state and:
and they do in fact obey this celestial system, the divine mind, and the all-powerful god. Hence this whole universe must be thought of as a single community shared by gods and men. (I, 23)
In the course of the continuous circuits and revolutions of the heavens the right moment arrived for sowing the human race; that after being scattered and sown in the earth it was further endowed with the divine gift of mind; that whereas men derived the other elements in their makeup from their mortal nature…their mind was implanted in them by God. Hence we have…a lineage, origin or stock in common with gods…As a result man recognises God in as much as he recognises his place of origin…the same moral excellence in man and in God. (I, 24-25)
Cicero's belief in God or gods isn't tangential to his thought: his theism is absolutely central and vital to his entire view of human nature, reason, ethics, law and justice. And so, since there is no God, Cicero's views on human nature, reason, ethics, law and justice are wrong from top to bottom. They may occasionally coincide with modern views based on humanistic atheism but these are accidental overlaps.
What makes this relatively short book (72 pages) so hard to read is that I disagreed with all his premises and almost all his conclusions. As a discussion of the theoretical basis of law and justice I found it useless. It has a sort of historical usefulness in shedding a very clear light on how a leading Roman lawyer conceived his profession and clearly explaining the kind of arguments about jurisprudence which were common in his day. And it includes references to Greek and Roman history which are anecdotally interesting. But every time he makes a general statement I find myself totally disagreeing and this eventually becomes very wearing:
Nature has lavished such a wealth of things on men for their use and convenience that every growing thing seems to have been given to us on purpose; it does not come into existence by chance. (I, 26)
Wrong: the life forms we see around us evolved by the process explained by Darwin, of which Cicero knows nothing; none of them were created 'for our convenience', instead food crops and livestock only began to be bred and fine-tuned for our use during the agricultural revolution which began some 10,000 years before Cicero's time, of which he knew and understood nothing.
And the world does not exist 'for our convenience': it is precisely this self-centred sense of human privilege and entitlement which is very obviously destroying the earth in our own time.
God has created and equipped man in this way, intending him to take precedence over everything else. (I, 27)
Anthropocentrism. Narcissism*. Human chauvinism. Arrogance.
Nature made man alone erect, encouraging him to gaze at the heavens as being akin to him and his original home. (I, 27)
Sweet, poetic and false.
Cicero goes on to make the humanistic claim that people have more in common than separates them, we are all one human family. He is not stating this because he'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony but because he wants to continue his thought that there is One God who has created one human race with One Reason and so it follows that there must be One Law to rule them all. Hence his insistence that there is One Human Nature. He claims that Reason:
may vary in what it teaches but is constant in its ability to learn
that what we perceive through the senses, we all perceive alike
that perceptions which impinge on our minds do so on all minds in the same way
that human speech may use different words but expresses the same ideas
troubles and joys, desires and fears haunt the minds of all alike
He is trying to corral human nature into his One God, One Reason, One Human Nature therefore One Law argument, but each of those four statements is questionable or wrong, starting with the notion that everyone is alike in the ability to learn and ending with the notion that we all experience the same emotions. Demonstrably false.
This is the evidence, in reality just wishes and assertions, which leads him to conclude that there is One Justice and that it derives from Nature (I, 33). Again and again he repeats the same formulas:
There is one, single, justice. It binds together human society and has been established by one, single law. That law is right reason in commanding and forbidding. (I, 42)
We are inclined by nature to have a regard for others and that is the basis of justice. (I, 43)
But repeating false claims doesn't make them true.
Nature has created perceptions that we have in common, and has sketched them in such a way that we classify honourable things as virtues and dishonourable things as vices. (I, 44)
And yet Cicero saw Scipio Africanus, the general who oversaw the complete destruction of Carthage and the selling of its entire population of 50,000 into slavery as an epitome of virtue and honour and glory. Is that a perception we all have in common? Probably not the population of Carthage.
Moral excellence is reason fully developed and that is certainly grounded in nature. (I, 45)
Goodness itself is good not because of people's opinions but because of nature. (I, 46)
Here and in many other similar formulations you can see that what he is arguing against is the notion that goodness and morality and law are contingent upon human societies. If this is true then, for a patriotic, socially-minded conservative like Cicero, what follows is anarchy. (It is the same fear of anarchy which underpins his conservative preference to keep on worshipping the gods according to the traditional ceremonies, as expressed in De rerum deorum.)
For more pragmatic, sceptical and utilitarian-minded people like myself, what follows is not anarchy, but is certainly a complex and never-ending process of trying to create culture, morality and laws which allow for diversity and strike a balance between conflicting opinions, classes and needs. The unending messiness of democracy, in other words.
Book one is essentially in two parts: up to section 40-something he is laying down these basic principles, and then gets his brother and best friend to enthusiastically vouch that he has certainly proved them, that men were endowed with reason by the gods, men live with one another in the same way everywhere, and that all human communities are held together by the same universal justice (I, 35).
All good men love what is fair in itself and what is right in itself. (I, 48)
In the second half he introduces, or wanders off to consider, notions of the good and morality. Sometimes, reading Cicero, it feels like you can see the joins, the places where he moved from copying one Greek text to suddenly copying from another. The order is his but much of the source content is cribbed from Greek originals (as he freely admits in his letters and in the texts themselves) with the result that his works rarely feel like they have a steady clear direction of travel, but more like a collection of related topics thrown loosely together. And this partly explains why his so-called conclusions rarely feel really justified by what has preceded them.
The conclusion is obvious from what has been said, namely that one should strive after justice and every moral virtue for their own sake. (I, 48)
Therefore what is right should be sought and cultivated for itself. (I, 48)
The t-shirt slogans keep on coming:
Justice looks for no prize; it is sought for itself and is at once the cause and meaning of all virtues. (I, 48)
This reminds me of St Paul's letter to the Corinthians:
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude… (1 Corinthians 13:4)
And the comparison confirms my sense that Cicero's writings are less philosophy than wisdom literature, defined as: "statements by sages and the wise that offer teachings about divinity and virtue."
A fundamental mistake he makes is common to dogmatists of his type, namely the false dilemma or false dichotomy, "an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available." For, Cicero argues, if his account of One God endowing One Human Race with One Right Reason so that Justice and Virtue arise out of Nature is wrong – then the only alternative is chaos. For if people only act in their own self-interest, not according to Universal Justice, then:
where is a generous person to be found…what becomes of gratitude…where is that holy thing, friendship…what are we to say of restraint, temperance, and self-control? What od modesty, decency and chastity?… then there is no such thing as justice at all. (I, 49-50)
But this is a false dichotomy. There aren't just two stark alternatives. There are, in reality, a huge variety of societies, laws, customs and traditions. Yes it may look like anarchy to a conservative like Cicero. But it is how human beings actually live. The false dichotomy is a way for an author to terrorise you into accepting his tendentious view.
Cicero is not seeking 'the truth'; he is, like the excellent lawyer he was, making a case and using every rhetorical and logical sleight of hand to do so.
Quintus asks where all this is going (I, 52) and Marcus replies that he is steering the discussion towards a definition of the Highest Good. Oh God, how boring. As with all these conservative/authoritarian thinkers, there can only be one of everything, One God, One Human Nature, One Reason, One Justice, One State and One Good.
As usual he a) approaches the problem through a blizzard of references to Greek philosophers including Phaedrus, the Academy, Zeno, the Old Academy, Antiochus, Chios, Aristotle, Plato and b) fails to reach any meaningful conclusion. Whereas the Old Academy called what is honourable the highest good, Zeno said it was the only good, holding the same beliefs as Aristotle but using different terms. (I, 55).
Quintus suggests that:
There is no doubt about it: the highest good is either to live according to nature (i.e. to enjoy a life of moderation governed by moral excellence) or to follow nature and to live, so to speak, by the law (i.e. as far as possible to omit nothing in order to achieve what nature requires, which means the same as this: to live, as it were, by a code of moral excellence). (I, 56)
Great. Does that help anyone? No. Words, words, words. But when Quintus asks him to show what all this means in practice, Cicero at first pleads that it is beyond his powers. What isn't beyond his powers is more highfalutin' truisms:
Wisdom is the mother of all good things; the love of her gives us the word 'philosophy' from the Greek. Of all the gifts which the immortal gods have bestowed on human life none is richer or more abundant or more desirable. (I, 58)
Cicero deflects to invoke the famous maxim carved above the oracle at Delphi, Know thyself:
The person who knows himself will first of all realise that he possesses something divine, and he will compare his own inner nature to a kind of holy image placed within a temple. (I, 59)
Will he? The book concludes with a half page hymn of praise to the Truly Great Man Who Knows Himself, understands his mind is a gift from God, understands Wisdom and Virtue and Justice, and so is ideally placed to rule over his fellow men. In other words, the ideal Roman ruler of Cicero's own time.
Book two
As a break, the characters describe the fictional walk they are taking through the countryside of around the Cicero family estate outside Cicero's home town of Arpinum, 100 kilometres south east of Rome. Pleasant chat about the view ('What could be more delightful?') is artfully placed in order to lead on to consideration of love of birthplace and country. Never forget that Cicero was a fierce Roman patriot. A person's birthplace:
is the country for which we should be willing to die, to which we should devote ourselves heart and soul, and on whose altar we should dedicate and consecrate all that is our. (II, 5)
All that is ours. Cicero is usually referred to as a lovely humanist but this is as fierce and total a patriotism as Mussolini's. And then we return to consideration of the law and Cicero recapitulates his axioms for the umpteenth time:
Law was not thought up by the intelligence of human beings, nor is it some kind of resolution passed by communities, but rather an eternal force which rules the world by the wisdom of its commands and prohibitions…the original and final law is the intelligence of God, who ordains or forbids everything through reason. Hence that law which the gods have given to the human race is rightly praised, for it represents the intelligence of a wise man directed to issuing commands and prohibitions. (II, 8)
I think I disagree with pretty much every word of this. On it goes: the power of encouraging people to right actions:
is not only older than the existence of communities and states; it is coeval with that god who watches over and rules heaven and earth. (II, 10)
If in doubt, repeat it again and again, bludgeoning your readers into submission:
Reason existed, reason derived from the nature of the universe, impelling people to right actions and restraining them from wrong. That reason did not first become law even it was written down, but rather when it came into being. And it came into being at the same time as the divine mind. Therefore the authentic original law, whose function is to command and forbid, is the right reason of Jupiter, Lord of all. (II, 10)
Mind you, in a note to page 162 Jonathan Powell points out that repeating ideas in different formulations in order to drive it home was a skill that was taught and practiced in the schools of rhetoric which Cicero attended.
The use value of religion
I mentioned above how the conservative Cicero thought religion should be kept up in order to maintain social structure, for its use value. In book two he makes this explicit:
Who would deny that these [religious] ideas are useful, bearing in mind how many contracts are strengthened by the swearing of oaths, how valuable religious scruples are for guaranteeing treaties, how many people are restrained from crime for fear of divine retribution…(II, 16)
One of the reasons Cicero despises and mocks Epicureans is because they sought to free people's minds from fear of the gods. For Cicero (as for the ancient Jews) piety and morality begin with fear of the gods. This is very Roman, very practical-minded of Cicero. And explains why the population has to be brainwashed into believing in the gods:
Citizens should first of all be convinced of this, that the gods are lords and masters of everything; that what is done is done by their decision and authority; that they are, moreover, great benefactors of mankind and observe what kind of person everyone is…Minds imbued with these facts will surely not deviate from true and wholesome ideas. (II, 15)
I don't need to point out how coercive and authoritarian this idea is. The gods are Big Brother, watching you, reading your thoughts, checking up that you obey Right Reason, as defined by Cicero and his class.
That said, Cicero's attitude really only reflected the attitudes of most educated men of his time. They didn't believe in their religion in the same way a Christian or Muslim believes in their God. Roman religion was, as Jonathan Powell puts it, by this period a matter almost entirely of public ritual, tradition and custom. Religious belief, in the post-Christian sense of the word, wasn't required or checked. Obedience to custom and ritual, reverence for tradition, was all.
Cicero's ideal laws concerning religion
All of which explains why, when he comes to actually enumerate the laws in his ideal state, Cicero does so with Laws Governing Religion. Anti-climactically, these turn out to be pretty much the same laws as govern Rome. Just as De republica concluded that the Roman constitution was the best imaginable constitution (a conclusion he repeatedly refers to here e.g. II, 23), so De legibus, when push comes to shove, concludes that the best possible laws the human mind could devise are…exactly the same as the laws of ancient Rome (II, 23).
The rest of the book is divided into two parts: a relatively considered statement of Cicero's ideal laws concerning religion (sections 18 to 22) followed by a detailed commentary on each of them (sections 23 to 60). There follow pages and pages of detailed prescriptions about religious rites and rituals, an extraordinary level of detailed specification. There's a short digression about the proper regulation of music to stop it becoming immoral and corrupting which made me think of Mary Whitehouse and demonstrates Cicero's cultural conservatism, before we plunge back into thickets of religious law.
The contrast between the high minded rhetoric about the One God and Universal Human Nature and Divine Law in book one and the slavish iteration of Roman rules and regulations as the actual embodiment of this supposedly Universal Law is unintentionally comic. Bathos = "an effect of anti-climax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous."
The place of burial is not called a grave until the rites have been conducted and the pig has been slain. (II, 57)
Do not smooth the pure with a trowel. (II, 59)
Women shall not scratch their cheeks on the occasion of a funeral. (II, 64)
It is forbidden to decorate a tomb with stucco work. (II, 65)
Do these sound like the Universal Laws indicative of the Divine Mind which Cicero has been banging on about…or the customs and conventions accumulated by one particular little city state?
Once this lengthy and hyper-detailed account of Rome's religious laws is finished, Cicero announces that the next most important element in the structure of the state is magistrates and that he will devote the next book to considering the ideal magistrate.
Cicero bases his thoughts about magistrates, like his thoughts about everything else, on God:
Nothing is so closely bound up with the decrees and terms of nature…as authority. Without that, no house or clan or state can survive – no nor the human race, nor the whole of nature, nor the very universe itself. For the universe obeys God; land and sea abide by the laws of the universe; and human life is subject to the commands of the supreme law. (III, 3)
As with book two, he gives a clipped concise statement of his ideal laws governing magistracies or public offices (sections 6 to 11, 3 pages) then a detailed commentary on them (sections 12 to 47, 14 pages).
And yet again he repeats that, since his 'six previous books' (i.e the De republica) 'proved' that the Roman constitution was the best one conceivable by the human mind, so, logically enough, the kind of Ideal Magistrate he intends to describe will also turn out to be…Roman ones!
And so indeed, it turns out, after consulting the Divine Mind, that the optimum state will feature quaestors, aediles, praetors, consuls and censors, a senate to propose laws and popular assemblies to vote on them – exactly like the Roman state! He has the good grace to have his characters admit that this is a little embarrassing:
QUINTUS: How succinctly, Marcus, you have drawn up a scheme of all the magistrates for our inspection! But they are almost identical with those of our own country, even if you have introduced a little novelty.
MARCUS: Yes, we are talking about the harmoniously mixed constitution which Scipio praised in those books and prefers to all others…and since our constitution was given the most sensible and well-adjusted form by our ancestors, I found little or nothing to change in the laws. (III, 12)
The latter part of book three goes into considerable details about all aspects of the Roman constitution, the peculiarities of the different magistracies, the age limits, the pros and cons of the tribunate, the different types of voting (by acclamation, writing down, secret ballot) and so on. This is quite interesting because it is, arguably, the most practical part of the book, describing Rome's actual constitutional practices and debating points Cicero (or his more conservative brother, Quintus) would like to change, a bit, not too much.
Worth emphasising that the aim of all the tinkering round the edges which Cicero proposes is to ensure that power remains firmly in the hands of the aristocracy and out of the hands of the people at large.
Liberty will exist in the sense that the people are given the opportunity to do the aristocracy an honourable favour.
Thanks to my [proposed] law, the appearance of liberty is given to the people [and] the authority of the aristocracy is retained. (III, 39)
The end was nigh
This final section has a wistfully hypothetical air about it because, within a few short years the entire world it describes would be swept away.
Let us imagine that Cicero was half way through writing the book when, in 51 BC, he was called on to take up the governorship of Cilicia (the southern coast of modern Turkey) and served throughout the year 50.
This meant that he was out of Rome as the political confrontation between Caesar and the Senate came to a head. there was a flurry of proposals and counter proposals in December 50, all of which failed and prompted Caesar, in January 49, to cross with his army from Cisalpine Gaul where he held an official post, into mainland Italy, where he didn't, thus breaking the law, making himself an outlaw, and sparking the five year civil war between himself and Pompey and his followers.
When peace was restored in 45 BC, Caesar had himself declared dictator for life thus turning the entire Roman constitution into a hollow shell and rendering On the laws, with their pages of pedantic footling about precise constitutional arrangements, redundant overnight. It became overnight a record of a specific historical moment, which was eclipsed before the book could even be completed.
Cicero is frequently held up as the godfather of humanism. Finding, translating and commenting on his books was a central element in the Renaissance, which saw the creation of modern ideas of humanism. ("Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance." Lumen).
However, as my close readings of De rerum deorum, De republica and De legibus amply demonstrate, Cicero's 'humanism' is crucially, vitally, centrally based on his theism, his belief in One God who created human beings and implanted in them fragments of the Divine Reason which underpin all our values, morality, law, justice and statecraft.
Thus, in a nutshell: humanism derives from religious belief. Without its religious underpinning, humanism is nothing. It becomes a wish, a hope, a dream, with no factual or logical basis. I don't say this to undermine humanistic values. I am probably a humanistic progressive liberal myself. Where I appear to differ from most of my tribe is I don't believe these truths to be self evident. There are other ways of being human, other cultures, other values completely different from ours, probably the majority of human lives have very much not been lived according to these values. Several points follow:
1. We do not have the right to compel these other cultures into adherence to our values. That is no different from Victorian missionaries trying to convert tribes in Africa or Asia or Australia to their narrow Christian culture.
2. If we want to defend our values effectively against those who threaten them, for example Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, we must base them on really secure foundations, not wishes or aspirations. Far stronger foundations than Cicero, who wrote all these fancy words only to have his head cut off by Mark Antony's bounty hunters. The sword is mightier than the pen.
* Cicero's self promotion
It's further evidence of Cicero's self-centred narcissism that in several places in book 3 he manages to shoehorn into the text the famous events of 63 BC, when he was consul and saved the state from the Cataline conspiracy. He gives a melodramatic account of the tremendous dangers he faced and how he single-handedly overcame them (III, 26) and then has Atticus fulsomely thank him for his efforts.
To be sure, the whole order is behind you and cherishes most happy memories of your consulship. (III, 29)
Cicero also takes the opportunity to remind everyone that he should never have been exiled (in 57 BC) and that's why it needed no legislation to rescind his exile (III, 47). In other words, no matter what Cicero is writing about, the text has a strong tendency to end up being about himself.
There is something irredeemably comic about Cicero, like Oliver Hardy pretending to be Napoleon. It's this hyper-intelligent, super articulate yet comical earnestness which has endeared him to 2,000 years of readers.
Niall Rudd's translation
A word of praise for this Oxford University Press edition. I described, probably at too much length, how strongly I disliked the prose styles and odd attitudes of A.J. Woodman, who translated Sallust, and Carolyn Hammond, who translated Caesar's Gallic War, both for OUP. This edition restored my faith in OUP editions of the classics.
The introduction, mostly written by Jonathan Powell, is a model of lucidity, useful and to the point, as are the scholarly and interesting notes. There is a useful list of names and an appendix giving a handy summary of the sometimes confusing Roman constitution.
The translation itself is by Professor Niall Rudd (1927 to 2015) and was first published in 1998. It is clear and unaffected – you feel you are engaging directly with the text. I cannot judge its fidelity to the source Latin, but it makes for a lucid, engaging read, as I hope you can tell from the many quotations I take from it. All round, it is a gold standard edition.
The Republic and The Laws by Cicero translated by Niall Rudd with introduction and notes by Jonathan Powell and Niall Rudd was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. All references are to the 2008 paperback edition.
De legibus online
Posted in Ancient history, Politics, Translation
Tagged A.J Woodman, aedile, Africa, agricultural revolution, Ancient history, ancient Rome, ancient world, anthropocentricism, anthropocentrism, Antiochus, Aristotle, Arpinum, atheism, Atticus, authority, Britain, British Museum, Caesar's Gallic War, Carolyn Hammond, Carthage, Cataline conspiracy, censor, Chios, Christianity, Cicero, Cicero's letters, Cilicia, civil war, conservatism, consul, Darwin, De legibus, De republica, De rerum deorum, Delphic oracle, dialogue, divine mind, Eleanor Roosevelt, Epicureans, false dichotomy, false dilemma, Gnaeus Pompeius, God, Greek philosophy, human exceptionalism, humanism, Isaac Newton, Islam, Jonathan Powell, Julius Caesar, Jupiter, justice, Know thyself, Law, legal theory, letter to the Corinthians, Macrobius, magistrate, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Mark Antony, Mediterranean Sea, Middle East, Moral excellence, Mussolini, natural law, Nature, Niall Rudd, Oliver Hardy, On the laws, On the Origin of Species, Oxford University Press, Petrarch, Phaedrus, Plato, Pompey, praetor, Providence, quaestor, Quintus Tullius Cicero, Reason, republicanism, Right Reason, River Rubicon, Roman history, Sallust, Scipio Africanus, Second World War, Senate, speciesism, St Paul, Stoicism, Stonehenge, the academy, the Old Academy, the Renaissance, theism, Theology, theory of Natural Law, Titus Pomponius Atticus, United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, universal Law, Vladimir Putin, wisdom literature, Xi Jinping, Zeno
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/06/29/on-the-laws-cicero/
On the nature of the gods by Cicero – 3
Rarely have I read so many wrong-headed, misleading and bad arguments collected together in one place as in Cicero's book, On the nature of the gods. The overall impression is to make you think 'philosophy' is a cover-all term for playground squabbling rather than an activity for adults. At one point Cotta says that the task of philosophy is to clear away bad thinking and error in order to get to 'the truth' but this text demonstrates the exact opposite. It is like stirring up a pond with a stick till you have completely muddied and confused the waters.
The handful of axioms which all the characters base all their arguments on are null and void.
Argument from consensus
All the protagonists claim that gods must exist because all human beings have an innate sense of gods or a God. Well a) no they don't and b), even if they did, mjust because everyone believes something (for example, witches must be burned) doesn't make it true or socially useful. Fail.
Argument from design
The Argument from Design is invoked repeatedly throughout the book (on pages 129 159, 160 to 164, 167, 170, 172 and many more). Velleius, Balbus and Cotta all look up at the regular movements of the stars, are impressed by tides of the oceans, or admire the beauty of all manner of animals – and proclaim that all this order and pattern must prove the existence of a rational designer and, in the Stoics' case, an ongoing divine and rational providence moving all things in order and harmony.
Unfortunately, the Argument from Design was destroyed in its abstract philosophical form by David Hume in the 1770s and in its application to all living things, by Charles Darwin in the 1850s. So instead of being impressed and converted by its frequent repetition, I became more vexed and irritated.
Relying on the Argument from Design is as false as the way all the characters in the text assume that the earth is at the centre of the solar system and the sun revolves around it (p.165) which proves that the earth is the centre of the universe, and that human beings are the centre of the earth, and therefore that we must share our nature with the Master Creator.
All of these arguments are aspects of mankind's incorrigible anthropoventrism and inescapable narcissism, and all of them are null and void.
'The providence of God' (p.175) is simply a phrase people like Cicero's characters and many millions of others for well over 2,000 years have used to describe the laws of astronomy, geography and biology which they observe in action but which were completely ignorant of.
The reality that we, in the West at any rate, currently inhabit is that:
the structure, patterns, rules and laws governing the universe, galaxy, solar system and so on are all adequately explained by modern cosmology
the structure, pattern, rules and laws governing the non-organic aspect of the earth are explained by geology and geography
the structure, pattern, rules and laws governing all organic life forms are explained by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, as immeasurably deepened by the discovery of DNA in the 1950s and the rise of supercomputing power in the last few decades
Nobody who wants to know 'the truth' about these matters needs to read this book which, rather than any kind of guide to any kind of 'truth' should be regarded as a cabinet of curiosities. Educate yourself about the facts of life. Literally.
Too binary thinking
The fundamental mistake all Cicero's characters make is to adopt a binary opposition between chance and design. What astronomy and biology have taught us is, to put it simply, that it's a lot more complicated than that. The universe we see and inhabit is not the product of completely random 'chance' in the simple-minded sense; it is the product of a huge array of rules which govern matter of all kinds, at a host of levels, under all kinds of situations, many of which we still don't understand (quantum physics).
But the existence of these complex rules doesn't require a designer or intelligence or maker or divine providence to have made them. They just are the rules under which matter operates. That two atoms of hydrogen bond to one of oxygen to make water doesn't require a divine intelligence to make happen. It is a property of certain chemicals. The periodic table of elements crystallises out as the universe cools after the Big Bang. Chemical elements behave in certain ways according to their valencies and electrochemical characteristics.
The same goes for other 'concepts' the ancients throw around like pieces of Lego, such as 'free will' and 'providence'. Nobody knows what is going to happen in the future, but most of us can be pretty sure the basic rules of physics and chemistry and biology will continue to apply. It doesn't require a God to underpin every moment of every atom and cell in the universe at all moments. The rule of physics and chemistry and biology suffice.
One David Attenborough documentary contains more factual information than all the 'wisdom' of the ancients.
Atheism as a minority belief
It is clear that the majority of people around the world are still religious, some very much so – fundamentalists in the US, Catholics in Latin America, evangelicals in Africa, the world's 1.8 billion Muslims and 1.2 billion Hindus. Easily the majority of humans currently alive believe in some kind of god.
So the arguments I put forward, above, only apply to a minority of the world's population, mostly in the western, post-industrial societies. Still, in 'my' minority culture of white western atheists, our worldview is determined by Newton and Einstein, Darwin, Watson and Crick and tens of thousands of astronomers and biologists since.
Although I personally believe all forms of theism are factually incorrect, I have no great beef about them and am not driven to waste vast amounts of energy trying to disprove them à la Richard Dawkins. Why? Because people quite obviously need them. The lives of human beings are short and scary. We all die in various forms of pain or fear. We see all around us evidence of a vast universe which doesn't give a damn whether we live or die, are blissfully happy or existing in misery and pain. Therefore it makes psychological sense for many many people to have space in their minds for powers or spirits or gods or a God who they can imagine protecting them and looking after them and their families.
Even for people who are doing well in life, it makes psychological sense to be aware that life is fragile, fortune is fickle and it might all come crashing down at any moment. Therefore it makes sense to give thanks to someone, to something, to nature or god, to something outside yourself, for the blessings you are conscious of enjoying.
As Freud said in one of his letters, he was painfully aware that he couldn't give most of his patients what they were, at bottom, all searching for: consolation. Religion can.
Narrow atheism à la Richard Dawkins may be factually correct but Dawkins's obvious failing is to be completely oblivious to human psychology, which is why he comes over as an inflexible robot and makes so few converts, while managing to antagonise religious believers of all flavours.
The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins (1986)
River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins (1995)
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins (1998)
When your child is born or your parent dies, when you are anxious about your health or stressed about work or where the next meal is going to come from – then we all need psychological strategies to help us cope. And thousands of years of cultural evolution mean that the world's religions have accumulated huge numbers of psychological strategies, along with rites and rituals and ceremonies and beliefs for coping and making sense of life and the thousand ills we are prey to.
So my view is that anything which helps people to get through life and make sense of it is to be respected. The fact that we can prove that this or that aspect of it is factually wrong (wrong like the Christian evangelicals who reject Darwin or fossils) is missing the point. Most of us aren't coolly analytical logic machines to begin with. Most of us need help. Humans are, after all, wildly irrational.
In a thousand shapes and forms religions provide a conceptual structure and cultural traditions and psychological aids which help billions of people cope and make sense of and endure and even enjoy life. It would be pointless, and narrow minded, of me to quibble with that.
This books was interesting in shedding light on Cicero's broad knowledge, his ambitions to bring Greek philosophy to the Latin world, and so helping me understand his importance not only in his own time but as a preserver or conduit of ancient learning through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. But as an examination of the actual subject it purports to tackle, it felt to me almost completely worthless.
De natura deorum online
by Simon on May 20, 2022 • Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Philosophy, Theology
Tagged Amos Tversky, anthropocentrism, argument from design, atheism, Balbus, Big Bang, Catholicism, Charles Darwin, Cicero, consolation, Cosmology, Cotta, Daniel Kahneman, Darwin, David Attenborough, David Hume, DNA, Einstein, free will, Freud, Hinduism, Islam, Marcus Tullius Cicero, narcissism, Newton, On the Nature of the Gods, Philosophy, philosophy of religion, Providence, religion, River Out of Eden, Stoicism, Stuart Sutherland, The Blind Watchmaker, Theology, Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, Unweaving the Rainbow, Velleius, Watson and Crick
Posted by Simon on May 20, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/05/20/on-the-nature-of-the-gods-cicero-3/
Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. That is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn.
(River out of Eden, page 112)
Three things become clear early in this book:
1. Dawkins is very argumentative He can barely state a fact or idea without immediately imagining a scientific illiterate misunderstanding it, or a creationist arguing against it, or the tradition of thinkers who've adopted a contrary position, and then – whooosh! – he's off on one of his long-winded digressions devising metaphors and analogies and thought experiments ('imagine 20 million typists sitting in a row…') devoted to demolishing these opponents and their silly beliefs.
The neutral reader sits back, puzzled as to why Dawkins feels such a continual necessity to find enemies and argue against them, constantly and endlessly, instead of just stating the facts about the natural world in a lucid, calm way and letting them speak for themselves.
2. Dawkins is not a mathematician as he points out quite a few times in The Blind Watchmaker. As I read him saying this for the third or fourth time, it dawned on me that this means Dawkins rarely if ever makes his points with numbers – through data or statistics, tables and graphs and diagrams, as a true scientist might. Instead, deprived of numbers (of course he does use numbers, but very sparingly), Dawkins makes his case through persuasion and rhetoric. He is a rhetorician – the dictionary definition being someone who:
exploits figures of speech and other compositional techniques to have a persuasive or impressive effect
Consider the titles of the clutch of mid-career books which I'm rereading: The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving The Rainbow. They are all named for metaphors or analogies for the big Darwinian idea he is so anxious to explicate and defend, and they are themselves made up of chapters which are made up of sections and passages which rely far more on metaphor and analogy and stories and anecdotes than they do on hard data and scientific facts.
3. Dawkins is good at it The four book titles quoted above are all vivid and powerful metaphors for evolution and its implications. The master metaphor which dominates River Out of Eden – that all life on earth amounts to a river of DNA flowing from simple beginnings and then splitting over a billion years or more into thousands and then millions of tributaries, one for each of the species now alive – is a powerful explanatory tool, and leads you on into a series of other analogies and metaphors.
I was amused by the number of times Dawkins mentions or quotes other people – creationists, fellow academics or other biologists – solely to show how their approach or interpretation of Darwinism, biology or anything else is wrong wrong wrong!
He doesn't hold back. He isn't subtle or circumspect. He often puts exclamation marks at the end to emphasise just how wrong wrong wrong they are! before proceeding to demolish them one by one! It's like watching a confident man at a coconut shy throwing the wooden balls and knocking each coconut off, one… by… one. Here's a selection of his targets:
– Lamarckism or the belief that characteristics organisms acquire during their lives are passed on to their children – 'Wrong, utterly wrong! (p.3)
– It's tempting to think of the original branches between what would later turn out to be distinct families or orders of animals as consisting at the time of the first breach 'mighty Mississippis rivers' – 'But this image is deeply wrong' (p.10)
– Zoologists are tempted to think of the divide between what later became major groups as a momentous event. But they are 'misled' (p.11)
– One zoologist has suggested that the entire process of evolution during the Cambrian period, when so many new species came into existence, must have been a different process from what it is now. 'The fallacy is glaring!' (p.12)
– The digital revolution at the core of the new biology has dealt 'a killer blow to vitalism, the incorrect belief that living matter is deeply distinct from nonliving material' (p.20).
– 'There is a fashionable salon philosophy called cultural relativism which holds… that science has no more claim to truth than tribal myth'. It is, of course, wrong, which he goes on to prove with the fact that tribal myth can't build the airplanes which fly you to conferences where you can present papers about cultural relativism.
– He once asked a student how far back you'd have to go to find ancestors that Dawkins and the student shared. She replied back to the apes. 'An excusable intuitive leap, but it is approximately 10,000 percent wrong.'
– Some creationists insist on misinterpreting the scientific concept of Mitochondrial Eve and claim, from the sound of it, that she's identical with the Biblical Eve! 'This is a complete misunderstanding.' (p.62)
The trouble with Dawkins's arguments
There are several practical problems with Dawkins's relentless argufying.
One is that, because Dawkin is arguing all the time with someone or other, if you put down the book then pick it up later, it's often difficult to remember the precise Wrong Interpretation of evolution he was in the middle of raging against i.e. to recall the context of whatever scientific information he happens to be presenting.
Making it worse is the way Dawkins often breaks down the argument he's tackling into sub-arguments, and especially the way he breaks his own counter-arguments down into sub-counter-arguments. And then he'll say, 'I've just got to explain a few basic concepts…' or 'Before I reply to the main thrust of that argument, let me make a small digression…' leading you steadily away from whatever point you think he was trying to make.
And if the digression takes the form of an analogy, yjrm quite quickly you can be three of four 'levels' removed from the initial proposition he's arguing against. You find yourself needing to follow an analogy he's using to explain a concept you need to understand in order to grasp the thrust of a part of an argument he's making against a specific aspect of one particular misinterpretation of evolution.
In other words – it's easy to get lost.
At several points he asks the reader to be patent, but I wonder how many of his readers really do have the patience to put up with the digressions and analogies.
It's an oddity of Dawkins's approach that moments after venting a vivid attack on creationists and Christians for their ignorance, for being 'wrong, utterly wrong!' – he will ask them to bear with him, and have a little patience because what follows is only a rough analogy or a hypothetical example or a computer program he's made up, or some other rather remote and tangential point.
It's as if someone punched you in the face and then asked you to hold their coat for them. it shows an astonishing naivety and innocence.
And more to the point, the upshot of all these aspects of his approach is that – he never really presents the knock-down, drop-dead, unanswerable counter-arguments against creationist literature which he continually promises.
In fact on several occasions in The Blind Watchmaker he made so many apologies about the absence of current scientific knowledge on a particular point (especially about a) the patchiness of the fossil record and b) the sharply conflicting hypotheses among scientists about how life on earth got started) – or he went on at such length about the arguments and divisions among the scientists themselves – that I emerged with my belief in evolution shaken, not confirmed.
I couldn't help feeling that, if I was a born-again Christian, a fundamentalist and creationist, Dawkins's books, with their combination of in-your-face insults with mealy-mouthed, round-the-houses argufying, might well confirm me in my anti-evolutionary beliefs.
The importance of geological time
To summarise Dawkins's arguments for him, the central foundation of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is TIME. Lots and lots and lots of time. Geological time. More time than we can possibly imagine. To quote Wikipedia (in order to have the latest, up-to-date info):
The earliest time that life forms first appeared on Earth is at least 3.77 billion years ago, possibly as early as 4.28 billion years, or even 4.5 billion years; not long after the oceans formed 4.41 billion years ago, and after the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago.
Around 4 billion years ago. No human being can understand that length of time.
The next element in Darwin's theory is the advantage of small changes, minute changes, sometimes molecular changes, in organisms as they reproduce and create new generations. Even minuscule differences, which humans cannot detect, might be the vital determinants in whether an organism just about survives to reproduce, or just fails and is killed or eaten before it reproduces.
Dawkins's core argument is that, if you set that process in train and let it run for four and a half billion years – then anything can happen, and we have the evidence in the fossil record that it has, that forms of life of surpassing weirdness and sizes and functions have been and gone, and their descendants live on all around us in a marvellous profusion.
the enormous, impossible-to-conceive length of geological time
and the big difference to its chances of survival which even tiny variants in an organism's attributes can give it
which anti-evolutionists tend not to have grasped, or understood or have simply rejected. Which drives Dawkins crazy.
The evolution of 'the eye'
The locus classicus (the classic example) where the two sides clash is THE EYE.
Anti-evolutionary writers of all stripes cite the human eye and assert that it is ridiculously unlikely that The Eye can have just popped into existence in complete perfection, with a fully functioning iris and lens and all the rods and cones which detect light and shade and colour, absurdly unlikely, only a caring Creator God could have made something so wonderful.
AND the related creationist argument, that what possible use would half an eye, or a tenth of an eye or a hundredth of an eye have been to any organism? It must have appeared fully functional or not all.
To which Dawkins and all the evolutionists reply that a) no-one is saying it came into being fully functional and b) you'd be surprised: half an eye is really useful. So is a hundredth of an eye, or a thousandth.
In fact, having a patch of skin which is merely light-sensitive can convey advantage on some organisms. Given enough generations this light-sensitive patch will become a confirmed part of all the members of a particular species, and will tend to form a dip or hollow in the skin to protect itself from damage. If the dip goes deep enough then sooner or later some chance mutation may code for another strand of skin to form across the opening of the dip, with a slight preference given to any variation which creates a membrane which is translucent i.e. lets at least some light through to the light-sensitive skin beneath.
And bingo! The eye!
The killer fact (for me, reading this well-trodden argument for the umpteenth time) is that not only is The Eye not an improbable device for evolution to create in the natural flow of endless variations created in each new generation and likely to be selected because its adds even a smidgeon of survival value to its owners..
But that the formation of The Eye turns out to be a highly probable result of evolution. We know this because we now know that The Eye has evolved at least forty separate times in widely separated orders and families and genera. over the past four and a half billion years. Conclusion:
Never say, and never take seriously anybody who says: 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by natural selection.' (p.81)
Dawkins dubs this position The Argument from Personal Incredulity, and this discussion of The Eye is one of the few places where Dawkins states an opponent's argument clearly and then mounts a clearn and convincing counter-argument.
Bored with a lot of the these tired old arguments, and of Dawkins's combative yet strangely naive style, I took to noting the the analogies, reading them as a kind of buried or counter-narrative linking up the boring arguments.
– The river out of Eden is the river of DNA, a river of digital information, which makes up all living things. In fact the river has branched out over the aeons, with countless streams and tributaries running dry but there are, as of now, some thirty million separate rivers of DNA or species.
– Each generation is a sieve or filter: good genes get through, 'bad' genes don't.
– The genetic code is like a dictionary of a language with 64 words.
– the DNA inside each of us is like a family Bible (p.44)
– Insofar as it is digital, the genetic code is like digital phones or computer codes.
– Every cell in your body contains the equivalent of 36 immense data tapes (i.e the chromosomes) (p.21).
– We humans – and all living things – are survival machines designed to propagate the digital database that did the programming.
– The membranes in a living cell are like the glassware in a laboratory.
– An enzyme is like a large machine tool, carefully jigged to turn out a production line of molecules of a particular shape (p.26)
– Cells' ability to replicate is comparable to the process of 'bootstrapping' required in the early days of computing (p.27).
Reading River Out of Eden for the analogies was more fun that trying to follow many of Dawkins's trains of thought which were often tortuous, long-winded and strangely forgettable.
River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins was published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1995. All references are to the 1996 Phoenix paperback edition.
River Out of Eden on Amazon
The Richard Dawkins Foundation
The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson (1992)
Origins of Life
Posted in Biology, Books, Christianity, Evolution, Science
Tagged book, Christianity, Darwin, Darwinism, DNA, Evolution, popular science, rhetoric, Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden, Science, vitalism
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/river-out-of-eden-richard-dawkins/
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design by Richard Dawkins (1986)
I hope that the reader is as awestruck as I am (p.37)
I first read this book 25 years ago and in the intervening years I had forgotten how naive, silly and embarrassingly earnest Dawkins can be.
The blind watchmaker
The basic premise is easily summarised. In a theological work published in 1802 – Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity – the English theologian William Paley said that if you were out for a walk and stumbled over a stone, you wouldn't think anything of it, it is so obviously part of the natural world and you unthinkingly accept it as a product of impersonal geological forces.
But if you were out for a walk and stumbled over a watch, particularly if it was an 18th-century, ornately fashioned pocketwatch, you would immediately deduce that something so wonderfully crafted, with so many carefully calibrated inner workings clearly designed for a purpose, presupposed a designer – a craftsman who consciously and deliberately designed and built it.
Well, says Paley, same for the natural world about us. When we look at the countless examples of marvellous design in the world about us – our own eyes, the interaction of insects pollinating flowers, the perfect design of fish for swimming and birds for flying – who can look at all these marvels and not be prompted to declare that there must, on the analogy of the watch, be a conscious designer, an all-powerful entity which created the entire world and all the creatures in it so that they would all perform their functions perfectly? In other words, God (and, since Paley was an Anglican clergyman) the Christian God.
In fact Paley's book was just the latest in a very long line of works promoting, describing and explaining what is called Natural Theology, the view that the existence of an all-powerful loving God can be deduced solely from observation of the world around us, without the need of any holy books or revelations. This line of argument is recorded as far back as the Biblical psalms and is believed by many people right up to the present day.
Dawkins's book is a refutation of this entire way of thinking as it relates to the natural world i.e. to living organisms.
As Dawkins points out, it was reasonable to hold Paley's beliefs in his day and age, it was a reasonable hypothesis in the absence of any better explanation for the origin and diversity of life we see around us.
But since Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species in 1859, all forms of natural theology have been rendered redundant. We now have an infinite simpler, more satisfying and more believable explanation for the origin, spread and diversity of life forms on earth, which is Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
Thus Dawkins's 340-page book amounts to a sustained argument against natural theology, and against the whole crew of Christians, Creationists, theists, bishops and poets and philosophers who still espouse it, because they are wrong and Richard and the other evolutionary biologists he cites are right.
The book combines a battery of supposedly 'philosophical' arguments with an overview of natural history, biology and – in particular – what was then, in 1986, the latest thinking about genetics and DNA – in order to ridicule, rubbish and refute every possible variation of natural theology and to promote Darwin Darwin Darwin.
One long argument
To describe The Blind Watchmaker as argumentative is an understatement. The book is expressly not a straightforward exposition of Darwin's theory, it is more a series of arguments which Dawkins has with proponents of the views he wishes to demolish, as well as with other biologists whose theories he disputes, and sometimes even with himself. If it moves, he'll argue with it. It is like an explosion in an argument factory.
And Dawkins is addicted to making elaborate and often far-fetched analogies and comparisons to help us understand evolution. In other words, you have to wade through a lot of often irrelevant argumentation and distracting analogies in order to get to the useful information.
Another key part of Dawkins' approach, something I found initially irritating about the book, then found ludicrous, and ended up finding laugh-out-loud funny, is the way he makes up people to argue with.
He will invent a naive believer of this or that aspect of natural theology, someone who can't credit evolution with explaining everything about the natural world, put words into their mouths, and then gleefully demolish their made-up arguments.
I think it's the purest example of an author using convenient straw men to set up and knock down that I've ever read. Thus in the first 40 pages he invents the following figures:
a distinguished modern philosopher who he once sat next to at dinner and revealed to a horrified Dawkins that he didn't understand why the evolution and diversity of life required any special explanation (p.5)
a 'hypothetical philosopher' he invents and claims would, at this stage of Dawkins's exposition, be 'mumbling something about circular argument' (p.8)
a hypothetical engineer who starts 'boring on' about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts (p.11)
he creates another engineer ('our engineer') to act as a foil for his explanation of how bat echolocation works in chapter 2
with similar condescension he refers at various moments to 'our mathematicians' in order to dismiss their arguments
the second half of the book is littered with references to 'creationists' and 'creationist propaganda' and 'anti-evolution propaganda' which he doesn't actually quote, but whose views he briefly summarises before pulverising them
On page 13 he dismisses 'readers of trendy intellectual magazines' saying that, if you read them you might have noticed that:
reductionism, like sin, is one of those things that is only mentioned by people who are against it.
This thought then rapidly gets out of control as he goes on to say that calling yourself a reductionist is the equivalent, 'in some circles' of admitting that you eat babies.
He then goes on to compare the hypothetical simple-minded 'reductionist' who he's just invented with his own, more sophisticated, materialist reductionism, and then writes:
It goes without saying – though the mythical, baby-eating reductionist is reputed to deny this – that the kinds of explanations which are suitable at high levels in the hierarchy are quite different from the kinds of explanations which are suitable at lower levels.
You can see that he's making a serious point, but can't help wondering why it required inventing a straw man and then attributing him the bizarre characteristic of eating babies!
This is just one tiny snapshot of Dawkins's technique, in which serious and often interesting points are surrounded by relentless argufying and quarrelling, more often than not with entirely fictional, made-up figures who are often given ridiculously caricatured views and qualities.
In among the vast army of people Dawkins picks fights with are some real Christian or anti-evolutionary figures who he briefly invokes before subjecting them to withering criticism.
the 'distinguished sceptic' who refused to believe Donald Griffin when the latter first explained the secret of bat echolocation at a 1940 conference (p.35)
Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore (1920-2005) whose book The Probability of God Dawkins credits with being an honest attempt to prove God but which he quickly dismisses for its widespread use of what Dawkins calls The Argument From Personal Incredulity i.e. 'I find it hard to understand…it is difficult to see how…' etc which only goes to show the ignorant the author is (p.37)
Francis Hitching (b.1933) author of The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong (1983) which appears to be a sustained attack on Darwinism
The Duke of Argyll who, apparently, supported Darwin but with the modest proviso that the loving Creator God did, of course, intervene in evolution to create new species and generally give evolution a helping hand (p.248)
the editor of Creationist magazine Biblical (p.251) who is quoted leaping onto the controversy surrounding the (then) new theory of punctuated equilibrium in order to claim it undermined the entire Darwinian edifice
The remorseless battering of opponents, real or hypothetical, builds up to a climax in the final chapter where Dawkins tackles head-on half a dozen or so alternative explanations for the existence of complex life forms including the Big One, Christian Creationism.
Naivety
There's a stunning moment before the book's even properly begun which reveals Dawkins' amazingly earnest naivety about the real world.
He describes taking part in a formal debate (organised, apparently, at the Oxford Union). Afterwards he is seated at dinner (the book includes lots of anecdotes about conversations over dinner; Oxford is that kind of place) next to the young lady who argued against him in the debate, and made the creationist case – and Dawkins is horrified to discover that she doesn't necessarily believe all the points she made!!
Indeed, Dawkins reveals to his shocked readers, this young lady was sometimes making arguments simply for the sake of having a debate! Richard is horrified!! He himself has never uttered a word he didn't believe to be the complete truth! He cannot credit the notion that someone argued a case solely for the intellectual challenge of it!
At first I thought he was joking, but this anecdote, told on page two of the Preface, establishes the fact that Dawkins doesn't understand the nature of intellectual debate, and so by implication doesn't understand the worlds of law or politics or philosophy or the humanities, where you are routinely asked to justify a cause you don't particularly believe in, or to argue one of any number of conflicting views.
When I told my son this he recalled being made to take part in school debates when he was 11. Learning to debate different points of view is a basic teaching, learning and cultural practice.
Philosophical simple-mindedness
Dawkins likes to brandish the word 'philosophy' a lot but none of his arguments are truly philosophical, they are more rhetorical or technical. For example, early on he asks 'What is an explanation?' before giving this definition of how he intends to use the word:
If we wish to understand how a machine or living body works, we look to its component parts and ask how they interact with each other. If there is a complex thing that we do not yet understand, we can come to understand it in terms of simpler parts that we do already understand. (p.11)
This isn't really philosophical, more a straightforward clarifying of terms. And yet in chapter 2 he refers back to the opening chapter in which this and much like it occurred, as 'philosophical'. Quite quickly you get the sense that Dawkins' idea of 'philosophy' is fairly simplistic. That it is, in fact, a biologist's notion of philosophy i.e. lacking much subtlety or depth.
Same goes for his attitude to the English language. Dawkins is extremely proud of the care with which he writes, and isn't shy about showing off his rather pedantic thoughts about English usage. For example, he stops the thrust of his argument to discuss whether it is better to write 'computer programme' or 'computer program'. Towards the end of the book he mentions 'the great Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura'
whose English prose style, incidentally, would shame many a native speaker (p.303)
There is no reason for this unnecessary aside except to let everyone know that he, Richard Dawkins, is a first class judge of what constitutes good English, and isn't shy about letting you know it. As with the 'philosophy', Dawkins's comments about the English language are fairly obvious, but presented with a great hoo-hah and self-satisfaction.
Dawkins's sense of humour!
Way before he has given any kind of account of Darwin's actual theory, Dawkins is assailing us with his sense of humour, sometimes with short squibs, sometimes with extended 'humorous' passages.
You can tell when he's made a joke, or said something he's really proud of, because he rounds off the punchline with an exclamation mark!
It's quite a while since I've seen quite so many exclamation marks in a text and it made me realise that their cumulative impact is to make you feel the author is poking you in the ribs so you will laugh and/or marvel at the wonderful anecdote they've just told!
Here's an example of the way that genuinely fascinating natural history/science is buried in Dawkins's rib-nudging approach. Chapter two is about echolocation in bats, and moves from:
a detailed description of how bat echolocation works – which is riveting
to pondering what it is like to be a bat and live in a bat's body and live and perceive the world entirely by echolocation and sonar – which is sort of interesting, but speculative
to an extended passage where Dawkins imagines a conference of scientific bats – he does this in order to imagine his scientific bats listening to one of their colleagues presenting a paper with the flabbergasting discovery that humans use a previously unknown sense called 'sight', employing two bulbous receptors in their faces called 'eyes' in order to analyse light signals which appear to create in their brains 3-D models of the world which help them navigate around – almost as well as bats!!
Now this final passage is sort of helpful, maybe, if you're in the mood, and sort of humorous. But it is at the same time more than a little ludicrous in what purports to be a serious scientific book. Above all, it gives you a powerful whiff of Dawkins's world, a world of self-important Oxbridge academics. It does this in two ways:
the choice of an academic conference as the setting for his imaginary fantasy tells much you about the milieu he inhabits
the fact that he thinks he can spend an entire page of his book sharing this extended joke with his readers tells you a lot more about his supreme, undentable self-confidence
Unintentional autobiography
Dawkins likes to think he is making 'difficult' science more accessible by giving the poor benighted reader plenty of analogies and examples from everyday life to help us understand these damn tricky concepts. But it is one of the most (unintentionally) enjoyable aspects of the book that many of the examples he uses betray a comic out-of-touchness with the modern world.
I laughed out loud when on page 3 he writes:
The systematic putting together of parts to a purposeful design is something we know and understand, for we have experienced it at first hand, even if only with our childhood Meccano or erector set.
He explains the Doppler Effect by asking the reader to imagine riding a motorbike past a factory whose siren is wailing. Motorbike? Wailing factory siren? This sounds like a W.H. Auden poem from the 1930s. He goes on to explain that it is the same principle as the police use in their radar traps for speeding motorists.
Elsewhere he begins to explain the unlikeliness of organic molecules coming into existence by asking us to ponder the number of his bicycle lock (and later assures us that 'I ride a bicycle to work every day', p.84). On almost every page there is an unreflecting assumption that we will be interested in every detail of Professor Dawkins's life, from his bicycle lock to his personal computer.
He suggests that the advantage even a slight improvement in the ability to 'see' would give an evolving species can be considered while 'turning the colour balance knob of a colour television set' (p.84).
He explains that the poor Nautilus shellfish has developed the hollow orb of a primitive 'eye' but lacks the lens facility that we and all mammals have, making it rather 'like a hi-fi system with an excellent amplifier fed by a gramophone with a blunt needle' (p.85).
Gramophone? Later he refers to 'hi-fidelity sound amplification equipment' (p.217). It's possible that Dawkins is the most fuddy-duddy author I've ever read.
When describing the transmission of DNA he suggests it might help if we imagine 20 million 'typists' sitting in a row. When I asked my daughter what a 'typist' is she didn't know. Reading the book now is like visiting a lost world.
The common brown bat Myotis emits sonic clicks at the rate of ten a second, about the same rate, Dawkins tells us, as a Bren machine gun fires bullets. An analogy which seems redolent of National Service in the 1950s.
His comic-book enthusiasm bubbles over when he tells us that:
These bats are like miniature spy planes, bristling with sophisticated instrumentation. (p.24)
Spy planes. Gramophone players. Factory sirens.
If you put to one side the science he's trying to explain to us, and just focus on the analogies and stories he uses so liberally, a kind of alternative world appears – a portrait of an incredibly earnest, other-worldly, high-minded Oxford don, a man whose secure upper-middle-class childhood gave him an enduring love of toys and gadgets, and who has the sublime self-confidence of thinking he can change the world by the sheer power of his boyish enthusiasm and the secrets of his bicycle lock.
At the end of chapter 8 (which has been about positive feedback loops in evolution) he digresses into a lengthy description of the new-fangled 'pop music', which is introduced by what he describes as the 'mid-Atlantic mouthings of disco jockeys' on the radio, and reflected in something which he fastidiously refers to as the 'Top 20'.
The whole sub-culture is obsessed with a rank ordering of records, called the Top 20 or Top 40, which is based only upon record sales. (p.219)
His point is that records are often bought by young people based on their popularity alone, not on their intrinsic artistic merit and that this is a form of arbitrary positive feedback loop, such as may also be true of some characteristics exaggerated in the course of sexual selection, such as the peacock's tail.
But the real impact of reading this page-long digression is to make you realise that Dawkins is a real-life version of the stereotypical out-of-touch judge who has spent so long in the bubble of the legal profession (as Dawkins has spent virtually his whole life in the bubble of an Oxford college) that one of the barristers has to patiently explain to him that 'The Beatles' are a popular rhythm-and-blues group.
Elsewhere he refers to this new thing called 'the mass media'. He refers to bodybuilders as members of a 'peculiar minority culture' (p.289). It doesn't seem to occur to him that being a don at an Oxford college is even more of a 'peculiar minority culture'.
Hi-fidelity gramophones. Factory sirens. Mid-Atlantic mouthings.
Then there are the directly autobiographical snippets – the references to his idyllic childhood in Africa (where he played with his Erector Set or admired a huge swarm of soldier ants), to his High Anglican public school, and on to the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford, where he spent his academic career from 1970 to 2008, and has had so many stimulating conversations over High Table which he is not shy about repeating for our benefit.
Thus, in the middle of an explanation of different theories about the speed with which evolution works, he stops because he:
cannot help being reminded here of the humiliation of my first school report, written by the Matron about my performance as a seven-year-old in folding clothes, taking cold baths, and other daily routines of boarding-school life: "Dawkins has only three speeds: slow, very slow, and stop." (p.245)
Similarly, he begins Chapter 8 with a reminiscence of a schoolmaster of his who became uncontrollably apoplectic with rage, as an example of 'positive feedback'.
This is followed by the story of a recent experience he had of attending Oxford's Congregation, at which the hubbub of the large crowd slowly died away into silence – which he gives as an example of negative feedback.
My point is that The Blind Watchmaker is characterised by many pages of self-indulgent autobiography. It is an obtrusive element in the book which often gets in the way of the factual content he wants to convey. Dawkins is so in love with the sound of his own analogies and whimsical digressions, and so keen to share with you his ripping boyhood memories and High Table anecdotes, that it becomes at times, almost physically painful to read him.
Distracting analogies
But the real problem with all these analogies and reminiscences is that too often they get in the way of actually understanding his scientific points.
For example, chapter seven has an extended explanation of what arms races are in the context of evolution i.e. when predators and prey develop characteristics designed to help them outdo each other. So far so good. But then he goes off into an extended comparison with the race to build dreadnoughts before the Great War, and then to a description of the actual arms race between the USA and USSR building larger and larger nuclear weapons during the 1970s and 1980s.
My point is that the analogy takes on a life of its own, goes on at unconscionable length, and becomes steadily less useful and increasingly distracting and misleading.
Same goes when he asks us to imagine 20 million typists sitting in a row copying out a message as if that makes it at all easier to understand DNA, instead of puzzling and distracting.
Or when he spends a couple of pages calculating just how many monkeys it would take to type out the complete works of Shakespeare, as a demonstration of the power of cumulative selection i.e. if evolution really did work at random it would take forever, but if each version typed out by the monkeys kept all the elements which were even slightly like Shakespeare, and then built on that foundation, it is surprising how few generations of monkeys you'd need to begin to produce an inkling of a comprehensible version of the complete works of Shakespeare.
He thinks he is a scientific populariser but the examples he uses to explain scientific ideas are often out of date or far-fetched as to be harder to understand than the original scientific idea.
In the worst example in the book, chapter 8 about punctuated equilibrium doesn't start with an explanation of what punctuated equilibrium actually is – instead, it starts with a two-page-long extended description of the ancient Israelites spending forty years wandering in the wilderness after fleeing Egypt.
Dawkins then invents (as so often) a hypothetical figure to mock, in this case a hypothetical historian who, he says, takes the story of the Biblical exodus literally and so calculates that, since the distance from Egypt to the Holy Land was only 200 miles and the Bible says it took them 40 years to cover, this must mean that the Israelites covered just 24 yards per day or 1 yard per hour.
'Is the attitude of the Bible historian I have just invented ridiculous?' asks Dawkins. 'Yes, well, that's how ridiculous the theory of punctuated equilibrium is.'
This example is at the start of the chapter, setting the tone for the entire discussion of punctuated equilibrium. And it lasts for two solid pages.
It is a classic example of how Dawkins is so in love with his own wit and that he a) never really gets round to clearly explaining what punctuated equilibrium is, and b) really confuses the reader with this extended and utterly irrelevant analogy.
(The theory of punctuated equilibrium takes the extremely patchy fossil record of life on earth as evidence that evolution does not progress at a smooth, steady rate but consists of long periods of virtual stasis or equilibrium, punctuated by sudden bursts of relatively fast evolution and the creation of new species. Some Creationists and Christians seized on the publication of this theory in the 1970s as evidence that Darwin was wrong and that therefore God does exist. Dawkins devotes a chapter and a host of ideas, sub-ideas and extended analogies to proving that the theory of punctuated equilibrium does not undermine the Darwinian orthodoxy – as Creationists gleefully claim – but can be slotted easily into the existing Darwinian view that evolution takes place at a slow steady pace: the core of Dawkins's argument is that the fossil record appears to suggest long static periods interspersed with periods of manic change, solely because it is so very patchy; if we had a fuller fossil record it wold vindicate his and Darwin's view of slow steady change. In other words, the theory of punctuated equilibrium is an optical illusion produced by the patchiness of the fossil record and not a true account of his evolution works.)
The whole tenor and shape and flavour of the book is dominated by Dawkins's analogies and similes and metaphors and witty ideas but I can't help thinking it would have been so much better to have devoted the space to killer examples from the natural world. Too often Dawkins's long comparisons take the reader away from the wonders of life on earth and push you into the broom cupboard of his oddly sterile and unimaginative analogies.
To give another example, it is fascinating to learn that many bat species have scrunched-up gargoyle faces (which have terrified generations of humans) because their faces have evolved to reflect and focus their high-pitched echolocation signals into their ears. But when Dawkins tries to make this fact more 'accessible' by writing that bats are 'like high-tech spy planes', his analogy feels not only trite but – here's my point – less informative than the original fact.
I have just read E.O. Wilson's stunningly beautiful and inspiring book about the natural world, The Diversity of Life, which is all the more amazing and breath-taking because he doesn't impose anecdotes about his own childhood or love of gadgets between you and the wonder's he's describing: the wonders are quite amazing enough without any kind of editorialising.
The Blind Watchmaker computer program
This un-self-aware, naive enthusiasm comes over most strongly in chapter three of the book which is devoted to the subject which gives the book its title, the computer program Dawkins has devised and titled The Blind Watchmaker (and which is advertised for sale at the back of the book, yours for just £28.85 including VAT, post and packaging).
At this early stage of the book (chapter 3) I was still hoping that Dawkins would give the reader a knock-down, killer explanation of Darwin's theory. Instead he chooses to tell us all about a computer program he's written. The program begins with a set of nine stick figures or 'genes', as he calls them, and then applies to them a set of instructions such as 'double in length' or 'branch into two lines' and so on. Here are the basic 'genes'.
Basic 'tree' shapes developed by Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker programme
The idea is that, if you invent rules for transforming the shape of the basic 'genes' according to a set of fixed but arbitrary rules and then run the program, you will be surprised how the mechanical application of mindless rules quite quickly produces all kinds of weird and wonderful shapes, thus:
More advanced iterations produced by Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker program
The point of all this is to show how quickly complex 'creatures' can be created by a few simple rules and endless iterations.
Having explained his program Dawkins artlessly presents it as a strong proof for Darwin's theory. He calls the multi-dimensional cyberspace thronged with a potentially endless sequence of mutating life forms stretching out in all directions Biomorph Land, and the metaphor is invoked throughout the rest of the book.
Dawkins boyishly tells us that when he first ran the program and saw all the shapes appearing he was so excited he stayed up all night!
It's difficult to know where to start in critiquing this approach, but two things spring to mind.
At the point where he introduces the program the book still hasn't delivered a clear exposition of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. During this chapter I began to realise it never would, and that instead the book would be all about Richard's own ideas and inventions.
Does Dawkins really think that a dyed-in-the-wool, Christian fundamentalist would be the slightest bit persuaded to change his or her lifelong beliefs by a lengthy explanation of a toy computer program which Richard has developed at home on his Dell computer? If he does, he is fabulously self-deluded and, as I've said, above all, naive about the ways of the world and how human beings actually think and live.
Dawkins's declared intention is to change the world, or the way people think and what they believe about the world and the diversity of life around us – and yet virtually every word he writes – certainly extended passages like the long chapter devoted to the self-written computer program which gives the book its name – show you how completely inadequate his view of human nature is.
The book may well have explained and elucidated various concepts around evolution and genetics to an educated, secular audience which had hitherto (in 1986) had relatively few if any popular accounts to read on the subject. But given Dawkins's fierce anti-Creationist rhetoric all through the book, his invention of all kinds of Christian or just ignorant critics of evolution throughout the book who he can pulverise with his arguments and analogies – it would be fascinating to learn if The Blind Watchmaker ever converted anyone to abandon their Christian or theist beliefs and become an atheist.
Précis of the contents of The Blind Watchmaker
Chapter 2 Bats and echolocation
Chapter 3 Cumulative changes in organisms can have massive consequences when subjected to non-random selection.
Chapter 4 Creationist propaganda often mocks the theory of evolution by pointing out that according to the theory exquisitely complicated features such as eyes must have evolved from next to nothing to their present stage of perfection and What is the point of half an eye? But Dawkins robustly replies that even 1% of an eye is better than no eye at all, and there are many animals with what you could call half or a quarter or less of a wing (i.e. bits of stretchable skin which help with gliding from tree to tree), which function perfectly well.
Chapter 5 'It is raining DNA outside' as Dawkins describes the air outside his study window being full of down and dandelion seeds, innumerable flower seeds floating past on the wind. Why Life is more like a computer programme (i.e. DNA is a transmissible digital code) than pre-Darwinian ideas about blobs of matter and life forces.
Chapter 6 The idea of 'miracles' considered in the context of the 4.5 billion years the earth has existed, and a detailed summary of A.G. Cairns-Smiths theory of the origin of life (i.e. that replicating organic molecules originally took their structure from replicating inorganic clay crystals.)
Chapter 7 Genes are selected by virtue of their interactions with their environment, but the very first 'environment' a gene encounters is other genes, within the cell, and then in sister cells. Cells had to learn to co-operate in order to form multi-celled organisms. Cumulative selection produces arms races between rivals in ecosystems.
Chapter 8 Positive feedback and sexual selection, compared to steam engines, thermostats and pop music.
Chapter 9 Is devoted to taking down the theory of punctuated equilibrium put forward by the paleontologists Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould and opens with two pages about a hypothetical and very dense scholar of Biblical history.
Chapter 10 There are countless ways to categorise living things, as objects, but there is only one true tree of life based on evolutionary descent. Although in this, as everything else, there are different schools and theories e.g. phyleticists, cladists, pheneticists et al.
Chapter 11 A summary of various alternatives to Darwin – Lamarckism, neutralism, creationism, mutationism – are described and then demolished.
What is really striking about this final chapter is how cursory his dismissal of Christian creationism is – it only takes up a couple of pages whereas his analysis of Lamarckism took up ten. It's as if, once he finally comes face to face with his long-cherished enemy, it turns out that he has… nothing to say.
Back in the mid-1980s this book had a big impact, garnering prizes and making Dawkins a public intellectual. This suggests 1. the extent of the ignorance then prevailing about Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and 2. the low bar set in the Anglo-Saxon world for the definition of 'public intellectual'.
Then again, not many people actually had computers in 1986. I think the impact of the book came less from his countless and tiresome anti-Christian arguments, and more from the crisp modern way he compared DNA to a computer program. That was a genuinely innovatory insight thirty-five years ago. He was there right at the beginning of the application of computer technology to genetics and biology, a technology which has, ironically, rendered almost everything he wrote out of date.
– If you want to really understand Darwin's theory there is no replacement for reading On The Origin of Species itself because, although many of the details may have changed and Darwin's account notoriously contained no explanation of how variation came about (because he lacked any knowledge of genetics), nonetheless, the central idea is conveyed with a multitude of examples and with a persuasive force which really bring home what the theory actually consists of, far better than any later summary or populist account.
– If you want to read an up-to-date book about genetics and its awesome possibilities, I'd recommend Life At The Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by Craig Venter.
– If you want to read about the wonders of the natural world, you could do a lot worse than E.O. Wilson's wonderful and inspiring book The Diversity of Life.
The Mr Bean of biology
Having ground my way through this preening, self-important book, I came to the conclusion that 'Richard Dawkins' is best seen as a brilliant comic creation, a kind of super-intellectual version of Mr Bean – filled with comic earnestness, bursting to share his boyish enthusiasm, innocently retailing memories of his first Meccano set or his knowledge of spy planes and motorbicycles, inventing fictional 'distinguished philosophers' and 'sceptical scientists' to demolish with his oh-so-clever arguments, convinced that his impassioned sincerity will change the world, and blissfully unaware of the ludicrous figure he cuts.
It's a much more enjoyable book to read if you ignore Dawkins's silly argufying and see it instead as a kind of Rabelaisian comedy, told by an essentially ludicrous narrator, with characters popping up at random moments to make a Creationist point before being hit over the head by Mr Punch's truncheon – 'That's the way to do it!' – interspersed with occasionally useful, albeit mostly out-dated, information about evolution and genetics.
The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins was published by the Harvard University Press in 1986. All references are to the 1994 Penguin paperback edition.
The Blind Watchmaker on Amazon
Posted in Biology, Books, Evolution, Nature, Science
Tagged A.G. Cairns-Smiths, arms race, Biomorph Land, Blind Watchmaker, Charles Darwin, computer programming, computers, creationism, Darwin, Darwinism, Donald Griffin, echolocation, Evolution, Francis Hitching, genetics, God, Hugh Montefiore, Lamarckism, Mendel, Monty Python, Mr Bean, mutationism, natural theology, Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, neutralism, Niles Eldridge, On the Origin of Species, Origin of Species, Oxford, Oxford Union, Rabelais, Richard Dawkins, Science, Stephen Jay Gould, The Blind Watchmaker, Theology, theory of evolution, Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, William Paley
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/11/the-blind-watchmaker-richard-dawkins/
I will attempt to show that the chasm separating biology and chemistry is bridgeable, that Darwinian theory can be integrated into a more general chemical theory of matter, and that biology is just chemistry, or to be more precise, a sub-branch of chemistry – replicative chemistry. (p.122)
Repetitive and prolix
This book is 190 pages long. It is much harder to read than it need be because Pross is a bad writer with very bad habits, namely 1. irritating repetition and 2. harking back and forward. The initial point which he repeats again and again in the first 120 pages is that nobody knows the secret of the origins of life and all previous attempts to solve it have been dead ends.
So, what can we conclude regarding the emergence of life on our planet? The short answer: almost nothing. (p.109)
We don't know how to go about making life because we don't really know what life is, and we don't know what life is, because we don't understand the principles that led to its emergence. (p.111)
The efforts to uncover probiotic-type chemistry, while of considerable interest in their own right, were never likely to lead us to the ultimate goal – understanding how life on earth emerged. (p.99)
Well, at the time of writing, the so-called Holy Grail (the Human Genome sequence) and the language of life that it was supposed to have taught us have not delivered the promised goods. (p.114)
But the systems biology approach has not proved a nirvana… (p.116)
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has not proved to be the hoped-for breakthrough in seeking greater understanding of biological complexity. (p.119)
A physically based theory of life continues to elude us. (p.119)
While Conway's Life game has opened up interesting insights into complex systems in general, direct insights into the nature of living systems do not appear to have been forthcoming. (p.120)
The book is so repetitive I though the author and his editor must have Alzheimer's Disease. On page viii we are told that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a pithy little book titled What Is Life? which concluded that present-day physics and chemistry can't explain the phenomenon of life. Then, on page xii, we're told that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger' found the issue highly troublesome'. Then on page 3 that the issue 'certainly troubled the great physicists of the century, amongst them Bohr, Schrödinger and Wigner'. Then on page 36, we learn that:
Erwin Schrödinger, the father of quantum mechanics, whose provocative little book What Is Life? we mentioned earlier, was particularly puzzled by life's strange thermodynamic behaviour.
When it comes to Darwin we are told on page 8 that:
Darwin himself explicitly avoided the origin of life question, recognising that within the existing state of knowledge the question was premature.
and then, in case we have senile dementia or the memory of a goldfish, on page 35 he tells us that:
Darwin deliberately side-stepped the challenge, recognising that it could not be adequately addressed within the existing state of knowledge.
As to the harking back and forth, Pross is one of those writers who is continually telling you he's going to tell you something, and then continually reminding you that he told you something back in chapter 2 or chapter 4 – but nowhere in the reading process do you actually get clearly stated the damn thing he claims to be telling.
As we mentioned in chapter 4…
As noted above…
I will say more on this point subsequently…
We will consider a possible resolution of this sticky problem in chapter 7…
As discussed in chapter 5… as we will shortly see… As we have already pointed out… As we have discussed in some detail in chapter 5… described in detail in chapter 4…
In this chapter I will describe… In this chapter I will attempt…
I will defer this aspect of the discussion until chapter 8…
Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.
Shallow philosophy
It is a philosophy book written by a chemist. As such it comes over as extremely shallow and amateurish. Pross namechecks Wittgenstein, and (pointlessly) tells us that 'tractatus' is Latin for 'treatise' (p.48) – but fails to understand or engage with Wittgenstein's thought.
My heart sank when I came to chapter 3, titled Understanding 'understanding' which boils down to a superficial consideration of the difference between a 'reductionist' and a 'holistic' approach to science, the general idea that science is based on reductionism i.e. reducing systems to their smallest parts and understanding their functioning before slowly building up in scale, whereas 'holistic' approach tries to look at the entire system in the round. Pross gives a brief superficial overview of the two approaches before concluding that neither one gets us any closer to an answer.
Instead of interesting examples from chemistry, shallow examples from 'philosophy'
Even more irritating than the repetition is the nature of the examples. I thought this would be a book about chemistry but it isn't. Pross thinks he is writing a philosophical examination of the meaning of life, and so the book is stuffed with the kind of fake everyday examples which philosophers use and which are a) deeply patronising b) deeply uninformative.
Thus on page x of the introduction Pross says imagine you're walking through a field and you come across a refrigerator. He then gives two pages explaining how a refrigerator works and saying that you, coming across a fully functional refrigerator in the middle of a field, is about as probable as the purposeful and complex forms of life can have come about by accident.
Then he writes, Imagine that you get into a motor car. We only dare drive around among 'an endless stream of vehicular metal' on the assumption that the other drivers have purpose and intention and will stick to the laws of the highway code.
On page 20 he introduces us to the idea of a 'clock' and explains how a clock is an intricate mechanism made of numerous beautifully engineered parts but it will eventually break down. But a living organism on the other hand, can repair itself.
Then he says imagine you're walking down the street and you bump into an old friend named Bill. He looks like Bill, he talks like Bill and yet – did you know that virtually every cell in Bill's body has renewed itself since last time you saw him, because life forms have this wonderful ability to repair and renew themselves!
Later, he explains how a Boeing 747 didn't come into existence spontaneously, but was developed from earlier plane designs, all ultimately stemming from the Wright brothers' first lighter than air flying machine.
You see how all these examples are a) trite b) patronising c) don't tell you anything at all about the chemistry of life.
He tells us that if you drop a rock out the window, it falls to the ground. And yet a bird can hover in the air merely by flapping its wings! For some reason it is able to resist the Second law of Thermodynamics! How? Why? Nobody knows!
Deliberately superficial
And when he does get around to explaining anything, Pross himself admits that he is doing it in a trivial, hurried, quick, sketchy way and leaving out most of the details.
I will spare the reader a detailed discussion…
These ideas were discussed with some enthusiasm some 20-30 years ago and without going into further detail…
If that sounds too mathematical, let's explain the difference by recounting the classical legend of the Chinese emperor who was saved in battle by a peasant farmer. (p.64)
Only in the latter pages – only when he gets to propound his own theory from about page 130 – do you realise that he is not so much making a logical point as trying to get you to see the problem from an entirely new perspective. A little like seeing the world from the Marxist or the Freudian point of view, Pross believes himself to be in possession of an utterly new way of thinking which realigns all previous study and research and thinking on the subject. It is so far-ranging and wide-sweeping that it cannot be told consecutively.
And it's this which explains the irritating sense of repetition and circling and his constant harking forward to things he's going to tell you, and then harking back to things he claims to have explained a few chapters earlier. The first 130 pages are like being lost in a maze.
The problem of the origin of life
People have been wondering about the special quality of live things as opposed to dead things for as long as there have been people. Darwin discovered the basis of all modern thinking about life forms, which is the theory of evolution by natural selection. But he shied away from speculating on how life first came about.
Pross – in a typically roundabout manner – lists the 'problems' facing anyone trying to answer the question, What is life and how did it begin?
life breaks the second law of thermodynamics i.e. appears to create order out of chaos, as opposed to the Law which says everything tends in the opposite direction i.e. tends towards entropy
life can be partly defined by its sends of purpose: quite clearly inanimate objects do not have this
life is complex
life is organised
Put another way, why is biology so different from chemistry? How are the inert reactions of chemistry different from the purposive reactions of life? He sums this up in a diagram which appears several times:
He divides the move from non-life into complex life into two phases. The chemical phase covers the move from non-life to simple life, the biological phase covers the move from simple life to complex life. Now, we know that the biological phase is covered by the iron rules of Darwinian evolution – but what triggered, and how can we account for, the move from non-life to simple life? Hence a big ?
Pross's solution
Then, on page 127, Pross finally introduces his Big Idea and spends the final fifty or so pages of the book showing how his theory addresses all the problem in existing 'origin of life' literature.
His idea begins with the established knowledge that all chemical reactions seek out the most 'stable' format.
He introduces us to the notion that chemists actually have several working definitions of 'stability', and then introduces us to a new one: the notion of dynamic kinetic stability, or DKS.
He describes experiments by Sol Spiegelman in the 1980s into RNA. This showed how the RNA molecule replicated itself outside of a living cell. That was the most important conclusion of the experiment. But they also found that the RNA molecules replicated but also span off mutations, generally small strands of of RNA, some of which metabolised the nutrients far quicker than earlier varieties. These grew at an exponential rate to swiftly fill the petri dishes and push the longer, 'correct' RNA to extinction.
For Pross what Spiegelman's experiments showed was that inorganic dead chemicals can a) replicate b) replicate at exponential speed until they have established a situation of dynamic kinetic stability. He then goes on to equate his concept of dynamic kinetic stability with the Darwinian one of 'fitness'. Famously, it is the 'fit' which triumph in the never-ending battle for existence. Well, Pross says this concept can be rethought of as, the population which achieves greatest dynamic kinetic stability – which replicates fast enough and widely enough – will survive, will be the fittest.
fitness = dynamic kinetic stability (p.141)
Thus Darwin's ideas about the eternal struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest can be extended into non-organic chemistry, but in a particular and special way:
Just as in the 'regular' chemical world the drive of all physical and chemical systems is toward the most stable state, in the replicative world the drive is also toward the most stable state, but of the kind of stability applicable within that replicative world, DKS. (p.155)
Another way of looking at all this is via the Second Law. The Second Law of Thermodynamics has universally been interpreted as militating against life. Life is an affront to the Law, which says that all energy dissipates and seeks out the state of maximum diffusion. Entropy always triumphs. But not in life. How? Why?
But Pross says that, if molecules like his are capable of mutating and evolving – as the Sol Spiegelman experiments suggest – then they only appear to contradict the Second Law. In actual fact they are functioning in what Pross now declares is an entirely different realm of chemistry (and physics). The RNA replicating molecules are functioning in the realm of replicative chemistry. They are still inorganic, 'dead' molecules – but they replicate quickly, mutate to find the most efficient variants, and reproduce quickly towards a state of dynamic kinetic stability.
So what he's trying to do is show how it is possible for long complex molecules which are utterly 'dead', nonetheless to behave in a manner which begins to see them displaying qualities more associated with the realm of biology:
'reproduction' with errors
triumph of the fittest
apparent 'purpose'
the ability to become more complex
None of this is caused by any magical 'life force' or divine intervention (the two bogeymen of life scientists), but purely as a result of the blind materialistic forces driving them to take most advantage of their environment i.e. use up all its nutrients.
Pross now takes us back to that two-step diagram of how life came about, shown above – Non-Life to Simple Life, Simple Life to Complex Life, labelled the Chemical Phase and the Biological Phase, respectively.
He recaps how the second phase – how simple life evolves greater complexity – can be explained using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: even the most primitive life forms will replicate until they reach the limits of the available food sources, at which point any mutation leading to even a fractional differentiation in the efficiency of processing food will give the more advanced variants an advantage. The rest is the three billion year history of life on earth.
It is phase one – the step from non-life to life – which Pross has (repeatedly) explained has given many of the cleverest biologists, physicists and chemists of the 20th century sleepless nights, and which – in chapters 3 and 4 – he runs through the various theories or approaches which have failed to deliver an answer to.
Well, Pross's bombshell solution is simple. There are not two steps – there was only ever one step. The Darwinian mechanism by which the best adapted entity wins out in a given situation applies to inert chemicals as much as to life forms.
Let me now drop the bombshell… The so-called two-stage process is not two-stage at all. It is really just once, continuous process. (p.127) … what is termed natural selection within the biological world is also found to operate in the chemical world… (p.128)
Pross recaps the findings of that Spiegelman experiment, which was that the RNA molecules eventually made errors in their replication, and some of the erroneous molecules were more efficient at using up the nutrition in the test tube. After just a day, Spiegelman found the long RNA molecules – which took a long time to replicate – were being replaced by much shorter molecules which replicated much quicker.
There, in a nutshell, is Pross's theory in action. Darwinian competition, previously thought to be restricted only to living organisms, can be shown to apply to inorganic molecules as well – because inorganic molecules themselves show replicating, 'competitive' behaviour.
For Pross this insight was confirmed in experiments conducted by Gerald Joyce in 2009, who showed that a variety of types of RNA, placed in a nutrient, replicated in such a way as to establish a kind of dynamic equilibrium, where each molecule established a chemical niche and thrived on some of the nutrients, while other RNA varieties evolved to thrive on other types. To summarise:
The processes of abiogenesis and evolution are actually one physicochemical process governed by one single mechanism, rather than two discrete processes governed by two different mechanisms. (p.136)
The study of simple replicating systems has revealed an extraordinary connection – that Darwinian theory, that quintessential biological principle, can be incorporated into a more general chemical theory of evolution, one that encompasses both living and non-living systems. it is that integration that forms the basis of the theory of life I propose. (p.162)
The remaining 50 or so pages work through the implications of this idea or perspective. For example he redefines the Darwinian notion of 'fitness' to be 'dynamic kinetic stability'. In other words, the biological concept of 'fitness' turns out, in his theory, to be merely the biological expression of a 'more general and fundamental chemical concept' (p.141).
He works through a number of what are traditionally taken to be life's attributes and reinterprets in the new terms he's introduced, in terms of dynamic kinetic stability, replicative chemistry and so on. Thus he addresses life's complexity, life's instability, life's dynamic nature, life's diversity, life's homochirality, life's teleonomic character, the nature of consciousness, and speculating about what alien life would look like before summing up his theory. Again.
A solution to the primary question exists and is breathtakingly simple: life on earth emerged through the enormous kinetic power of the replication reaction acting on unidentified, but simple replicating systems, apparently composed of chain-like oligomeric substances, RNA or RNA-like, capable of mutation and complexification. That process of complexification took place because it resulted in the enhancement of their stability – not their thermodynamic stability, but rather the relevant stability in the world of replicating systems, their DKS. (p.183)
A thought about the second law
Pross has explained that the Second Law of Thermodynamics apparently militates against the spontaneous generation of life, in any form, because life is organised and the second law says everything tends towards chaos. But he comes up with an ingenious solution. If one of these hypothetical early replicating molecules acquired the ability to generate energy from light – it would effectively bypass the second law. It would acquire energy from outside the 'system' in which it is supposedly confined and in which entropy prevails.
The existence of an energy-gathering capacity within a replicating entity effectively 'frees' that entity from the constraints of the Second Law in much the same way that a car engine 'free's a car from gravitational constrains. (p.157)
This insight shed light on an old problem, and on a fragment of the overall issue – but it isn't enough by itself to justify his theory.
Several times I nearly threw away the book in my frustration before finally arriving at the Eureka moment about page 130. From there onwards it does become a lot better. As you read Pross you have the sense of a whole new perspective opening up on this notorious issue.
However, as with all these theories, you can't help thinking that if his theory had been at all accepted by the scientific community – then you'd have heard about it by now.
If his theory really does finally solve the Great Mystery of Life which all the greatest minds of humanity have laboured over for millennia… surely it would be a bit better known, or widely accepted by his peers?
The theory relies heavily on results from Sol Spiegelman's experiments with RNA in the 1980s. Mightn't Spiegelman himself, or other tens of thousands of other biologists, have noticed its implications in the thirty odd years between the experiments and Pross's book?
And if Pross has solved the problem of the origin of life, how come so many other, presumably well-informed and highly educated scientists, are still researching the 'problem'?
Harvard University Origins of Life Initiative
(By the way, the Harvard website optimistically declares that:
Thanks to advances in technologies in these areas, answers to some of the compelling questions surrounding the origins of life in the universe were now possibly within reach… Today a larger team of researchers have joined this exciting biochemical 'journey through the Universe' to unravel one of humankind's most compelling mysteries – the origins of life in the Universe.
'Possibly within reach', lol. Good times are always just around the corner in the origins-of-life industry.)
So I admit to being interested by pages 130 onwards of his book, gripped by the urgency with which he tells his story, gripped by the vehemence of his presentation, in the same way you'd be gripped by a thriller while you read it. But then you put it down and forget about it, going back to your everyday life. Same here.
It's hard because it is difficult to keep in mind Pross's slender chain of argumentation. It rests on the two-stage diagram – on Pross's own interpretation of the Spiegelman experiments – on his special idea of dynamic kinetic stability – and on the idea of replicative chemistry.
All of these require looking at the problem through is lens, from his perspective – for example agreeing with the idea that the complex problem of the origin of life can be boiled down to that two-stage diagram; this is done so that we can then watch him pull the rabbit out of the hat by saying it needn't be in two stages after all! So he's address the problem of the diagram. But it is, after all, just one simplistic diagram.
Same with his redefining Darwin's notion of 'fitness' as being identical to his notion of dynamic kinetic stability. Well, if he says so. but in science you have to get other scientists to agree with you, preferably by offering tangible proof.
These are more like tricks of perspective than a substantial new theory. And this comes back to his rhetorical strategy of repetition, to the harping on the same ideas.
The book argues its case less with evidence (there is, in the end, very little scientific 'evidence' for his theory – precisely two experiments, as far as I can see), but more by presenting a raft of ideas in their current accepted form (for 130 boring pages), and then trying to persuade you to see them all anew, through his eyes, from his perspective (in the final 50 pages). As he summarises it (yet again) on page 162:
The emergence of life was initiated by the emergence of a single replicating system, because that seemingly inconsequentual event opened the door to a distinctly different kind of chemistry – replicative chemistry. Entering the world of replicative chemistry reveals the existence of that other kind of stability in nature, the dynamic kinetic stability of things that are good at making more of themselves.Exploring the world of replicative chemistry helps explain why a simple primordial replicating system would have been expected to complexify over time. The reason: to increase its stability – its dynamic kinetic stability (DKS).
Note the phrase' entering the world of replicative chemistry…' – It sounds a little like 'entering the world of Narnia'. It is almost as if he's describing a religious conversion. All the facts remain the same, but new acolytes now see them in a totally different light.
Life then is just the chemical consequences that derive from the power of exponential growth operating on certain replicating chemical systems. (p.164)
(I am quoting Pross at length because I don't want to sell his ideas short; I want to convey them as accurately as possible, and in his own words.)
Or, as he puts it again a few pages later (you see how his argument proceeds by, or certainly involves a lot of, repetition):
Life then is just a highly intricate network of chemical reactions that has maintained its autocatalytic capability, and, as already noted, that complex network emerged one step at a time starting from simpler netowrks. And the driving force? As discussed in earlier chapter, it is the drive toward greater DKS, itself based on the kinetic power of replication, which allows replicating chemical systems to develop into ever-increasing complex and stable forms. (p.185)
It's all reasonably persuasive when you're reading the last third of his book – but oddly forgettable once you put it down.
Fascinating facts and tasty terminology
Along the way, the reader picks up a number of interesting ideas.
Panspermia – the theory that life exists throughout the universe and can be carried on meteors, comets etc, and one of these landed and seeded life on earth
every adult human is made up of some ten thousand billion cells; but we harbour in our guts and all over the surface of our bodies ten times as many – one hundred thousand bacteria. In an adult body hundreds of billions of new cells are created daily in order to replace the ones that die on a daily basis
in 2017 it was estimated there may be as many as two billion species of bacteria on earth
the Principle of Divergence – many different species are generated from a few sources
teleonomy – the quality of apparent purposefulness and goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms
chiral – an adjective meaning a molecule's mirror image is not superimposable upon the molecule itself: in fact molecules often come in mirror-image formations, known as left and right-handed
racemic – a racemic mixture, or racemate, is one that has equal amounts of left- and right-handed enantiomers of a chiral molecule.
reductionist – analysing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of its simple or fundamental constituents
holistic – the belief that the parts of something are intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole
Second Law of Thermodynamics – 'in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state.' This is also commonly referred to as entropy
the thermodynamic consideration – chemical reactions will only take place if the reaction products are of lower free energy than the reactants
catalyst – a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change
catalytic – requires an external catalyst to spark a chemical reaction
auocatalytic – a reaction which catalyses itself
cross-catalysis – two chemicals trigger reactions in each other
static stability – water, left to itself, is a stable chemical compound
dynamic stability – a river is always a river even though it is continually changing
prebiotic earth – earth before life
abiogenesis – the process whereby life was derived from non-living chemicals
systems chemistry – the chemical reactions of replicating molecules and the networks they create
the competitive exclusion principle – complete competitors cannot co-exist, or, Ecological differentiation is th enecessary condition for co-existence
Does anyone care?
Pross thinks the fact that biologists and biochemists can't account for the difference between complex but inanimate molecules, and the simplest actual forms of life – bacteria – is a Very Important Problem. He thinks that:
Until the deep conceptual chasm that continues to separate living and non-living is bridged, until the two sciences – physics and biology – can merge naturally, the nature of life, and hence man's place in the universe, will continue to remain gnawingly uncertain. (p.42)
'Gnawingly'. Do you feel the uncertainty about whetherbiology and physics can be naturally merged is gnawing away at you? Or, as he puts it in his opening sentences:
The subject of this book addresses basic questions that have transfixed and tormented humankind for millennia, ever since we sought to better understand our place in the universe – the nature of living things and their relationship to the non-living. The importance of finding a definitive answer to these questions cannot be overstated – it would reveal to us not just who and what we are, but would impact on our understanding of the universe as a whole. (p.viii)
I immediately disagreed. 'The importance of finding a definitive answer to these questions cannot be overstated'? Yes it can. Maybe, just maybe – it is not very important at all.
What do we mean by 'important', anyway? Is it important to you, reading this review, to realise that the division between the initial, chemical phase of the origin of life and the secondary, biological phase, is in fact a delusion, and that both processes can be accounted for by applying Darwinian selection to supposedly inorganic chemicals?
If you tried to tell your friends and family 1. how easy would you find it to explain? 2. would you seriously expect anyone to care?
Isn't it, in fact, more likely that the laws or rules or theories about how life arose from inanimate matter are likely to be so technical, so specialised and so hedged around with qualifications, that only highly trained experts can really understand them?
Maybe Pross has squared the circle and produced a feasible explanation of the origins of life on earth. Maybe this book really is – The Answer! But in which case – why hasn't everything changed, why hasn't the whole human race breathed a collective sigh of relief and said, NOW we understand how it all started, NOW we know what it all means, NOW I understand who I am and my place in the universe?
When I explained Pross's theory, in some detail, to my long-suffering wife (who did a life sciences degree) she replied that, quite obviously chemistry and biology are related; anyone who's studied biology knows it is based on chemistry. She hardly found it 'an extraordinary connection'. When I raised it with my son, who is studying biology at university, he'd never heard of Pross or his theory.
So one's final conclusion is that our understanding of 'The nature of life, and hence man's place in the universe' has remained remarkably unchanged by this little book and will, in all likelihood, remain so.
What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology on Amazon
Posted in Books, Science
Tagged 2012, abiogenesis, Addy Pross, auocatalytic, Biology, book, catalyst, Chemistry, chiral, cross-catalysis, Darwin, Darwinian, DKS, dynamic kinetic stability, dynamic stability, earth, Erwin Schrödinger, Evolution, Harvard University Origins of Life Initiative, holistic, life, life on earth, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, origin of life, panspermia, Philosophy, prebiotic earth, Pross, racemate, racemic, reductionism, replicative chemistry, RNA, Science, Sol Spiegelman, static stability, systems chemistry, teleonomy, the biological phase, the chemical phase, the Human Genome, the Principle of Divergence, the second law of thermodynamics, What Is Life?, Wittgenstein
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/17/what-is-life-how-chemistry-becomes-biology-addy-pross/
The topic of the origin of life on the Earth is a branch of mineralogy. (p.99)
How did life begin? To be more precise, how did the inorganic chemicals formed in the early years of planet earth, on the molten rocks or in the salty sea or in the methane atmosphere, transform into 'life' – complex organisms which extract food from the environment and replicate, and from which all life forms today are ultimately descended? What, when and how was that first momentous step taken?
Thousands of biologists have devoted their careers to trying to answer this question, with the result that there are lots of speculative theories.
Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith (1931-2016) was an organic chemist and molecular biologist at the University of Glasgow, and this 120-page book was his attempt to answer the Big Question.
In a nutshell he suggested that life derived from self-replicating clay crystals. To use Wikipedia's summary:
Clay minerals form naturally from silicates in solution. Clay crystals, like other crystals, preserve their external formal arrangement as they grow, snap, and grow further.
Clay crystal masses of a particular external form may happen to affect their environment in ways that affect their chances of further replication. For example, a 'stickier' clay crystal is more likely to silt up a stream bed, creating an environment conducive to further sedimentation.
It is conceivable that such effects could extend to the creation of flat areas likely to be exposed to air, dry, and turn to wind-borne dust, which could fall randomly in other streams.
Thus – by simple, inorganic, physical processes – a selection environment might exist for the reproduction of clay crystals of the 'stickier' shape.
Cairns-Smith's book is densely argued, each chapter like a lecture or seminar packed with suggestive evidence about what we know about current life forms, a summary of the principles underlying Darwin's theory of evolution, and about how we can slowly move backwards along the tree of life, speculating about how it developed.
But, as you can see from the summary above, in the end, it is just another educated guess.
The blurb on the back and the introduction both claim the book is written in the style of a detective story. Oh no it isn't. It is written in the style of a biology book – more precisely, a biology book which is looking at the underlying principles of life, the kind of abstract engineering principles underlying life – and all of these take quite some explaining, drawing in examples from molecular biology where required.
Sometimes (as in chapter 4 where he explains in detail how DNA and RNA and amino acids and proteins interact within a living cell) it becomes quite a demanding biology book.
What the author and publisher presumably mean is that, in attempt to sweeten the pill of a whole load of stuff about DNA and ribosomes, Cairns-Smith starts every chapter with a quote from a Sherlock Holmes story and from time to time claims to be pursuing his goal with Holmesian deduction.
You see Holmes, far from going for the easy bits first, would positively seek out those features in a case that were seemingly incomprehensible – 'singular' features he would call them… I think that the origin of life is a Holmesian problem. (p.ix)
Towards the very end, he remembers this metaphor and talks about 'tracking down the suspect' and 'making an arrest' (i.e. of the first gene machine, the origin of life). But this light dusting of Holmesiana doesn't do much to conceal the sometimes quite demanding science, and the relentlessly pedagogical tone of the book.
Broad outline
1. Panspermia
First off, Cairns-Smith dismisses some of the other theories about the origin of life. He makes short work of the theories of Fred Hoyle and Francis Crick that organic life might have arrived on earth from outer space, carried in dust clouds or on meteors etc (Crick's version of this was named 'Panspermia') . I agree with Cairns-Smith that all variations on this hypothesis just relocate the problem somewhere else, but don't solve it.
Cairns-Smith states the problem in three really fundamental facts:
There is life on earth
All known living things are at root the same (using the same carbon-based energy-gathering and DAN-replicating biochemistry)
All known living things are very complicated
2. The theory of chemical evolution
In his day (the 1970s and 80s) the theory of 'chemical evolution' was widely thought to address the origin of life problem. This stated that lot of the basic amino acids and sugars which we find in organisms are relatively simple and so might well have been created by accident in the great sloshing oceans and lakes of pre-life earth, and that they then – somehow – came together to make more complex molecules which – somehow – learned how to replicate.
But it's precisely on the vagueness of that 'somehow' that Cairns-Smith jumps. The leap from a random soup of semi-amino acids washing round in a lake and the immensely detailed and complex machinery of life demonstrated by even a tiny living organism – he selects the bacterium Escherichia coli – is just too vast a cliff face to have been climbed at random, by accident. It's like saying if you left a bunch of wires and bits of metal sloshing around in a lake long enough they would eventually make a MacBook Air.
Cairns-Smith zeroes in on four keys aspects of life on earth which help to disprove the 'chemical evolution' theory.
Life forms are complex systems. It is the whole machine which makes sense of its components.
The systems are highly interlocked: catalysts are needed to make proteins, but proteins are needed to make catalysts; nucleic acids are needed to make proteins, yet proteins are needed to make nucleic acids;
Life forms are very complex.
The system is governed by rules and conventions: the exact choice of the amino acid alphabet and the set of assignments of amino acid letters to nucleic acid words are examples.
3. The Miller-Urey experiments
Cairns-Smith then critiques the theory derived from the Miller-Urey experiments.
In 1953 a graduate student, Stanley Miller, and his professor, Harold Urey, performed an experiment that demonstrated how organic molecules could have spontaneously formed from inorganic precursors, under conditions like those posited by the Oparin-Haldane Hypothesis. The now-famous 'Miller–Urey experiment' used a highly reduced mixture of gases – methane, ammonia and hydrogen – to form basic organic monomers, such as amino acids. (Wikipedia)
Cairns-Smith spends four pages comprehensively demolishing this approach by showing that:
the ultraviolet light its exponents claim could have helped synthesise organic molecules is in fact known to break covalent bonds and so degrade more than construct complex molecules
regardless of light, most organic molecules are in fact very fragile and degrade easily unless kept in optimum conditions (i.e. inside a living cell)
even if some organic molecules were created, organic chemists know only too well that there are hundreds of thousands of ways in which carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen can combine, and most of them result in sticky sludges and tars in which nothing could 'live'
Only some of the molecules of life can be made this way
Most of the molecules that would be made this way are emphatically not the 'molecules of life'
The 'molecules of life' are usually better made under conditions far most favourable than those obtaining back in the primordial soup era
He then does some back-of-a-matchbox calculations to speculate about how long it would take a random collection of organic molecules to 'happen' to all tumble together and create a life form: longer than the life of the universe, is his conclusion. No, this random approach won't work.
Preliminary principles
Instead, he suggests a couple of principles of his own:
That some and maybe all of the chemicals we now associate with 'life' were not present in the first replicating organisms; they came later; their exquisitely delicate interactivity suggests that they are the result not the cause of evolution
Therefore, all lines of investigation which seek to account for the presence of the molecules of life are putting the cart before the horse: it isn't the molecules which are important – it is the mechanism of replication with errors
Cairns-Smith thinks we should put the molecules of life question completely to one side, and instead seek for entirely inorganic systems which would replicate, with errors, so that the errors would be culled and more efficient ways of replicating tend to thrive on the available source material, beginning to create that dynamism and 'sense of purpose' which is one of life's characteristics.
We keep coming to this idea that at some earlier phase of evolution, before life as we know it, there were other kinds of evolving system, other organisms that, in effect, invented our system. (p.61)
This seems, intuitively, like a more satisfying approach. Random forces will never make a MacBook Air and, as he has shown in chapter 4, even an entity like Escherichia coli is so staggeringly complex and amazingly finely-tuned as to be inconceivable as the product of chance.
Trying to show that complex molecules like ribosomes or RNA or amino acids – which rely on each other to be made and maintained, which cannot exist deprived of the intricately complicated interplay within each living cell – came about by chance is approaching the problem the wrong way. All these complex organic molecules must be the result of evolution. Evolution itself must have started with something much, much simpler – with the 'invention' of the basic engine, motor, the fundamental principle – and this is replication with errors. In other words:
Evolution started with 'low-tech' organisms that did not have to be, and probably were not made from, 'the molecules of life'. (p.65)
And it is at this point that Cairns-Smith introduces his Big Idea – the central role of clay crystals – in a chapter titled, unsurprisingly, 'Crystals' (pp.75-79).
He now explains in some detail the surprisingly complicated and varied world of clay crystals. These naturally form in various solutions and, if splashed up onto surfaces like rocks or stones, crystallise out into lattices, but the crystallisation process also commonly involves errors and mutations.
His description of the different types of crystals and their properties is fascinating – who knew there were so many types, shapes, patterns and processes, starting with an introduction to the processes of saturation and super-saturation. The point is that crystals naturally occur and naturally mutate. He lists the ways they can vary or diverge from their 'pure' forms: twinning, stacking errors, cation substitutions, growth in preferred directions, break-up along preferred planes (p.97).
There follows a chapter about the prevalence of crystals in mud and clay and, therefore, their widespread presence in the conditions of the early planet earth.
And then, finally, he explains the big leap whereby replicating crystals may have attracted to themselves other molecules.
There follows a process of natural selection for clay crystals that trap certain forms of molecules to their surfaces that may enhance their replication potential. Complex proto-organic molecules can be catalysed by the surface properties of silicates.
Genetic takeover of the crystals
It is at this point that he introduces the idea of a 'genetic takeover'.
When complex molecules perform a 'genetic takeover' from their clay 'vehicle', they become an independent locus of replication – an evolutionary moment that might be understood as the first exaptation.
(Exaptation = 'the process by which features acquire functions for which they were not originally adapted or selected')
Cairns-Smith had already described this process – the 'genetic takeover' of an initial, non-organic process by more complex, potentially organic molecules – in his earlier, longer and far more technical book, Genetic Takeover: And the Mineral Origins of Life, published in 1982.
This book – the Seven Clues – is a much shorter, non-technical and more accessible popularisation of the earlier tome. Hence the frivolous references to Sherlock Holmes.
Proliferating crystals form the scaffold for molecules which learn to replicate without them
The final chapter explains how these very common and proliferating entities (clay crystals) might have formed into structures and arrangements which attracted – for purely chemical reasons – various elementary organic molecules to themselves.
Certain repeating structures might attract molecules which then build up into more complex molecules, into molecules which are more efficient at converting the energy of the sun into further molecular combinations. And thus the principle of replication with variation, and competition for resources among the various types of replicating molecule, would have been established.
At this point the book ends, his case presented. It has been a fascinating journey because a) it is interesting to learn about all the different shapes and types of clay crystal b) he forces the reader to think about the fundamental engineering and logistical aspects of life forms, to consider the underlying principles which must inform all life forms, which is challenging and rewarding.
But, even in his own terms, Cairns-Smith's notion of more and more complex potentially organic molecules being haphazardly replicated on a framework of proliferating clay crystals is still a long, long, long way from even the most primitive life forms known to us, with their vastly complex structure of cell membrane, nucleus and internal sea awash with DNA-controlled biochemical processes.
Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story on Amazon
Posted in Books, Chemistry, Science
Tagged 1985, A.G. Cairns-Smith, Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith, amino acids, biochemistry, Biology, chemical evolution, Darwin, DNA, Escherichia coli, evolution by natural selection, exaptation, Francis Crick, Fred Hoyle, genetic takeover, Genetic Takeover: And the Mineral Origins of Life, Harold Urey, inorganic chemicals, life, life on earth, living cell, methane atmosphere, mineralogy, molecular biology, Oparin-Haldane Hypothesis, panspermia, popular science, proteins, RNA, saturation and super-saturation, Science, self-replicating clay crystals, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, Sherlock Holmes, Stanley Miller, the Miller-Urey experiments, the origin of life on the Earth, the tree of life, University of Glasgow
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/16/seven-clues-to-the-origin-of-life-a-g-cairns-smith/
The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990)
In the soothing reek of his tobacconist's quiet stockroom, at the corner of Chancery Lane and Carey Street, Oliphant held the corner of the blue flimsy above the concise jet of a bronze cigar-lighter in the shape of a turbanned Turk.
(The Difference Engine page 338)
This is a really absorbing, intelligent and often mind-blowing book.
We are in 1855, though not the 1855 familiar from history books, for this is an alternative history. The 'point of divergence' from actual history appears to come around 1822 when Charles Babbage, not only theorises about the possibility of a computing machine (as he did in actual history) but builds one. This sets off a cascade of technological changes which result in a new political party, the Industrial Radical Party, seizing power, apparently by the assassination of then-Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington, in 1831. This led to a period of widespread rioting and anarchy, during which Luddites smashed the new-fangled machinery, referred to by the characters as the Time of Troubles.
It was during, or as a result of this disorder, that the Industrial Radical Party came to power with a vision of a completely new type of society, governed by reason and science and calculation. The 'Rads' co-opted the more flexible of the Luddite and working class leaders into cushy jobs as leaders of tame trade unions (p.295). Once in power the 'Rads' inaugurate an era of dazzling new technological and industrial innovations, led by a great social movement of industrialists, radicals and savants.
Lord Byron emerges as the great orator of the Industrial Radical Party, but Charles Babbage is its grey eminence and foremost social theorist (p.93)
Examples of these innovations are that Charles Babbage's Calculating Machine has found a wide variety of applications, including the creation of a Central Statistics Bureau which stores information about every person in the country via the medium of paper with holes punched in them (in reality, 'punched card' computers, which could only do very basic data storage, were not developed till the late 1890s, early 1900s).
Babbage's very first Engine, now an honoured relic, was still less than thirty years old, but the swift progression of Enginery had swept a whole generation in its wake, like some mighty locomotive of the mind. (p.121)
British people are no longer 'subjects' in this technicalised society, they are 'citizens', each issued with a unique citizen number, against which numerous records are kept, including their credit rating.
Another example is the new-fangled kinetrope machines, sets of cellulose cards with images on them which are 'clacked' through a machine in front of a light source to produce moving images (about 40 years before the earliest moving picture machines were actually invented).
London's underground train system is well advanced, with characters hopping off and on the noisy, smelly subterranean trains (in reality, the first tube line wasn't opened until 1863). London's streets are filled with steam engine-driven omnibuses or 'gurneys' as they seem to be called.
To summarise, in this alternative history, a wide range of new technologies have been developed about 50 years before they did so in the real world, and this produces a continual clash between the characters' mid-Victorian speech, dress and behaviour, and the continual array of newfangled technology the authors keep creating for the to interact with.
Historical jokes
There are a number of knowing, nudge-nudge, boom-boom jokes in which the authors imagine alternative destinies for various Eminent Victorians. Thus I sat up with a jolt when one of the central characters is approached by a short, grey-haired man who says he started life as a doctor but then wasted his youth dallying with poetry, before finding his current métier – as a purveyor of kinetrope films. His name? John Keats.
Benjamin Disraeli, far from gouging his way up the 'greasy pole' of politics (it was Disraeli who coined that expression), is stuck as a super-fluent novelist and journalist.
A divergence from our history which is probably too large to be a 'joke' is that, in this alternative history, the American Civil war has already broken out and war is raging between the Union North and Confederate South. The most striking feature of the war has been a working class insurrection in New York which has led to the creation of a 'Commune' (just as was to happen in Paris in 1870) led by the German émigré journalist and agitator Karl Marx! Presumably he found an England ruled by the Industrial radical party not a safe place to settle and moved on to New York (where, after all, he had many sympathisers, the real Karl Marx writing numerous articles for the New York Daily Tribune as its Europe correspondent from 1852 to 1862).
Another joke for the literary-minded is the fact that, in this world Lord Byron did not die of malaria in Greece in 1824, but lived on to become a leader of the Radical Party and is, at the time of the novel, Prime Minister of England, although the social disturbances described in the middle of the story coincide with the 'old Orator's' death.
In fact this is a central fact to the plot, because the mystery or secret at the heart of the book rotates around Byron's daughter, Lady Ada Byron who was, in our version of history, an advanced practitioner of Babbage's theories, so much so that she is nowadays sometimes credited with being the very first computer programmer. In reality Ada died aged only 36 in 1852; in the novel she is still alive, but a very dubious figure, rumour has it she is addicted to gambling of all sorts and, when we first meet her, she appears to be high on drugs.
The prose is stuffed and cluttered with two distinct elements, steampunk and Victoriana.
Continual reference to machines and technologies and the political party and scientific discoveries which dominate the age, never letting you forget its novel alternative industrial ambience. Wherever possible people use gadgets, machines which click and clunk together, cards which have hole punches, steam-gurneys in the street, offices with voice tubes, telegraphs not only between post offices but extending to people's individual houses, and so on. Here's a description of Oliphant's telegraph machines.
Three Colt & Maxwell receiving-telegraphs, domed in glass, dominated the end of the table nearest the window, their tapes coiling into wire baskets arranged on the carpet. There was a spring-driven transmitter as well, and an encrypting tape-cutter of recent Whitehall issue. the various cables for these devices, in tightly-woven sleeves of burgundy silk, snaked up to a floral eyebolt suspended from the central lavalier, where they then swung to a polished brass plate, beating the insignia of the Post Office, which was set into the wainscoting. (p.296)
Or the scene at the enormous Central Statistics Bureau, keeper of the most powerful Engines which keep tabs on all citizens:
Behind the glass loomed a vast hall of towering Engines – so many that at first Mallory thought the walls must surely be lined with mirrors, like a fancy ballroom. It was like some carnival deception, meant to trick the eye – the giant identical Engines, clock-like constructions of intricately interlocking brass, big as railcars set on end, each on its foot-thick padded blocks. The whitewashed ceiling, thirty feet overhead, was alive with spinning pulley-belts, the lesser gears drawing power from tremendous spoked flywheels on socketed iron columns. White-coated clackers, dwarfed by their machines, paced the spotless aisles. (p.136)
Victorian slang
I wonder how two authors born in South Carolina (Gibson) and Texas (Sterling) managed to create a prose style absolutely stuffed with Victorian slang and argot.
But above and beyond these two identifiable components, the style is just very rich, the sentences seamed with inventive imagery and interesting vocabulary. Here are our heroes standing by the sewage-laden Thames.
Fraser looked up and down the mudflats at the foot of the embankment. Mallory followed his gaze. Small boats were embedded in the grey-black mud as if set in cement. Here and there along the bend of the Limehouse Reach, rivulets of viridian slime reached up through the gouged tracks of channel-dredgers. (p.253)
Or Oliphant looking at mugshots of Victorian criminals:
It was a collection of stipple-printed Engine portraits. Dark-haired Englishmen with hangdog looks. The little square picture-bits of the Engine prints were just big enough to distort their faces slightly, so that the men all seemed to have black drool in their mouths and dirt in the corner of their eyes. They all looked like brothers, some strange human sub-species of the devious and disenchanted. (p.128)
Or the lowering weather during the Stink of London:
Outside the Palace, the London sky was a canopy of yellow haze.
It hung above the city in gloomy grandeur, like some storm-fleshed, jellied man-o'war. Its tentacles, the uprising filth of the city's smokestacks, twisted and fluted like candlesmoke in utter stillness, to splash against a lidded ceiling of glowering cloud. The invisible sun cast a drowned and watery light. (p.164)
Or the kind of zippy, mind-expanding phraseology which prose can do better than all TV or film:
It was hot, uncommon hot, beastly hot. There was not a ray of sun but the air was mortally still and the high cloudy sky had a leaden, glowering look, as if it wanted to rain but had forgotten the trick of it. (p.138)
The book is divided into five 'iterations'.
First Iteration: The angel of Goliad (62 pages)
Cockney courtesan Sybil Gerrard, daughter of the Luddite agitator Walter Gerrard (who was hanged as the Radical Party took power) has been taken up by Michael Radley, Flash Mick, who promises to make her an apprentice adventuress and take her with him to Paris. Flash Mick is orchestrating the European speaking tour of Texas legend and American politician, Sam Houston. We witness one of his speeches about his life and times, which is accompanied by a kinetrope projection of moving pictures onto the backdrop behind him, managed by Mick. However, Houston double crosses Mick by stealing the projection cards. Mick sends Sybil up to Houston's hotel room, while he keeps the Texan busy drinking in the hotel's smoking room but Sybil is horrified to discover an assassin waiting in the room, who holds his knife to her throat to hush her. A few minutes later Mick opens the door into the darkened room, and finds himself pinned against the wall by the assassin and his throat brutally cut. Then Houston himself arrives to find himself confronted by the assassin. He's one of the Texan fighters who consider that Houston betrayed them, particularly when Texan soldiers were massacred by the Mexicans who'd captured them after the battle of Goliad, and ran off with their money. Houston tries to sweet talk him round but the assassin pushes him to the floor and then shoots him in the chest, before smashing the hotel window and escaping down the fire escape.
Horrified, Sybil crawls to Houston's body as he gurgles pleas for help, and realise she is crawling over diamonds which have spilled out from Houston's cane. The man was a walking treasure trove. She stuffs as many as she can into her bodice, then stands and exits the hotel room. Standing for a moment quietly in the empty hotel corridor, before walking as casually as she can away.
Second Iteration: Derby Day (23 pages)
Introduces us Edward Mallory, tall, bearded hero of a scientific expedition to Wyoming where he discovered the fossilised skeleton of a brontosaurus, hence his nickname 'Leviathan Mallory'.
He is at Epsom for the Derby, drinking in the sights and sounds of a mid-Victorian day out. He goes to see his younger brother, Tom, who's got a good job working for the designer and builder of a new type of (steam-powered) racing machine, Michael Godwin (p.74). The machine looks like a big tadpole on wheels, named The Zephyr. Godwin suggests Mallory bets £10 on the Zephyr, but he doesn't have that much. So Godwin says he'll lend Mallory a tenner and if they win they'll share the proceeds, or he can pay him back if it loses. So Mallory goes along to a betting booth, places the £10 and then, on impulse, decides to gamble all the money he has in the world, £40. In an exciting race, Zephyr wins at long odds. Mallory makes £500 – he is rich!
Mallory is making way for a steam-powered brougham or carriage pushing through the crowd, when he notices the young woman sitting in it punching the older woman by her side (p.85).
Mallory immediately intervenes to protest but a rough-looking man driving the carriage leaps out and asks him what business it is of his, lunges at him and – Mallory realises – stabs him in the thigh with a stiletto. Mallory is a big man, he was a boxing champion and has survived in the wilds of the American West. Now he smashes the little spiv in the face, breaking some of his teeth. The bloodied little man screams at Mallory that he will not only kill him, he will destroy him.
Mallory helps the woman who was hit out of the coach. She is wearing a veil and talks as if drugged and quite calmly hands a long wooden box, 'something like an instrument case' (p.85). When she removes the veil he realises it is Ada Byron, daughter of the Prime Minister and one of the most important theoreticians of the calculating machines which dominate modern life, 'Lady Ada Byron, the Queen of Engines' (p.89). Mallory accompanies her to the Royal Box where she is let in by the security guards, but not him, who they turn away. He wanders off puzzled, to collect his winnings, and realises he is still holding the long wooden case. What is in it? Why did she hand it to him?
When Mallory opens it he discovers it is full of Engine-produced cellulose cards i.e. designed to be 'clacked' or projected onto a screen via a light source. Mallory stashes it in his locker at the Museum of Practical Geology (p.103).
Third iteration: Dark Lanterns (102 pages)
The phrase dark lanterns appears to refer to people working undercover, for whatever reason.
Having recently returned from a scientific expedition to the American mid-West – where he cemented his reputation by discovering the fossilised skeleton of a brontosaurus – Mallory is staying in rooms at the vast Palace of Palaeontology. Here he is visited by Laurence Oliphant, supposedly a journalist, in fact some kind of official, and wounded in the 'Tokyo Affair', by a sabre slash across his wrist.
Oliphant knows Mallory's secret – that on the scientific expedition he also undertook gun-running tasks for the Royal Society Commission on Free Trade. Unnervingly, he also knows that Professor Rudwick, who has recently been murdered in London, was also carrying out secret offices for the Commission on Free Trade. Rudwick had been arming the Comanche Indians in Texas. He was murdered the same night Sam Houston was wounded and his publicist, Mick Radley, was eviscerated, as we saw in the first iteration.
(It takes some teasing out from the hints scattered across the narrative, but I think the gun-running is somehow to undermine America by making Texas focus on is own troubles with Indians. We know America is racked by a civil war. Britain is happy for America to remain fragmented into separate countries – the Union, the Confederacy, an independent republic of Texas, and so on.)
Mallory walks through central London to the Museum of Practical Geology in Duke Street, where he meets and chats with Thomas Henry Huxley, in real history famous for publicising Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. For a long time after Darwin's theory was published there were two schools of evolutionists: uniformitarians who believed the world was immensely old and evolution had taken place very slowly over vast periods; and catastrophists, who believed the whole world and its living systems were regularly shaken by cataclysms, volcanic activity, tsunamis, comets crashing into the planet, you name it and that these catastrophes ware the driving force of change in life forms. Until the start of the 20th century they actually had science on their side, because all educated opinion had it that the sun was only a few million years old. This was because astrophysicists knew nothing about radiation and dated the sun on the basis that it was a burning ball of hydrogen (p.178). Only with the discovery of sub-atomic particles and the splitting of the atom did science realise that the sun is driven by nuclear fusion, and that this process could have been going on for billions of years, which swung the pendulum in favour of the uniformitarians.
In the 1980s and 1990s Stephen Jay Gould and colleagues advanced the theory of 'punctuated equilibrium' i.e. the notion of very long periods of slow change interrupted by a number of cataclysmic events which rewrote 'the book of life'. The debate continues to this day.
The conversation with Huxley makes it clear that Mallory was a catastrophist (which matches the sometimes melodramatic events of this book) (p.115). Huxley introduces the man who is going to erect the brontosaurus bones into a life sized model at the museum, and they have an argument since he has been told to build the animal squatting like a frog, since a rival palaeontologist thinks it lived in swamps. Mallory strongly disagrees and says it must be built with a tall neck stretching up like a giraffe, since it ate leaves off the canopies of trees.
Mallory goes to Horseferry Road, site of the Central Statistics Bureau, heart of this Engine-based society. He's been advised to come here by Oliphant, in order to track down the ruffian who stabbed him at Epsom using the CBS's vast 'Engines', primitive computers used to file and sort vast numbers of punched cards. Oliphant told him to contact Wakefield, Undersecretary for Quantitative Criminology.
Mallory bribes the assistant, Tobias, who Wakefield allots to help him look through the mugshots the Engines shoot out on the basis of his description. Doesn't seem to be a record of the cad who stabbed him. But there is a mugshot of the vividly red-haired 'tart' who he saw punch Lady Ada. She is Florence Bartlett.
Back at the Palace of Palaeontology, sweating because of the hot summer weather, Mallory has lunch and picks up letters from his family back in Sussex (much is made of his Sussex heritage and a Sussex accent he can revert to, if provoked), and his little sister who's getting married. it crosses his mind to buy her a wedding present.
So after lunch in the Palace's dining room, Mallory walks along Piccadilly to Burlington Arcade where he buys a large clock for his younger sister and discovers he is being followed by a man who holds a handkerchief to his mouth a lot, who Mallory christens the Coughing Gent. Mallory lets himself be trailed into an alleyway where he suddenly springs on the man, driving him to the ground when he is himself struck hard on the back of the head by a cosh and collapses dazed, then wanders back down the alleyway to Piccadilly, leaning against a paling with blood coursing down his head and neck.
He realises he is near where Oliphant lives and blunders up to the door of his house in Half Moon Street. Oliphant lets Mallory in, tells his man to get water and a flannel and proceeds to clean and stitch up the wound. When Mallory suddenly remembers he left his sister's precious clock in the alleyway, Oliphant dispatches Bligh who discovers it untouched and brings it safely back. Oliphant playfully speculates whether the attack was made on behalf of rival scientists (or 'savants' as they're called throughout the book) or is some kind of payback for his gun-running activities in America.
Either way, he recommends the discreet services of Inspector Ebenezer Fraser of the Bow Street Special Branch.
In an eerie scene Oliphant then introduces Mallory to half a dozen Japanese businessmen and diplomats who have come to learn the ways of the West and raise their land out of backwardness and superstition. They are all kneeling Japanese style at a lacquer table in a back room of Oliphant's apartment. Here they demonstrate to him a robot woman they have made which pours out drinks.
After passing a hot sweaty night in his rooms at the Palace, Mallory is woken by cleaners come to flush out the stinking toilet. There's also a letter printed on celluloid, demanding that he return the box he took from lady Ada, via instructions given in the Daily Express, and threatening to ruin him otherwise, signed 'Captain Swing'. Even as he reads it the card bursts into flames and he has to grab other papers to douse it. At that moment Ebenezer Fraser enters his office.
Fraser shows Mallory a photo of Professor Rudwick's cut-up body and a note which implies it is only the first in a series. It seems someone is trying to frame Mallory and scare fellow savants into thinking he is instigating a series of murders.
Fraser and Mallory walk through London while they discuss a number of issues, recent history, the Time of Troubles, the triumph of the Industrial Radical Party, Lady Ada Byron's real character (a savant, yes, but also a notorious gambler) for Mallory has an appointment to meet the noted romantic novelist and scribbler, Benjamin Disraeli, who he finds eating a breakfast of coffee and stinking mackerel fried in gin (!). Disraeli has been engaged to write an account of Mallory's adventures in America, which went well beyond scientific investigation for fossils and included friendship with the Native Americans. Mallory censors his memories for Disraeli (leaving out the fact he had sex with Indian women) and ends up helping the author fix an early form of typewriter.
Back in the street, Mallory hooks up with Fraser who had been waiting. Something weird is happening to the sky. It has turned a yellow colour and the atmosphere is thick and pestilent. Smells of sewage. This is the book's version of the real historical event of the Great Stink of London which took place in 1858, when hot weather made stinks from the Thames overrun central London forcing Parliament to move to Oxford.
In this novel it combines with dense fog to create an end-of-the-world atmosphere.
Fraser exposes the Coughing Gent and (presumably) the accomplice who coshed Mallory, as well-known private detectives Mr J.C. Tate and Mr George Velasco. Sullenly, like naughty schoolboys, they put up with Fraser's description of them, then, when Mallory offers to pay guineas, confess the man who put them up to following Malory is a fellow savant and rival palaeontologist, Peter Foulke.
They have a gritty lunch at a roadside booth and then return to the Palace of Palaeontology to discover that someone has broken in and set fire to his room, burning a lot of his papers and clothes. It is this 'Captain Swing' again who is clearly carrying out a vendetta till he gets the box of cards back. Luckily Mallory has hidden them safely where no-one will ever know – inside the skull of the brontosaurus fossil which the assistants are even now erecting in the museum. the only person he tells is Ada Lovelace, who he writes a personal message to.
Mallory now decides he wants to do some 'genuine, blackguard, poverty-stricken drinking' and Fraser suggests they go to the pleasure grounds at Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea. The shops are closing, The sky is dark yellow. it is difficult to breathe. Earlier they'd noticed the Underground railway workers had come out on strike claiming it was impossible to breathe underground. Now shops are putting up their shutters. Somewhere on the way to Chelsea Fraser and Mallory are best by a gang of boys, jeering in their faces, one of them riding an early type of roller skates. After yelling abuse at our chaps this boy spins out of control and shoots through a plate glass window. Instantly his mates start looting the shop. Fraser wades in and someone throws a shard of glass which embeds in his back, painfully though not fatally. Mallory pulls it out, staunches the bleeding and helps Fraser to the King's Road police station.
Fourth iteration: Seven Curses (93 pages)
Mallory proceeds on to Cremorne Gardens where he gets drunk and chats up a woman with a fine figure if a blocky, lantern-jawed face. After a dance, they proceed to a snog, she takes him outside and lets him touch her breast. She persuades Mallory to pay their fare on a paddle streamer which will take them along the sluggish, effluent-filled Thames down to the East End. She's called Hetty and we realise she is the flatmate of Sybil who we met in the first iteration. They are both courtesans.
Hetty takes Mallory back to her squalid little rooms where they have sex several times, in a manner constrained by Victorian convention and vocabulary, for example he has to pay a lot extra for her to strip naked. Mallory uses French letters he had earlier purchased in Haymarket, and the authors use the Victorian word 'spend' for orgasm which, along with numerous other details, give it an authentic historic feel.
Next morning Mallory emerges into a London which seems overcome by cataclysm. Overnight there has been widespread looting and shooting. Mallory himself is nearly shot down by a nervous shopkeeper. Firemen have been attacked. An omnibus pushed over and set on fire. London has collapsed into complete anarchy, with armed bands, drunk bands, rioters and looters roaming the streets and trashing street after street, as Mallory discovers as he makes his way through the foggy, dangerous streets. He gets set on by a mob and only frees himself by firing his revolver into the air.
Then, in a surreal scene, he comes along a trundling cart being used by three bill posters to stick up enormous posters along the base of London buildings. This all seems harmless until he reads one they've just put up which starts off publicising a speech to be given by him, Mallory, before turning nasty and accusing him of all sorts of crimes. Mallory threatens the bill posters who call for their boss, who describes himself as the Poster King and sits inside the jaunting, swaying carriage into which he invites Mallory for a civilised chat. He explains that they were engaged this morning by a man calling himself Captain Swing. This captain has based himself in the West India Docks. Mallory gives them cash in exchange for all the posters libelling him.
Mallory blunders through the fog dodging rioters to arrive back at the Palace of Palaeontology, with his clutch of posters. It is full of refugees from the heat and stink and fog and anarchy.
Here he is delighted to discover his brother Brian, back from service in India. And Tom, the youngest brother, has motored up in the famous Zephyr. What of the marriage of their younger sister? Mallory asks. Brian sadly informs him that some bounder wrote a letter to Madeline's fiancé accusing the innocent girl of all kinds of scandal (pre-marital sex, basically).
Mallory explains the letter was written by the tout, the driver, the man who attacked him, the infamous Captain Swing. It is just part of a much larger campaign, for London is now plastered with posters exhorting the working classes to rise up against their oppressors and claim what is theirs. Fired by revenge, Brian and Tom vow to join Ned on a march to the west India Dock to find and punish this fiend. Fraser (who has joined them) agrees to come along, in the spirit of arresting this dangerous anarchist.
They trundle across London from Kensington to the Isle of Dogs on Tom's Zephyr but when they get to the docks realise that its eight-foot-high walls are guarded and the gates locked and barred. The only way in is via the locks giving onto the Thames which is at low tide. So they strip and wade across the foul stinking mud, until they're spotted by guards, a ragamuffin crew of anarchists, but pretend themselves to be anarchists and looters and so are helped up to ground level, washed off with water and cologne, and led along to a big meeting of the lads by a cocky young lad who calls himself the Marquess of Hastings.
Here, in a warehouse, Mallory is astonished to find an audience of looters and anarchists and communists being addressed by none other than Florence Russell Bartlett, the red-haired young woman who had been bullying Lady Ada at Epsom and is now haranguing an audience of lowlifes about 'the revolutionary spirit of the working class' (p.268)
Mallory has a coughing fit and is led away by the Marquess but, in his reactions to the speaker, pretty clearly gives himself away as a patriot and radical. Before he can react Mallory punches Hastings unconscious. Hasting's black servant Jupiter stands watching, not lifting a finger. As he remarks:
'There is nothing to history. No progress, no justice. There is nothing but random horror.' (p.272)
Mallory returns to the lecture to find Bartlett now onto the death of the family and the triumph of free love in the communist society when he stands up and declares he has a message for Captain Swing. An uproar breaks out, chairs are thrown at him, Mallory brings out his pistol and shots are fired. Suddenly he, Brian, Tom and Fraser are on the run through the warren of Victorian warehouses. This turns into a prolonged fight, with our boys doing well but soon running out of ammunition while the enemy consolidate their position and begin sniping. our boys hide within an enormous pile of bales of cotton which they hurriedly erect into a makeshift fortress. The tide turns their way when Brian lets off an artillery piece he has, killing quite a few of the attackers, and making his way into the fortress with new rifles, but then they are again pinned down.
Captain Swing himself approaches waving a white flag, calling for a truce and asking for the return of the wooden box of cards. Then the entire situation is transformed with a tremendous explosion and collapse of part of the ceiling. One or more naval ships out in the Thames are firing at the docks, which have been identified as a centre of sedition. The roof collapses. Fire breaks out. Dead and injured anarchists lie about the floor. In a cinematic moment Mallory emerges to stand on the 'parapet' of the cotton fortress. Captain Swing, far away on the floor of the warehouse, takes aim and misses, while Mallory methodically swings a rifle into the correct grip, takes aim, and shoots Swing down. Fraser leaps to the parapet beside him then clambers down and across the body-littered warehouse floor to clap the wounded captain in handcuffs.
At just this moment the long sweltering heat stifling the capital finally breaks in a tremendous thunderstorm.
Catastrophe had knocked Swing's fortress open in a geyser of shattered brick dominoes. Mallory, blissful, the nails of his broken shoe-heel grating, walked into a London reborn.
Into a tempest of cleansing rain. (p.287)
The last four pages of the chapter jump to Mallory as an old man of 83 in 1908. He lived to a ripe old age and rose to become President of the Royal Society. Now we find him in the study of his home and, in a manner entirely fitting the rather hallucinatory scenes we've just witnessed, the narrative gives two alternative scenarios for his death from heart failure.
On his desk are two folders, one to his left, one to his right. In one scenario, Mallory opens the folder on his left which describes the demise of the Japanese branch of the international Society of Light, which makes him sad and then so angry that he bursts an artery.
In the other scenario, Mallory opens the folder on his right which describes the amazing new fossil finds which have been made in the Burgess shale in western Canada, an explosion of weird and inexplicable animals shapes never seen before or since which creates such a rush of blood to his head that he suffers a stroke and dies.
Fifth iteration: The All-Seeing Eye (64 pages)
We appear to have left Mallory now. The new focus of the narrative is Laurence Oliphant, who poses as a dandyish journalist but quite obviously belongs to one of the security services with a special interest in tracking representatives of foreign powers.
It's in this respect that he was hosting a dinner party for six Japanese men that Mallory interrupted. Now he goes about a day's work accompanied by another fawning Japanese who is infatuated with British technology ad modern appliances, a Mr Mori Arinori.
We are told that it is November 1855, some six months after Mallory's adventure in the cotton warehouse. Lord Byron has in fact died, and been replaced by Lord Brunel (presumably Isambard Kingdom) though not without civil disturbances through the summer and there now appears to be a purge of old Luddites whose cases are being reopened and re-prosecuted by the zealous Lord Charles Egremont who is conducting something of an anti-Luddite witch-hunt.
Oliphant's leisurely drawling personage ('his gaze, beneath the black brim of his top hat, is mild and ironical') proceeds to:
– visit Dr McNeile, a physician who uses an articulated 'manipulation table' and electric currents applied to the body to try and cure 'railway spine', a spurious medical condition in which the 'magnetic polarity of the spine' is supposed to have been reversed by trauma. Oliphant had been recommended to McNeile by Lady Brunel, wife of the new Prime Minister (p.295).
– home to his house in Half Moon Street off Piccadilly, where his butler Bligh serves him a luncheon of cold mutton and pickle with a bottle of ale. Oliphant checks the three receiving-telegraphs on his desk and finds a request to meet from Fraser, the detective who accompanied Mallory through most of the previous two sections.
– take a cab to Brigsome Terrace in the East End where Fraser is waiting to show him the body of a huge man who died of poisoning while eating a tin of baked beans in a squalid little flat. Oliphant questions Fraser and his subordinate Betteridge. A complicated picture emerges whereby several Pinkerton agents arrived in London eighteen months earlier and had begun to extend a network of contacts and informants. Betteridge had been tasked with attending a performance by a troupe of women dancers come over from New York – The Manhattan Women's Red Pantomime Troupe. New York is now a workers' commune, run by Karl Marx (the authors describe the revolution growing out of anti-conscription riots, and there were indeed widespread and violent riots against the conscription imposed during the Civil War).
In the crowd at the panto performance Betteridge had spotted the well-known agitator, Florence Bartlett. It emerges that Bartlett is a well-known murderer and vitrioleuse i.e. acid thrower. She likely commissioned the Texian giant whose corpse they're standing over to murder Professor Rudwick, when he refused to agree to some mission or task – and then poisoned the giant.
– next day proceeds to the Statistics Bureau and to see Wakefield to ask him to run information through to the Engines to tell him who sent a particular telegram to the Duke's Hotel. Wakefield's machine tells him it was Charles Egremont. Oliphant asks Wakefield to find the text of the telegram and leaves.
– Oliphant is much possessed by memories of flash Mick Radley's death. He was there in the smoking room getting drunk with Houston and Mick, when Mick was called out of the room by a scared-looking woman (who we know to be Sybil Gerrard). Later that night Oliphant was called back to the hotel and has vivid flashbacks of searching through the belongings of the eviscerated Radley and wounded Houston. The Texian connection links into the visit of the red Ballet, and the arrival 18 months earlier of the Pinkertons. No direct links, But a mood.
– to visit Mr Hermann Kriege, late of the New York Volks Tribüne, who had greeted Karl Marx to New York, and had been on the central committee of the commune Marx set up there, till they fell out and Kriege had to flee for his life, now living in poverty-stricken exile in a slum in Soho (like many other American exiles). Oliphant is paying him to be a spy and informer about goings-on in the émigré community.
– to a pub in nearby Compton Street, which hosts dogs fighting rats competitions. Much drinking and gambling and dead rats and, occasionally, dead dogs. Oliphant meets Fraser and together they go up to the rat arena where they meet the manager Sayers, and show him a daguerreotype of the giant found murdered in the East End. Sayers confirms that that's the big man who murdered professor Rudwick. They bump into Tate and Velasco, the confidential agents we last saw assaulting Mallory, guns for hire. They are cocky and abusive so that Fraser nearly arrests them, but suave Oliphant is charm itself and tells him to desist. They swank themselves that they are hired by an eminent member of Parliament, Oliphant guesses Egremont.
– Oliphant breakfasts (presumably the next day) with Mori Arinori, the most zealous of the Japanese who have come to Britain to study its go-ahead culture. Oliphant takes him to the pantomime at the Garrick theatre, Whitechapel, to see the Manhattan Women's Red Pantomime Troupe. The performance is full of inexplicable modernism and half naked women. They go backstage and are introduced to a 'Helen America' who insists they go round the corner to the latest thing in self-service cafeterias (Mr Arinori is entranced; in reality this kind of thing wouldn't appear in America till 100 years later). Oliphant shows her an Engine-produced image of Flora Barnett which makes Helen America cross, saying Flora is no communist, is not even American. She realises Oliphant is some kind of policeman and storms out of the café.
– Arriving home, Oliphant discovers that the boy Tobias who he bribed at the Statistics Bureau has tracked down the punch code of the telegraphic message sent to Duke's hotel and delivered it while he was out. After fiddling about with screwdrivers and such, he rigs up his own telegraph-receiving machine to read the card and translate it into text. It is an illiterate long message sent by Sybil Gerrard accusing Charles Egremont of 'ruining' her i.e. taking her virginity out of wedlock, which we saw her dictating and sending in the first chapter, when Sybil thought she was going to Paris with flash Mick.
– Oliphant, rather amazingly, pays a visit to Albert the Prince Consort, with whom he on intimate terms, having brought a present for the son and heir, Alfred. (It turns out the Japanese automaton we saw earlier in the story was also a gift designed for young 'Affie although, like most children, he's managed to break it). In the middle of reading Affie the new storybook he's brought, an urgent message comes for Oliphant.
He races by cab to Fleet Street where he discovers there's been an outrage. Florence Bartlett and two assistants broke into the Museum of Practical geology and stole the skull Mallory's brontosaurus. They made their getaway in a horse and trap. Getting caught in a jam with another cab, the baddies pulled out a gun, passing police fired on them and there happened to be a soldier passing by and carrying one of the new 'Russian shotguns' which – I have only now realised – are a newfangled type of extremely destructive hand-held weapon, maybe like a bazooka (I realise Brian had used one of these to devastate the attackers in the Battle of the West India Docks). Anyway, Florence Bartlett and her two assistants are very dead, along with half a dozen passersby and police. Rival police agencies are at work on the bodies and Fraser takes Oliphant aside and slips him the case they found on the dead robbers, covered in plaster and obviously extracted from the skull. And a letter informing Bartlett that the case is inside the skull. They both recognise the hand-writing of Ada Lovelace, deary me she really is deep into this trouble.
Oliphant slips away with this booty, and examines it at leisure at the office of his tobacconists', not far away in Chancery Lane. He destroys the letter from Ada then asks the man to lock the box containing the Engine-cards in his safe. What the devil is on them??
In pages 330 to 355 or so we find out what it's all about. The set of Engine-cards which Mallory received from lady Ada and Captain Swing went to such trouble to reclaim and which Flora Bartlett died stealing, are French in origin. They contain a code designed to disable the Great Napoleon, the name given to the vast calculating machine prized by the French. Disabling it is a blow for the anarchists and those who oppose this surveillance society.
Oliphant confronts Wakefield in his club and learns that Egremont, via his department of Anthropometry, has taken over the Bureau of Statistics. Wakefield is scared to be seen with Oliphant. We learn from his muttered remarks that Oliphant and his people were the first to practice swiping people off the street, interrogating them and then making them disappear. They did it in a 'good' cause. But now Egremont and his people are going to do it in order to secure their grip on power. Egremont is close to Francis Galton, cousin of Darwin, who holds power in the Lords and is a strong proponent of genetics. Of helping evolution along by sterilising the poor and weak and forcing the breeding of the noble and fit. It isn't stated in these terms, but this constellation of forces has the potential to institute a Fascist society.
Convinced he is being followed, Oliphant slips out into a back alley, and catches a night train to Paris where he meets a trusted colleague high up in the Imperial Police Force. He wants to the whereabouts of Sybil Gerrard. It is only when he meets Sybil in a bohemian Montmartre café that we learn that it isn't simply a case of Egremont deflowering – or maybe 'abusing' Sybil, as we would say nowadays.
Much more dangerous to Egremont is that in his early days, he was a sympathiser with the Luddites, he was a colleague and friend of Sybil's father. It was only later that he helped get him arrested and hanged. And the witchhunt he is organising under the new Prime Minister, Lord Brunel, reflects his paranoia about his old links with the Luddites resurfacing.
In the Montmartre café Oliphant appears to persuade a reluctant Sybil to help him, to dictate a testament about her own deflowering but also about Egremont's early political heresy, which will ruin him and stop the totalitarian party.
Cut to a really brief, clipped scene: Mr Mori Arinori arrives outside the Belgravia home of Charles Egremont MP in a new-fangled Zephyr, parks, takes off his goggles, walks politely over to Egremont, ignoring the machine-gun-armed bodyguard, bows, hands Egremont 'a stout manila envelope' and returns to his car. Egremont watches him, puzzled.
The reader is left to deduce that the envelope must contain Sybil's testimony and some kind of demand that Egremont resign.
Modus: The images tabled
This is a peculiar thing to have in a work of fiction: the last 27 pages form a sort of appendix made up of excerpts from various documents, diaries, letters, recordings, histories and so on which shed light on how the alternative history came about, tell us about the later destinies of many of the characters, and 'explain' the meaning of the Engine-cards.
1864 – A (fictional) extract from an essay by Charles Babbage explaining how insight into using a language of signs and symbols extended the theoretical workings of the Difference Engine into the practical form of an Analytical Engine.
1830 – Letter to a newspaper encouraging readers to go out and vote for Babbage in the 1830 General Election.
1912 – (Fictional) history describing how Wellington's repression in 1830 featuring massacres of protesters led to the Times of Trouble and eventual triumph of Lord Byron's Industrial radical Party.
1855 – (Fictional) letter from Disraeli describing Lord Byron's state funeral.
1855 – three-page testimony from Byron's wife describing how she had to put up with his – to her – disgusting sexual practices which she out up with while finding solace in the kindly educating of Charles Babbage, full of 'the pure light of mathematical science'.
1855 – a couple of miners working with the huge underground digger boring tube tunnels witness a visit by the Grand Master Miner Emeritus
1855 – record of the words of the Reverend Alistair Roseberry who denounces Ada Byron as a debauched gambler, before he is grappled to the ground and actually shot.
1855 – Brunel's address to his cabinet asking their help to deal with the murder of Roseberry.
1855 – testimony of Kenneth Reynolds, nightwatchman at the Museum of Practical Geology, on discovering the corpse of the Marquess of Hastings who a) we met cockily inviting Mallory and brothers up into the West India Docks, who then b) Mallory punched unconscious and c) took part in the robbery led by Florence Bartlett to steal the box of Engine-cards from their hiding place in the skull of the brontosaurus, being lowered by rope through the skylight, extracting the box and handing it up to his colleagues before slipping and falling onto the hard stone floor below, shattering his skull.
1870 – memo to the Foreign Office from Lord Liston, describing the drunk behaviour of the ex-President of the American Union Mr Clement L. Vallandigham – to which is added a note that Sam Houston, ex-President of Texas, recently passed away in exile in Mexico.
1875 – spoken reminiscences of Thomas Towler, grandfather of Edward Towler, inventor of the Towler Audiograph who remembers a) the extreme poverty before the Rad government revolutionised the economy and b) the way Lord Byron roused the English to send food to Ireland during the Potato Famine, thus securing the loyalty of the Irish for generations.
1857 – John Keats gives testimony about a meeting with Oliphant. Oliphant is a smooth operator but we have but we have been given access to his mind and his rather paranoid fears and waking nightmares about an 'all-seeing Eye', which knows all our numbers and identities, that the computational powers of the Engines will match and supersede God's knowledge. Oliphant has Keats confirm that kinetropy is probably the most advanced branch of computing, and then gives him the French Engine-cards to analyse and find out what they mean.
Lyrics to the Great Panmelodium Polka, the panmelodium being the Victorian steampunk version of a juke box.
1860 – snippet of gossip from Tatler machine that Oliphant has set sail, leaving Britain to join the Susquehanna Phalanstery established by Professor Coleridge and the Reverend Wordsworth, which could be interpreted as a) the gloomy religious visions which we saw occasionally dogging his mind have tipped him over or b) Britain became too dangerous for him.
1866 – the full Victorian-style playbill of a major new Kinotropic Drama staged by J.J. Tobias, who we met as the junior clerk in the Quantitative Criminology section of the Central Statistics Bureau, and who Oliphant bribed to get him the text of the telegram which turns out to have been the accusation sent by Sybil to Charles Egremont.
1854 – poem written by Mori Yujo, samaurai and classical scholar on his son's departure for England.
1854 – letter home to his father from Mori Arinori describing his first sighting of the shore of England.
Narrative A – a return to the third person narrator which gives a seven-page description of Lady Ada on a speaking tour of Paris in which she describes in rather mystical terms the potential for the so-called 'Modus Programme' to lead to an Engine whose method of self-referentiality might eventually lead it to self-awareness. There's scattered applause from the half-filled auditorium and Fraser (for it is he; a much older, white-bearded Fraser, wounded from some incident in the line of duty, now retired and allotted a final task of being Lady Ada's bodyguard) helps her to her changing room where he knows she'll help herself liberally to the gin. He waits at the stage door where he finds a woman loitering. At first he (and the reader) think it might be part of some diabolical scheme: maybe someone's going to kidnap lady Ada and replace her with an impersonator who will travel across Europe saying… saying what, exactly?
But it turns out to be Sybil Gerrard, only now using the surname Tournechon (as she told Oliphant when he tracked her down to the Montmartre café). When Ada emerges, at first Sibyl asks for an autograph – then changes her tone and asks what it feels like to be a little old lady, lecturing to empty halls, deliberately hurtful. Then changes her tune again, trying to push past Fraser (who is by now pushing her away) in order to give Ada a large and genuine diamond ring, presumably made with one of the diamonds she stole from Houston after he was stabbed.
Then she is gone. Fraser helps her into the gurney. It drives to their hotel. Fraser helps her up to her room. They discuss money. Maybe she will have to go and lecture in America, though whether Confederate South or Union North… Fraser recalls being given the job by 'the Hierarch' (the only time this word is used in the book: who does he mean? is it as simple as Lord Brunel?) His task is to keep her out of England and so out of scandal, away from gambling dens, try to keep her sober and out of trouble.
And then, in a weird and disorientating final move, Ada is in her hotel room, looking into a mirror and… it reflects a city which is… the city of London in 1991.
These last four or so paragraphs are confusing. The Wikipedia synopsis says that the London described on this final page, the London of this alternative world, is a city built entirely of Engines in which the self-referential computer programme referred to by Lady Ada finally, at the very end of the book, in its last words, attains self-consciousness!
When I first read it I didn't get this, and I didn't understand the final, impressionistic sentences where this is, apparently, described as happening.
What I very much did read into the final couple of paragraphs was the apparent fact that human beings have ceased to exist. That cities are futuristic artefacts in which human-like simulacra are created by the All-Seeing Eye solely for the purpose of analysing their actions, interactions, for analysing the nature of causation and chance themselves.
Paper-thin faces billow like sails, twisting, yawning, tumbling through the empty streets, human faces that are borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye. And when a given face has served its purpose, it crumbles frail as ash, bursting into a dry foam of data, its constituent bits and motes. But new fabrics of conjecture are knitted in the City's shining cores, swift tireless spindles flinging off invisible loops in their millions, while in the hot unhuman dark, data melts and mingles, churned by gearwork in a skeletal bubbling pumice, dipped in a dreaming wax that forms a simulated flesh… (pp.382-3)
I am in two minds about this conclusion.
On the one hand it is a familiar science fiction trope, that somehow humans have been eliminated by computers – as in the Terminator franchise of movies – or only the facade of human life is maintained to serve the computers' purposes – very like the situation in The Matrix films. And it's fair to say that this abrupt, dystopian future does follow logically from the speculations of Ada Lovelace, which themselves grow out of the pioneering work of Babbage, so worryingly premature and advanced in this alternative history.
BUT, all that said, the appeal of the previous 282 pages all derived from the vivid language and extravagant delineation of a host of very human characters, especially tough Mallory, suave Oliphant, and unflappable Fraser. And a lot of the appeal is from the verbal energy of their dialogue and the Victorian vocabulary deployed in the narrative prose. The final Terminator-style vision of a post-human world goes a long way to annulling all the affection and complex network of feelings for both the characters and the prose which the previous 380 pages had so carefully, and impressively, built up.
I wish they had found some other clever way of rounding off the story which kept it within the gorgeously humanistic tapestry of the alternative 19th century they so brilliantly created.
Or maybe left it with the rather inconsequential back alley confrontation between Ada and Sibyl. It's often a characteristic of 'high literature' that it does not end with the boom and the bang that genre fiction often demands – instead it relies for its final impact on something more obtuse and implied, such as that vivid but ineffective confrontation between Ada and Sybil would have provided.
So I think I think that the ending of this wonderful, thoroughly researched and deeply entertaining book, lets it down.
Other William Gibson reviews
Neuromancer (1984)
Burning Chrome (short stories, 1986)
Count Zero (1986)
Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
The Difference Engine (1990; with Bruce Sterling)
Virtual Light (1993)
Idoru (1996)
All Tomorrow's Parties (1999)
Pattern Recognition (2003)
Spook Country (2007)
Zero History (2010)
Other alternative histories
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1962) In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War.
The Alteration by Kingsley Amis (1976) Set in a 20th century England and Europe where the Reformation – and thus the Industrial revolution – never happened and so the Catholic Church still rules the entire continent.
SS-GB by Len Deighton (1978) A detective thriller set in England soon after Nazi Germany won the war and occupied England.
Russian Hide-and-Seek by Kingsley Amis (1980) Set in a near-future when the Soviet Union took advantage of the campaign for nuclear disarmament and invaded and conquered England.
Fatherland by Robert Harris (1992) A detective thriller set in the 1960s after Nazi Germany invaded Britain, made peace with America, and now rules the entire continent.
by Simon on March 5, 2019 • Permalink
Tagged 1855, 1990, abolition, Ada Byron, all-seeing Eye, alternative history, American Civil War, Analytical Engine, Benjamin Disraeli, book, Bow Street Special Branch, brontosaurus, Bruce Sterling, Captain Swing, catastrophism, Central Statistics Bureau, Charles Babbage, Charles Egremont, Clement L. Vallandigham, Coleridge, computer, Confederacy, Darwin, Derby Day, Difference Engine, Dr McNeile, Duke of Wellington, Ebenezer Fraser, Edward Mallory, Edward Towler, Flash Mick, Florence Bartlett, Florence Russell Bartlett, Francis Galton, Great Napoleon, Great Stink, Half Moon Street, Helen America, Hermann Kriege, Industrial Radical Party, Irish Potato Famine, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, J.J. Tobias, John Keats, Karl Marx, Kenneth Reynolds, kinetropy, Lady Ada Byron, Laurence Oliphant, Leviathan Mallory, Lord Byron, Lord Liston, Luddites, Manhattan Women's Red Pantomime Troupe, Marquess of Hastings, Michael Godwin, Michael Radley, Modus Programme, Mori Arinori, Mori Yujo, Museum of Practical Geology, New York Commune, novel, Palace of Palaeontology, Peter Foulke, Prince Albert, Quantitative Criminology, Queen of Engines, Reverend Alistair Roseberry, Rudwick, Sam Houston, science fiction, Slavery, steampunk, Stephen Jay Gould, Sybil Gerrard, Sybil Tournechon, Terminator, Texas, The angel of Goliad, The Difference Engine, The Matrix, Thomas Henry Huxley, Thomas Towler, Time of Troubles, Times of Trouble, Underground, uniformitarianism, Union, Victoriana, Wakefield, Walter Gerrard, West India Dock, William Gibson, Wordsworth, Wyoming, Zephyr
Posted by Simon on March 5, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/the-difference-engine-william-gibson-bruce-sterling/
2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke (1987)
Clarke's famous characters
I was struck by the cosy, clubby, collegiate atmosphere created by this novel. Although it's meant to be about far-out events at the limits of human understanding, a thriller-cum-disaster story set at the remote end of the solar system – it often feels more like an after-dinner conversation at a gentleman's club.
Every character is the 'best in the world' at their trade. Thus, at the captain's table aboard the spaceship Universe, sit a typical cross-section of the planet's great and good: 'the planet's best known science communicator', a leading classical conductor, the first man to land on Mercury, the famous movie star Yva Merlin, and the planet's best-known popular writer. We learn that the man who paid for Universe to be built is, of course, the richest man in the world, 'the legendary Sir Lawrence Tsung' (p.31).
These characters all know each other, share the same kind of rational approach to the world, give each other the same kind of nicknames, cultivate a knowing cliqueyness. Thus the notable passengers on the Universe who I've listed above are immediately nicknamed 'the Famous Five' by the other civilian passenger, the world famous scientist Dr Heywood Floyd (who appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey and is the key figure in 2010: Odyssey Two).
Even when new characters are introduced, such as the Afrikaaner Rolf van der Berg, who appears in what is at first a standalone strand of the plot, he is quickly bound into the club of the internationally famous by virtue of the fact that his uncle, Dr Paul Kreuger, was eminent enough to nearly be awarded a Nobel prize for particle physics (he was only disqualified because of political concerns about apartheid).
Something very similar happened a few years ago when I read through the adventure novels of Alistair MacLean in chronological order. The early ones are about nobodies who perform amazing feats battling Soviet agents or criminal gangs. But as they go on, they get worse, and MacLeans's novels really began to go really downhill when they started to feature famous people (not real famous people – fictional famous people, the greatest racing driver, the most famous circus performer, the eminent film star, and so on).
You could call it laziness, or a fatal temptation for authors who have to churn out popular fiction by the yard – but you can see how, in a novel about nobodies, you have to earn the reader's interest and attention; whereas, by contrast, if you start your story with a cast list which already includes the world's most famous novelist, the world's most famous conductor, the world's most famous nuclear physicist, the world's most famous space explorer and so on… then you can kind of demand the reader's attention, as if they were reading the gossip column in Tatler or The Spectator.
It's a kind of fictional short cut to trying to involve us. It's like he's expecting us to give him our respect and attention merely for the high falutin' company he keeps, before he's even started the story.
In these pally, clubby circles everyone is eminent enough to have been discussed in the papers and magazines and had their private lives pawed over. Which explains why famous characters aren't introduced in their own right, but as the famous so-and-so who some critics / papers / colleagues criticise for his x, y, z public behaviour. This allows the author to then enact another cheap fictional strategy, which is – having invented various scandals or misunderstandings which dog the reputation of famous person x, y or z, to then present us as the man on the inside, the one in the know who is going to share the real reasons behind scandal x, y or z. It is the strategy of the gossip columnist, not the novelist.
And also, in these pally, clubby circles, everyone has nicknames for each other. Thus Floyd nicknames his fellow guests 'the Famous Five', but four of them quickly nickname the best-selling novelist Margaret M'Bala Maggie M (p.71). Later on, when Heywood comes up with a plan to use water from Halley's Comet to fuel the Universe, despite some risks, he is quickly nicknamed 'Suicide' Floyd by the sceptics (p.176).
And when they're not nicknaming each other, the characters are quick to come up with jokey nicknames for the space features they're discovering, chirpy, jokey names which domesticates the bleak and weird features of space and brings even them into the cosy circle, the confident cabal of Clarke's top men in their field. The habit of nicknaming which I've described among the little clique of VIPs aboard the Universe is shared by the crews of every other space ship and by astronomers back on Earth. That's my point. These are all the same kind of people with the same sense of humour.
it looked exactly like a terrestrial geyser and had been promptly christened 'Old Faithful' (p.22)
the fifteen-hundred-kilometre-long feature that's been christened the Grand Canal (p.38)
a perfectly straight two-kilometre-long feature which looked so artificial that it was christened the Great Wall. (p.136)
There is lots of 'wry' humour, 'rueful' remarks, 'wry' jokes and 'rueful' expressions. I've never really understood what wry and rueful mean. I can look them up in a dictionary, but I'm not sure I've ever seen someone give a 'wry smile'. It's the kind of phrase you only read in popular fiction.
Maggie M viewed the situation with rueful amusement. (p.200)
'By the time I abandoned Shaka,' she wryly admitted, 'I knew exactly what a modern Germans feels about Hitler.' (p.209)
Not much of this is actually funny, and it has an undermining effect on the book's tone. If you're writing a thriller you need to be very confident of yourself to include lots of supposed humour. The risk is it won't be funny but will work to undermine the necessary tension and suspense. This is what happened to Alistair MacLean – he got more and more jokey and less and less gripping or believable.
And, as I pointed out in my review of 2010: Odyssey Two, even if you make one of your characters comment on the fact that they appear to be in a cheap pulp melodrama – that doesn't deflect the allegation, it's an admission.
It was uncomfortably like one of those cheap 'mad scientist' melodramas… (p.146)
Clarke turned 70 as the book neared completion. Later, he would be knighted. So maybe that's another reason for this rather self-satisfied and clubby atmosphere: maybe it reflects the mind of a man rich in honours and achievements, a genuine pioneer in science thinking as well as fiction, an incredibly effective populariser of all kinds of ideas from satellites to mobile phones to scuba diving, a man who had an amazingly distinguished life and career, who knew everyone, who was garlanded with honours. Maybe this book accurately reflects what that feels like.
Why Clarke's predictions failed
As the title suggests, the book is set in 2061, sixty years after the alien monolith was discovered on the moon which kick-started this whole series.
Any sci-fi author writing about the future has to throw in some major events to pad out, to add ballast to their supposed future history, the obvious one being a nuclear war.
Clarke is no exception to this rule and predicts that by 2061 there will have been a short nuclear war carried out by two minor powers and only involving two bombs (I wonder if he was thinking about India and Pakistan). In light of this poisonous little conflict, Russia, America and China promptly band together to ban nuclear weapons and so the world is at peace (p.28).
Later on we learn that there has been a Third Cultural Revolution in China (there had already been a second one by the time of the 2010 book). Oh yes, and there has been the Great Californian Earthquake which reduced most of the state to flaming rubble (p.26).
In other words, Clarke's treatment of history is the same kind of lightweight caricature as his treatment of his 'famous' characters – a lamentably simplistic, cartoon view of human affairs, of history, economics, geopolitics and so on, which can all be summarised in a few throwaway brushstrokes.
Like so many of the sci-fi writers of his generation (who all came to eminence in the 1950s), Clarke thinks there'll be a nuclear war or two which will teach 'humanity' the errors of its ways, which will end war and conflict, and so, with the money saved, 'mankind' will invent a hyperdrive and set off to colonise the stars.
This simple-minded delusion is so basic to so many of these narratives that you could call it Science Fiction's foundational myth.
This iteration of it – 2061: Odyssey Three – follows the myth exactly: the small nuclear war leads to peace, which leads to a 'peace dividend', which funds the inevitable development of a new 'space drive', and so on to ever-widening space exploration.
Scientifically careful, as always, Clarke attributes the ability to travel at speed through space to a new 'drive' based on the development of muonium-hydrogen compounds in the 2040s. As a result – and as so often -the solar system is soon littered with human colonies on all the habitable planets and the moons of the gas giants, as well as various space stations in orbit, and a busy traffic of shuttles and freighters popping between them.
Seeking clues as to why – contrary to the confident predictions of Asimov, Blish, Bradbury, Clarke and so many other sci-fi writers – none of this has happened, I think there are two main reasons:
1. Erroneous comparison with other technologies
Clarke makes a profoundly mistaken comparison between air travel and space.
The Wright brothers made 'the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft on December 17, 1903, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina'. Only 50 years later passengers were sitting in first class while globe-spanning jet airliners flew them to Australia.
I.e it took just fifty years for the technology of manned flight to be transformed out of all recognition and to become commonly available to anyone with the cash.
In my opinion Clarke then makes the very false assumption that space travel will also proceed in the same kind of unstoppable leaps and bounds, from early primitive experiments to widespread commercial availability in a similar timespan – from Sputnik (1957) through the first men on the moon (1969), the first space shuttle in 1982 to the crewing of the International Space Station in 2000 and he then projects that forward onto bases on the moon, then Mars, then manned flights to Venus, then the new space drive and boom!
All so easy when you're writing novels, essays and brochures for NASA.
2. Failure to understand economics
The analogy doesn't hold because of simple economics. The space shuttle project cost some $210 billion, and each launch of a space shuttle cost over a billion dollars (until the last launch in 2011).
No commercial company can afford to spend this much. No commercial company will ever be able to make a profit out of space travel, either for tourists or for natural resources.
Only governments can fund this sort of cost, and even then only the governments of major powers, and even then only if there are demonstrable scientific, technological or geopolitical benefits. The Americans only put a man on the moon because they felt they were in a life-or-death struggle against Soviet Russia. The edge of that rivalry was wearing out in the 1980s and collapsed with the end of the Soviet Union in 1990.
There never was a commercial imperative for space travel and now there is next to no geopolitical motive. I predict there will never be a base on the moon. There will certainly never be 'bases' on Mars, let alone any of the other planets or moons. It just costs vastly too much, and for little or no payback.
3. Confusing space enthusiasts with 'all mankind'
A related passage indicates another error in Clarke's thinking. He was in the middle of explaining how 'mankind's thirst for knowledge pushed them on to explore blah blah blah', when I realised, there's the problem.
Clarke makes the common error of thinking that the subjects, activities and achievements which he has devoted his life to – are of interest to all mankind. Unfortunately, astronomy, astrophysics, space engineering, astronautics and all the rest of it are, at the end of the day, a very small minority interest. However:
1. Within the fictions, naturally enough, all the characters have dedicated their lives to these matters, and so his books – like those of Asimov or Blish – give the impression that the whole world cares as passionately about the aphelion of Io or the temperature on Callista, as they do.
2. There is a megalomania about science fiction as a genre. Pretty much from the start, from the minute H.G. Wells's Martians emerged from their spaceships back in 1897, science fiction has dealt with global threats and an absolute central assumption of thousands of its stories is that the world will be saved by a handful of heroes. That the entire world will look up as the alien spaceships are destroyed by Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day.
To make it clearer – on page 83 of this book Clarke writes that really major scientific discoveries, the ones that shatter the entire worldview of a culture, don't come along very often:
Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.
Just what does he mean here by 'mankind'? Galileo published his discoveries in the 1630s, while Europe was being wracked by the Thirty Years War. Was the average European's view of life turned upside down? No. Most Europeans were illiterate. What about the inhabitants of north or south America, Australia, Africa, or Asia? I don't think they were too bothered either. So by 'mankind', Clarke is clearly referring to a tiny sub-set of Western European intellectuals.
Also, obviously enough, he has chosen two guys – Galileo and Einstein – who made big changes to the way we see the universe, to astronomy and astrophysics.
But Darwin's theory had arguably the most seismic impact on the West, making Christian faith significantly harder to believe, while Fleming's discovery of penicillin has had more impact on human life than any other scientific discovery ever, by saving probably billions of lives.
In Clarke's prophecy when the major powers step in to prevent a nuclear war, it signals the end of all wars which results, of course, in a 'peace dividend' and, Clarke cheerfully informs us, 'humanity' then decides to devote this enormous amount of money to just the kind of things Clarke thinks are important, like exploring the solar system.
The flaw is when Clarke identifies the ambition and interests of a tiny minority of the earth's population with 'humanity'. It is, basically, identifying his own interests with all of 'humanity'.
But the overwhelming majority of 'earth's population' doesn't want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in constructing spaceships which half a dozen like-minded chaps can have adventures in. Sorry.
4. Confusing America with 'all mankind'
A common error made by high-profile, high-paid American authors is to think the entire world circles round America and American cultural products.
In pulp magazines, in short stories, in novels, and in Hollywood movies, American science fiction writers have complacently assumed that Americans will bear the brunt of any alien invasion, Americans will defeat the bad guys, Americans will develop all the new technology, including the mythical space drive, Americans will lead the way in colonising space.
The cold reality
Taken together, all these wrong assumptions, false analogies and economic illiteracy, combined with the enormous PR campaign surrounding NASA and the Apollo space programme throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, misled clever men like Clarke and Asimov into thinking that the whole world shared their passion, and that the outward urge was unstoppable.
Now, in 2019, from Syria to Xinjiang, from Burma to Brazil, people are in the same old trouble they always have been i.e. huge numbers of people are crushingly poor, unfree, victimised, exploited by massive corporations or locked up by the military police. People have other, more pressing priorities. Space is too expensive to travel to or to commercially exploit. These sci-fi stories are fantasy in the literal sense of something which never could and never will happen.
They are yesterday's futures.
(It was only after thinking this all through that I came upon the following article about the end of the Space Age in, of all places, the New Statesman.)
The New Race For Space by Philip Ball
When I saw the date (2061) I thought well, at least we won't have to put up with Dr Heywood Floyd, who was a key figure in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the rather irritating central character of 2010: Odyssey Two.
So I burst out laughing when I discovered that Floyd is in 2061, appearing at the ripe old age of one hundred and three.
How come? Well, it turns out Floyd falls off a hotel balcony during a party to celebrate his return from the 2010-15 Jupiter mission, and breaks so many bones that he's taken up to the space hospital in orbit round the Earth where he heals slowly but, by the time he does, it's clear he'll never be able to walk on Earth again.
So he stays up there for the next 45 years, sipping cocktails and chatting to the other occupants of the hotel, all – it goes without saying – eminent in their fields. A kind of All Souls College in space. Very cosy.
As the story opens a Chinese billionaire has funded the construction of several spaceships, leading up to the state-of-the-art spaceship Universe. Universe is scheduled to fly across the solar system to rendezvous with Halley's Comet.
Although Clarke's astrophysics is as precise as ever, the fictional part feels laughable. The Universe has gravity and joining Floyd at the captain's table for fine wine and Michelin star meals are a selection of the planet's great and good – 'the planet's best known science communicator', a leading conductor, the first man to land on Mercury, and the planet's best known popular writer, the 'Famous Five' I mentioned earlier.
This long sequence about the comet is only included so that Clarke can publish his (fascinating) speculations about what Halley's Comet really looks like and what it would be like to land on it. This is genuinely interesting and obviously based on research and an intimate knowledge of space physics. I particularly enjoyed the bit where several scientists go a-wandering in their space suits, down into the spooky subterranean caverns of the comet, complete with their eerie stalactites.
But this entire sequence – the building, launch, docking at a space station, Floyd joining it, the journey to Halley's Comet, docking with Halley's Comet, exploring Halley's Comet – all turns out just to be the hors d'oeuvre to what develops into quite a conventional thriller, albeit set in space.
For while the rich passengers on the Universe are frolicking on Halley's Comet, hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, the spaceship Galaxy (also owned by richest man in the world, the 'legendary' Sir Lawrence Tsung) sent to investigate the moons of what was once the planet Jupiter, is hijacked by a woman with a gun – Rosie Miller – clearly an agent of some Earth power (but who or why remains a mystery), who forces the pilot at gunpoint to set the ship down on the surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa.
Now it just so happens that out of the several billion human inhabitants of the solar system, the second mate on the spaceship Galaxy is none other than the famous Heywood Floyd's grandson, Chris.
This continues the book's strong sense that it is a very small world in which only about twenty people count
It means Floyd is thrown into understandable concern for his grandson and so
He supports the 'audacious' plan to refuel Galaxy with water from the geysers of Halley's Comet and then fly the Universe at top speed to Europa to rescue the Galaxy's 30-odd crew.
But it also turns out that 4. young Chris Floyd is himself not what he seems – he is working undercover for Astropol (the futuristic version of Interpol) who had suspected something dodgy was going to happen on the Galaxy. Aha! Mystery. Suspense.
The story turns into two parallel narratives. On Europa the crew of the Galaxy have to keep their ship afloat on the bubbling 'ocean' while being blown by its 'winds' towards a 'shore', all the time worrying about food and life support systems etc.
While, in alternating chapters, we eavesdrop on the harried crew and pampered passengers of the Universe as it travels at over four million kilometres per hour out towards Jupiter/Lucifer.
Young Chris Floyd and the geologist Rolf van der Berg persuade the captain of the Galaxy to let them take the ship's little shuttle and go on an explore. There's the usual Clarkean accuracy about the physical difficulty of extracting a shuttle out of a spaceship lying on its side beached on an alien moon, but soon enough they're puttering across the surface.
They stop right at the foot of what astronomers have for some time been calling Mount Zeus, a vast, straight-sided geometrically clean mountain.
This appears to be what the intrigue was about, what the Rosie hijacked and forced the Galaxy to land for, because Mount Zeus is a diamond, the biggest diamond in the solar system, a diamond weighing a million million tonnes.
Van der Berg collects stray chips and fragments while explaining to Chris Floyd that the collapse of Jupiter into a star flung some of its diamond core outwards, at high speed. Most disappeared into space but this enormous mountain-sized chunk embedded in Europa, causing tectonic upheavals which they can still feel in the form of earth tremors.
Van der Berg sends an enigmatic message up to the radio receiver on another of Jupiter's moons, Ganymede, which will relay it to Earth. The message is in code designed to tip off his friends on Earth to do something on the stock exchange – although whether knowledge that there exists a diamond the size of Mount Everest will collapse the diamond market forever, or prices will rise for rare Europa diamonds isn't really made clear. This is a simple flaw at the heart of the 'thriller' narrative which is – we never understand why the hijacker forced Galaxy to land and we never really understand the consequences of Van der Berg discovering Mount Zeus is the biggest diamond in the solar system. That thread of the story is left completely unresolved.
Lastly, the two young guys fly over the surface to investigate the Europan avatar of the Monolith. Remember the monolith they found on the moon back in 2001, and then Dave Bowman discovered sticking up out of Japetus and which then multiplied in 2010: Odyssey Two to destroy Jupiter and turn it into a new sun?
Well, yet another version of it is lying sideways on the surface of Europe creating a great two-kilometre-long wall. Abutting against it they see round objects a bit like igloos. Can these be the homes of intelligent life? Nothing is moving around as they guide the shuttle down to land in a snow-covered space between igloos. But it is as they descend that Chris Floyd has a perfectly clear and lucid conversation with his grandfather – who is, of course, millions of kilometres away on Universal – which rather worries van der Berg, who thinks his pilot's gone mad. Only later is there speculation that it was the monolith using a hologram projection of Heywood Floyd in order to communicate with his grandson. And what does the monolith say? That all the intelligent life forms who live in the igloos have fled because the little space shuttle is poisoning their atmosphere.
And then the novel is suddenly all over. Universe rescues everyone from Galaxy and takes them to Ganymede. The adventure ends with more heavy comedy as the human colonists are subjected to ha-ha-hilarious lectures from 'the Famous Five'.
The 'thriller' plot, the entire rationale for the hijacking of Galaxy, the storyline in which Chris Floyd is an agent for Astropol, van der Berg's cryptic messages about diamonds back to Earth – all these are just dropped. I've no idea why Rosie Miller hijacked the ship and I doubt whether the mere existence of a diamond mountain millions of miles from Earth would have any effect on the diamond market.
There's another massive loose end, which is that, at the end of 2010: Odyssey Two Bowman had conveyed to Earth the warning that humans must never approach Europa. It had been set aside by the guardians for new life forms to flourish on. A couple of probes which flew too close were quickly evaporated, presumably by the guardian monolith.
So how how how how how come a) the Galaxy is able to land and b) Floyd and van der Berg are able to go shuttling all over its surface, poisoning the atmosphere, destabilising the diamond mountain and generally interfering, with no consequences whatsoever.
In all these instances – the prohibition on visiting Europa, the 'thriller' / Astropol conspiracy / something secret to do with van der Berg and diamonds – the plotline is just dropped. Galaxy is rescued. Then Hal and Dave and Heywood are having a nice chat. Then a thousand years later, Lucifer goes out. It feels oddly amateurish and half-hearted.
There is a kind of postscript. We overhear conversation between the spirit of Dave Bowman, of HAL and of Dr Floyd. Somehow the other two have co-opted Floyd's spirit, though he is still alive (?).
They recap the idea that the monoliths destroyed Jupiter in order to create a sun which would stimulate the evolution of intelligent life on Europa. But, the thing I don't understand is that – Jupiter was itself teeming with life, strange vast gasbags blown in the impossible storms of Jupiter which had been described at length by Bowman's spirit as it penetrated and explored Jupiter's atmosphere in 2010: Odyssey Two.
That the creation of Lucifer resulted in the end of night on earth, I found upsetting enough. But the fact that in destroying Jupiter, the creators of the monolith destroyed all its life forms seemed to me as callous, brutal, clumsy and unthinking as most human activities. It nullified the sense which 2001 gave so powerfully of the intelligences behind the monolith being ineffably superior. Turns out they make just as questionable judgments as clumsy man.
In fact, right at the end of the story we learn that Mount Zeus was always unstable – having been flung at high speed into Europa by the destruction of Jupiter – and that right at the end, this diamond as big as Mount Everest collapses into Europa's young seas, wiping out many species including some of the ones the monolith destroyed Jupiter in order to encourage.
It seems like futility piled on futility.
In their final exchanges, Hal and Bowman tell the spirit of Floyd that they want him to remain with them as guardian spirits protecting what life forms have survived on Europa.
Really? Even this is incredible. It took billions of years for mammals to evolve on earth, 30 million or so years for proto-apes to evolve into man. Are Bowman and HAL really going to wait that long?
Clarke has a staggering grasp of the laws of physics and astrophysics which govern the solar system in all its complexity. But his fictions seem to ignore the mind-boggling lengths of time involved in the evolution of species.
Post-postscript
But sure enough, it's 'only' 1,000 years later that the population of Earth one day sees Lucifer collapse and the solar system's second sun go out. To be precise:
Suddenly, almost as swiftly as it had been born, Lucifer began to fade. The night that men had not known for thirty generations flooded back into the sky. The banished stars returned.
And for the second time in four million years, the Monolith awoke. (final words)
That's where the novel ends, presumably setting the reader up for the fourth and final novel in the 2001 series, which – I would bet – involves a trip to Europa and a meeting with the other intelligent life in the solar system.
2061: Odyssey Three on Amazon
2061: Odyssey Three Wikipedia article
Arthur C. Clarke Wikipedia article
Arthur C. Clarke reviews
Childhood's End (1953) a thrilling narrative involving the 'Overlords' who arrive from space to supervise mankind's transition to the next stage in its evolution
A Fall of Moondust (1961) a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
Rendezvous with Rama (1973) a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
2010: Odyssey Two (1982) Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the enormous monolith on Japetus
2061: Odyssey Three (1987) Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, a moon of the former Jupiter, but the thriller aspects are only pretexts for Clarke's wonderful descriptions of landing on Halley's Comet and the evolution of wild and unexpected new forms of life on Europa
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the 'ordinaries' and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel, Science Fiction
Tagged 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061, Alistair MacLean, Apollo, Astropol, China, Chris Floyd, Darwin, Dave Bowman, diamond, Dr Paul Kreuger, Europa, Evolution, Ganymede, Great Californian Earthquake, H.G. Wells, HAL 9000, Halley's Comet, Heywood Floyd, Independence Day, International Space Station, Japetus, Jupiter, Lucifer, Margaret M'Bala, Mars, Mount Zeus, NASA, Rolf van der Berg, Rosie Miller, science fiction, Sir Lawrence Tsung, solar system, space travel, Sputnik, Thirty Years War, Venus, Wright brothers, Yva Merlin
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/01/16/2061-odyssey-three-arthur-c-clarke/
In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells (1906)
We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most things accomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to a sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing from our vigour, and it is hard to understand the stifled and struggling manner in which my generation of common young men did its thinking.
(In The Days of The Comet. Chapter One)
In his earliest stories Wells stuck to describing localised events witnessed and recounted with feverish, first-person intensity by his astonished protagonists.
As he became famous he branched out. He wrote a series of non-science-fiction love stories (Love and Mr Lewisham, Kipps), often featuring whimsical social comedy satirising Edwardian manners and society.
He also began a series of factual articles and books devoted to predicting the future based on likely scientific and technological advances – Anticipations, A Modern Utopia, The Shape of Things To Come and so on.
And his science fiction stories became more long-winded and discursive, incorporating these other elements to produce stories which were longer, less focused, and contained all kinds of material extraneous to the main plot. In The Days of The Comet is a classic example of this tendency.
In the Days of the Comet
The central event of In The Days of the Comet is easy to describe. A comet passes close to the earth, trailing a cloud of strange chemicals through the atmosphere, which leads to an abrupt and total revolution in human nature and in human affairs, referred to as The Great Change. Everyone becomes peaceful, kind, forgiving and sensible. Here is the narrator telling his contemporary, post-Change audience, about the bad old days:
You must understand – and every year it becomes increasingly difficult to understand – how entirely different the world was then from what it is now. It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder, preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of the general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent beauty that seem no longer possible in my experience. The Great Change has come for ever more, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men. None would dare to dream of returning to the sorrows of the former time…
Wells has bitten off a massive theme – the transformation of the entire human race from a jungle of competing individualists, a system which produces misery and exploitation, into a brotherhood of enlightened and caring citizens who treat each other as equals and set about building the Perfect Society. For the fumes of the comet bring about the great Socialist Transformation of the World which Wells and so many of his contemporaries dreamed of.
But Wells has set himself the same challenge he faced in The Food of the Gods, which is to tell the transformation of the entire human race via the tiny story of a handful of individuals – in this case via the recollections of one particular man, Willie Leadford, now aged 71.
The novel is Willie's autobiography, or more precisely his memoir, of the months leading up to the Great Change 50 years previously, when he was a hot-tempered young man. The minutely narrow scope of the task is made clear in the book's first line:
I have set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far as it has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people closely connected with me, primarily to please myself.
Well, that gets Wells off the hook of having to write some kind of global history of this vast transformation. Instead it's going to be a book about Willie.
The central thread of the novel is Willie's mismatched love affair with the beautiful but narrow-minded young woman Nettie Stuart. They are both lower class inhabitants of the Four Towns, a region of the industrial Midlands. Here Willie has grown up in extreme poverty, raised by his mother, a devoted and tireless charlady who has almost literally worked her fingers to the bone. Their wretched hovel of a rented cottage is bitterly described numerous times, not least the leaks in the roof which lets rain into his mother's bedroom, exacerbating her many illnesses.
Against this backdrop, and in the scenery of this grim northern industrial townscape, Willie grows up into a typical angry young man who loses his religious faith and discovers 'socialism'. He moves in to share a flat with another young man, Parload, who is, however, more taken by the stars and astronomy than socialism.
Anyway, the central spine of the novel is Willie's forlorn love affair with Nettie. She is the daughter of the gardener to the local lady of the manor, Lady Verrall, and so she and her family regard themselves as a notch or two above Willie and his mother in the social scale. We know from his biography that at one stage of his own adolescence, Wells's family fell on hard times and his mother went to work as cleaner to a local landowner and Wells was obliged to give up schooling to work in a local shop in Sussex.
You cannot help feeling that the descriptions of a) his good and long-suffering mother b) his smouldering resentment at the patronising, superior attitude of the local landowners and c) his youthful sense of the crazy injustice of the entire social system, are all strongly derived from his own experiences, which he channels into this story of an earnest young working class man falling in love with a beautiful but unimaginative young woman from just a fraction above his own class.
In the hands of a genius like D.H. Lawrence this kind of thing would have been turned into an entire novel registering every flicker of the sensibilities of both the protagonists, and exquisitely marking the rise and fall of their relationship, recording:
the host of dark distressful memories, of darkened childhood, toilsome youth, embittered adolescence.
But in the hands of bumptious Mr Wells it is a good tale, some passages are intensely felt and written but… but… it always feels that Well's real focus of attention is elsewhere…
Anyway, young Willie becomes even more embittered when he tries to share his 'socialist' convictions with Nettie, as well as his loss of religious faith. Being a shallow conformist, all this alarms Nettie, who not only drops him but, in a scene worthy of a Thomas Hardy novel, rejects him for the rich son of a local landowner, the elegant, drawling, upper-class Edward Verrall –
son of the man who owned not only this great estate but more than half of Rawdon's pot-bank, and who had interests and possessions, collieries and rents, all over the district of the Four Towns.
They argue. Willie departs. He hears from local gossip that she has taken up with young Verrall. When he goes once again up to the grand house where Nettie lives with her mother and father in the gardeners' quarters, Willie is devastated to discover that… Nettie and Verrall have eloped!
Willie is consumed with psychotic anger, focusing all his personal frustration – the fact that he's just been 'let go' by his employer, Rawdon – the general misery of the industrial proletariat living in the hovels of the local towns – the injustice of the social system – the sight of his poor downtrodden mother – and the (believe it or not) fact that the country seems to be slipping towards war with Germany – all these things come together to make Willie search high and low until he finds a shop where he buys a revolver.
Willie determines to track the couple down and shoot them both, he is that demented with rage, and the remainder of part one of the book follows his efforts to establish where they've gone (Norfolk), tracking them to the coast, and then to a little bohemian 'artist's colony' on the seaside.
The industrial Midlands
Partly I've thought of D.H. Lawrence because the story is set in the industrial Midlands – Lawrence's home turf – and a lot of Willie's youthful energy goes into being outraged by the wretched poverty of the workers and the luxurious lifestyle of the rich.
Wells can certainly write when he wants to and, as you read on, you realise he has made a big effort to capture the miserable topography and lives of the down-trodden miners and other manual workers in the tight little cluster of Midlands mining towns he takes as his setting. I wonder if he had visited the area and made notes. It reads like it. Here's a description of Willie and his friend and flatmate, Parload, walking round the dirty industrial town of 'Clayton':
Then across the allotments, a wilderness of cabbages and evil-looking sheds, past a gaunt abandoned factory, and so to the high road. The high road ascended in a curve past a few houses and a beerhouse or so, and round until all the valley in which four industrial towns lay crowded and confluent was overlooked.
I will admit that with the twilight there came a spell of weird magnificence over all that land and brooded on it until dawn. The horrible meanness of its details was veiled, the hutches that were homes, the bristling multitudes of chimneys, the ugly patches of unwilling vegetation amidst the makeshift fences of barrel-stave and wire. The rusty scars that framed the opposite ridges where the iron ore was taken and the barren mountains of slag from the blast furnaces were veiled; the reek and boiling smoke and dust from foundry, pot-bank, and furnace, transfigured and assimilated by the night. The dust-laden atmosphere that was grey oppression through the day became at sundown a mystery of deep translucent colours, of blues and purples, of sombre and vivid reds, of strange bright clearnesses of green and yellow athwart the darkling sky. Each upstart furnace, when its monarch sun had gone, crowned itself with flames, the dark cinder heaps began to glow with quivering fires, and each pot-bank squatted rebellious in a volcanic coronet of light. The empire of the day broke into a thousand feudal baronies of burning coal. The minor streets across the valley picked themselves out with gas-lamps of faint yellow, that brightened and mingled at all the principal squares and crossings with the greenish pallor of incandescent mantles and the high cold glare of the electric arc. The interlacing railways lifted bright signal-boxes over their intersections, and signal stars of red and green in rectangular constellations. The trains became articulated black serpents breathing fire.
Dickens wrote a vivid description of the Midlands in The Old Curiosity Shop in 1842, and George Orwell was to describe them again nearly a century later. Wells comes in the middle of that period and is as vivid as either:
You cannot see, as I can see, the dark empty way between the mean houses, the dark empty way lit by a bleary gas-lamp at the corner, you cannot feel the hard checkered pavement under your boots, you cannot mark the dimly lit windows here and there, and the shadows upon the ugly and often patched and crooked blinds of the people cooped within. Nor can you presently pass the beer house with its brighter gas and its queer, screening windows, nor get a whiff of foul air and foul language from its door, nor see the crumpled furtive figure – some rascal child – that slinks past us down the steps.
We crossed the longer street, up which a clumsy steam tram, vomiting smoke and sparks, made its clangorous way, and adown which one saw the greasy brilliance of shop fronts and the naphtha flares of hawkers' barrows dripping fire into the night. A hazy movement of people swayed along that road, and we heard the voice of an itinerant preacher from a waste place between the houses.
There's a recession – Leadford and his flatmate squabble about the elementary economic causes of recessions in capitalism – some of the miners have come out on strike, there's stone throwing and minor riots and Leadford manages to get caught up in scuffles and mobs.
This could have been an interesting novel about industrial relations circa 1905, except that… a comet is hurtling towards the earth.
It's a bit like getting fifty pages into a promising early novel by D.H. Lawrence when the Tardis suddenly materialises and Dr Who steps out!
You are just getting into it, as a realistic novel, when Willie looks up once again to look at the strange green light of the approaching comet. For weeks now the newspapers and their 'experts' have been assuring the public that it will miss the earth and have no effect on all of us.
Part two – after the comet
Except that it does have an effect on all of us – a transformative impact.
The first part of the novel rises to a climax as Willie, one fateful night, tracks down the lovers Verrall and Nettie, to their beach hut hideaway, from a hiding place watches them gallivanting on the sand, then steps out and advances towards them, blindly firing his revolver (missing them both, luckily) and, as they turn and run, running after them, blind with impotent rage, anger, frustration, all the emotions of a trapped, trammelled inhabitant of the squalid little earth of 1906.
Absurdly (I haven't brought it out enough) in the background throughout the story, we have had tips and hints that Britain is stumbling towards war against Germany. Willie has absent-mindedly been reading the newspaper hoardings at the railways stations and towns he passes through on his vengeful pursuit, and now, here on the beach, his own personal demented rage is counterpointed by a battle which suddenly starts up between huge warships taking place way out at sea, off the coast, the flares and booms of the big guns lighting up the beach as Willie chases the lovers through the dunes. All very cinematic!
And then… the green lights of the comet engulf everything. It is as if a thousand pistols are detonating all over the sky and a great mist, a green fog, sweeps in from the sea, and Willie loses consciousness.
When he awakes some hours later he is struck by the beauty of the grass among the sand. He looks up into the beautiful sky. He feels fulfilled and happy. He looks down at the gun at his feet and doesn't understand it. He stumbles through the fields till he comes to a lane where a man has fallen and sprained his ankle and so he immediately helps him. It seems like the obvious thing to do.
And all over the world every person is waking with the same thought – feeling whole, purified, happy, content, and so brimming with good humour that they need to give of it, help others, make a better life.
In a throwaway bit of science Willie says that he later learned that chemicals in the comet's tail reacted with the nitrogen in the earth's atmosphere to create a new element which, when breathed in, gives new energy to blood corpuscles and gives the brain and nervous system a tremendous sense of life and calm.
Part two of the book describes the Great Change in three ways.
1. Very conveniently, the man Willie has found injured in the road turns out to be Melmount, a senior Cabinet Minister. Willie helps him to his holiday home down the coast where, incapacitated and so unable to go back to London, Melmount calls a cabinet meeting to discuss the new world and, since there aren't any of the usual civil servant secretariesavailable, Willie finds himself being dragooned into acting as secretary and aide de camp to the Prime Minister during these first few weeks after the Change. This allows Wells:
to give us satirical portraits of the members of the cabinet
to insert his analysis of the British government of his day (it didn't, in his opinion, have a clue what to do with its enormous empire or about the numerous social problems at home)
and to convey in broad brush terms how all of its members now look back on their narrow, sheltered, blinkered, privileged upbringings and publicly express regret
The politicians set about making radical changes which begin with Wells's personal hobby horse, land reform, namely nationalising all land and rebuilding society from scratch.
2. After witnessing all this Willie returns to Clayton, and registers the Great Change in the town, his mother, Nettie's parents and even old Mrs Verrall the landowner. All are now peaceful and calm. The scales have fallen from their eyes. All are now determined to build the New Jerusalem. Willie describes how they knock down all the disgusting old slums, and hold huge bonfires in which they burn their smelly clothes, disgusting furniture, rubbish decorations. Now all the land is jointly owned by the 'commune' as it is now called which plans rationally, establishing new workplaces in the best places, rebuilding convenient railway lines to link them, building new homes which are healthy and hygienic, for everyone. In the mornings they all work together, to build a better world. In the afternoons all take place in further education designed to bring out everyone's potential – everyone's life becomes a combination of productive labour and creative self-fulfilment.
3. And finally the love affair. This is dealt with in three parts. In the immediate aftermath of the Great Change, Willie comes across Nettie and Verrall again, and they all apologise to each other. In a rather moving passage both Nettie and Verrall reveal their feelings and motivations for running off together: Nettie admits that to some extent, it was Verrall's clothes: he just dressed so richly and confidently and ably, compared to Willie's dismal, dirty, threadbare working class suit, that she was bewitched. And Verrall gives what I thought was a powerful half page or so summary of the sheer irresponsible thrill of having an affair, of running away and abandoning all his parents' fine hopes that he'd become a politician, spurning all society's rules about not 'ruining' the reputation of a virginal young woman. What larks it was!
Anyway, they all sheepishly look at each other and apologise. Nettie says she wants to remain in love with Willie, who was her earliest adult friend and boyfriend but… still wants to remain with Verrall. The two men agree it cannot be and so, regretfully, she leaves with Verrall, leaving Willie to throw himself with energy into building the New Jerusalem in Clayton.
Back in Clayton, his mother is nearing the end of an exhausting long life of hard work, and the commune (in its new enlightened form) allots her a nurse – stocky young Annie – to be her carer through her last months. Distracted with all his new duties Willie is blissfully ignorant of the fact that this devoted, loyal young woman – rather inevitably – falls in love with him. It is only on the day of his mother's eventual death, that they burst into tears, find each other in each other's arms, and then kissing and then passionately kissing. Oops.
They marry and have children. Willie emphasises she was always his best friend and helpmeet. But… But Nettie reappears. Nettie has heard about his mother dying and makes a visit. And here she pursues the theme she had broached back in their parting scene at the seaside resort. Here she suggests… that she can be the lover of two men, that Willie can join her and Verrall. And Annie can join them too. And so it transpires. They become a ménage à quatre.
For the Great Change has overthrown even that old shibboleth, that one man shall cleave to one women, and one woman to one man, and that they shall be each other's all-in-all and never have any surplus love or affection to give to anybody else.
After all the heady themes the book has covered – socialism, social injustice, the squalor of industrial Britain, the unmerited privilege of the rich, the stupidity of war, the absurdity of empire, the incompetence of politicians – this is how it ends, with a hymn to Free Love, a very fashionable, if scandalous, Edwardian topic.
Anybody who knew about Wells's own love life (i.e. all of literary and artistic and political London) knew that this was in fact a close reflection of Well's own situation. He was married to the plain and devoted Jane Wells,who bore him several children and managed the home, but had to put up with Wells's numerous affairs with an impressive list of younger, sexier women, with several of whom he had illegitimate children.
(Wells's lovers included American birth control activist Margaret Sanger, writer Odette Keun, Soviet spy Moura Budberg, novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, writer Amber Reeves, novelist and feminist Rebecca West, and many more.)
And there the story ends.
The story is a variation on the very Wellsian trope of the sleeper who awakes in the distant future.
There is a 'before' (the grimy present day) and an 'after' (utopia after the Great Change). And the narrator is able to bear witness to both worlds. Thus the narrator is able to contrast a) the social squalor and b) the psychological and emotional constipation, of Edwardian times, with the a) social harmony and b) the relaxed and open relationships, after 'the Great Change'.
This gives rise to the odd and distinctive feature of the book which is that you can go for pages reading either a) gritty descriptions of the muddy coal-mining town and its surly inhabitants or b) the sometimes genuinely moving, sometimes rather laughable descriptions of Willie's love affair with Nettie – and both lull you into a false sense of security that you are reading a standard Edwardian novel…
But then Wells will throw in a sentence or two reminding us that this is all before the Change, the protagonist will look up and see the eerie shape of billowing green flaring in the night sky as the comet approaches day after day, thus inviting the reader to view with ridicule the absurd economic system and social conventions of the time – and you realise you are in a completely different type of book.
Or you are in a D.H. Lawrence social realist novel which has been picked up and photoshopped into a scene from Star Wars.
This before-and-after trope explains the prominence in the text of the direct address to the reader. By which I mean that the first person protagonist, Willie, is continually stopping to address his modern readers, the young readers who have grown up since the Great Change, with phrases like 'You who have grown up since the Change will scarcely believe the silliness of the society I grew up in…'
My point being that the 'before and after' trope isn't a minor aspect of the book, it is something the narrator and Wells are constantly rubbing in our faces.
You will consider those notions of my youth poor silly violent stuff; particularly if you are of the younger generation born since the Change you will be of that opinion.
When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belong entirely to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest early memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty in writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of fact to their fathers.
You cannot imagine the littleness of those former times; their naive, queer absurdities!
And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far as my younger readers are concerned. You who know only the world that followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling inconceivable…
All that previous life of ours had been an ill-lit marionette show, acted in the twilight. . . .
The whole of that old history becomes more and more foreign, more and more like some queer barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue…
Thus the novel stands in the tradition which includes all the other 'before and after' socialist novels of the era, such as Looking Backward, News From Nowhere and so on.
Was Wells a socialist – or a nihilist?
Wells joined the socialist Fabian Society in 1903 and wrote numerous articles for newspapers, magazines and so on, supporting socialism. And he certainly writes eloquently about the glaring social injustices of his day, in this book giving lengthy and convincing descriptions of the miserable state of slum-dwellers in a Midland industrial town.
He also makes an effort to analyse their causes, attributing most of it to the idea of private property in land i.e. the tradition that had grown up of letting landowners acquire more land, on which mines and other factories could be built, while swarming millions of the proletariat had no land whatsoever. He is particularly upset that this tradition – the crazy, disorganised and blatantly unfair distribution of land – had continued in America which some people had hoped would be a more rational utopia but with which, by 1906, Wells was thoroughly disillusioned.
The implication of the repeated references to unfair land distribution is that nationalising all land, abolishing the private ownership of land, is the only way to creating the basis for equality.
But if you ask whether Wells was a genuine socialist, I think the answer might well be No. What comes over from all his novels is not a careful analysis of the means of production and distribution and a fictional dramatisation of how these can be seized by the working class.
What comes over from his novels are cosmic visions of vast realms of space and time against which humanity is a mere insect. The point of The Time Machine and of The War of the Worlds is how puny and petty our present-day human concerns are compared to the vastness of the solar system and the knowledge that there are countless other life forms in the universe who are completely indifferent to us, to his visions of a future planet earth on which humanity has ceased to exist, and it doesn't matter.
I picture to myself this thing happening in space, a planetary moment, the faint smudge, the slender whirl of meteor, drawing nearer to this planet – this planet like a ball, like a shaded rounded ball, floating in the void, with its little, nearly impalpable coat of cloud and air, with its dark pools of ocean, its gleaming ridges of land. And as that midge from the void touches it, the transparent gaseous outer shell clouds in an instant green and then slowly clears again. . . .
The Fabians made sensible proposals about to how to improve the lot of the working classes through better building regulations, hygiene, water and gas and electricity provision, shorter working hours and so on. Wells paid lip service to all this but couldn't help, wherever he turns his eye, being overwhelmed by the sheer futility of human existence. Futility is a word which rings through all these books. Love is futile. Individuals are futile. War is futile. The whole social order is futile.
The golden earth and sky seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globe of human futility.
In The Time Machine the narrator reflects on the futile effort to create civilisations which have vanished, is afflicted by the futile attempts of the pretty young Eloi he befriends to understand him, calls the entire race of Eloi 'a mere beautiful futility'.
One of the most powerful results of the sojourn of the narrator on The Island of Dr Moreau is the way it leaves him with a crushing sense of the futility of human endeavour. 'I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island…'
The net effect of The War of the Worlds is both to make you realise what petty, powerless things human beings are, playthings before the mighty powers of the universe – but also that the Martians themselves are prey to the tiniest enemy, the terrestrial bacteria which kill them.
Wells's fundamental worldview is the heartless, brutal materialism of Darwin, as passed on to him directly by Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, who personally taught Wells at the South Kensington Science Institute in the 1880s.
We have come into being through a tumult of blind forces.
We are made for the struggle for existence – we ARE the struggle for existence; the things that live are the struggle for existence incarnate…
This is Darwinism raw.
In The Food of the Gods, Wells helps the reader come to see the entire present order of things as a mere stepping stone to the next level of evolution, to the coming of the giants, epitomised in the character of the uneducated giant, Caddles, who has no idea why he exists or what anybody is doing. Here he is, straddling Piccadilly, looking down at the multitudes of little people, and afflicted with a sense of complete pointlessness:
None of them seemed to see, as he could do, the drink-sodden wretchedness of the painted women at the corner, the ragged misery that sneaked along the gutters, the infinite futility of all this employment. The infinite futility! (The Food of the Gods Book III, Chapter 3)
At the climax of that novel, as the protagonist Redwood argues with the anti-giant Prime Minister, Caterham, 'The more he talked the more certain Redwood's sense of stupendous futility grew.' (Book III, Chapter 4)
So it should come as no surprise to find the same note sounded again and again in In The Days of The Comet. Here is young Willie's thoughts as he leaves his childhood home:
It was my native valley, and I was going out of it, I thought never to return, and yet in that last prospect, the group of towns that had borne me and dwarfed and crippled and made me, seemed, in some indefinable manner, strange. I was, perhaps, more used to seeing it from this comprehensive view-point when it was veiled and softened by night; now it came out in all its weekday reek, under a clear afternoon sun. That may account a little for its unfamiliarity. And perhaps, too, there was something in the emotions through which I had been passing for a week and more, to intensify my insight, to enable me to pierce the unusual, to question the accepted. But it came to me then, I am sure, for the first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy was the whole of that jumble of mines and homes, collieries and potbanks, railway yards, canals, schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches, chapels, allotment hovels, a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly smoking accidents in which men lived as happy as frogs in a dustbin. Each thing jostled and damaged the other things about it, each thing ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the potbank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a morass.
'Humanity choked amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a morass.'
That is the true Wellsian note. His vision isn't of a fair and equal society, to set alongside the utopian views of Edward Bellamy or William Morris. It is of apocalyptic wars, alien invasions, cosmic events and far futurity which make all human effort seem like 'groping imbecility'.
Poor little angry, miserable creature! Poor little angry, miserable world!
All that said, the second half of the In The Days of the Comet – After the Change – does make a sustained effort to paint a lyrical picture of a socialist paradise in which everyone collaborates to build a better life for everyone else. It is powerfully, forcefully and lyrically described, at length, along with practical aspects of the New World, like the destruction of all the old towns and cities and the building of new, rationally laid out urban centres lined with clean, well-lit, healthy and hygienic dwellings, and the availability of free higher education to all, and the limiting of work to only what is required and only what human beings can enjoyably supply.
The second half of the book does bear comparison with the 'After' scenarios painted by Bellamy and Morris in their utopias. But the grip of the book, its bite and punch, come from the narrator's anger and frustration at the glaring inequality, the poverty and misery, and the million subtle social slights which the poor and lower middle class have to endure from their hoity-toity superiors, which really drive the first half. And then the sense of the vast cosmic transformation which has undertaken mankind.
And the glaring drawback of the book is that, to get to that Ideal Future, the reader has to swallow the notion that the very air we breathe has been transformed by unknown chemicals from a passing comet. Which is not a very practical political policy.
Goodbye Fabians
All of which makes it no surprise to learn that the Fabian Society expelled Wells in 1908.
The other Fabians came to dislike his flashiness, irresponsibility and sexual adventurism. It is typical of his restless magpie mind that a book which was meant to turn into a vision of a socialist utopia instead leads up to a description of the Free Love which very much suited Wells and his philandering ways.
There is always another distraction in a book by Wells, always another shiny new idea or invention which he suddenly wants to share with you, and which leads him wandering away from the book's ostensible topic.
In response to their criticisms of him, Wells went on to satirise the two leading Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in his 1910 novel, The New Machiavelli but, in the event, it was their modest, top-down vision of a soft socialist nanny state which was to triumph – albeit not till after the Second World War.
And although Well's predictions of worldwide war and disaster did come true, particularly in the inferno of the Second World War, the final verdict on the visionary inconsequentiality of Well's vast and voluminous writings is the way almost all of them sank into the almost complete obscurity after that war.
He wrote over a hundred books and God knows how many articles. Nowadays only half a dozen of the best sci-fi and four or five of his Edwardian comedies of manners survive.
Relying on comets from outer space to bring about social change turned out not to be a very practical option.
In the Days of the Comet online
In the Days of the Comet Wikipedia article
Other H.G. Wells reviews
1895 The Time Machine – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the 'owner', Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come – set in the same London of the future described in The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love but descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1901 The First Men in the Moon – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of 'Cavorite' to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants' rebellion against the 'little people'
1906 In the Days of the Comet – a passing comet trails gasses through earth's atmosphere which bring about 'the Great Change', inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1914 The World Set Free – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
by Simon on November 9, 2018 • Permalink
Tagged 1906, Beatrice Webb, British Empire, Clayton, D.H. Lawrence, Darwin, Dickens, Dr Who, Edward Bellamy, Edwardian, Fabian society, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, In the Days of the Comet, Lady Verrall, Looking Backward, Melmount, Midlands, Nettie Stuart, News from Nowhere, Parload, science fiction, Sidney Webb, socialism, socialist, The Food of the Gods, The Great Change, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Henry Huxley, Utopia, Wells, William Morris, Willie Leadford
Posted by Simon on November 9, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/09/in-the-days-of-the-comet-h-g-wells/