The Good

'The Good': Is Morality still Needed? 

Do we have, or desire, or need a set of moral rules, or a moral compass?  My answer is "Yes!" We are social animals and need (and desire) a set of rules. But we do already have some guidance; partly in our instincts (the compass), partly acquired culturally (in our historic religions) and partly acquired individually (from parents and from 'life').

Can our historic religions provide? My answer is "No!"  Most have lost their authority by deploying  guesses, half-truths, myths, and arrogance.  Religion in the West, is today largely abandoned; devalued by its arrogance; recklessly challenging science, offering barmy claims, and making empty promises. (See my essay "The Rise and Fall of Christendom.") 

I am talking of Europe, and of now, in the twenty first century. So, I am also talking about Christianity (still the world's leading 'faith' system, apparently).  Science has, to a considerable extent, replaced religion; stolen its thunder and its arrogance; explained the motions of the planets, the weather, procreation, and (to some extent) disease. Science has expanded the universe a million-fold and relegated mankind and our little planet from the status of sovereign to be just another infinitesimal speck on an infinitesimal speck near the edge of the the universe.  

Very few people would argue that there is no difference between good and bad behaviour, nor would they deny that they prefer the good. It may be hard to decide for any one action whether it is good or bad; and people may vote either way. For example, on the assassination of Julius Caesar. That being the case, it is even harder to define what we mean in general by good and bad behaviour.  Most adults (though to varying extents) feel they know the difference. But, as to from whence we get that feeling, there is little agreement. Maybe partly from our genes, partly from our earliest childhood, and subsequent experience. There are plenty data, for acute and methodical observers; comparing people from different backgrounds, rich/poor households, large/small families, good/bad schools, provision/absence of religious instruction. But most simple experiments are unethical. For example, that of the Scottish king, Jame IV,  who put two new-borns on Inch Keith in the Firth of Forth with a dumb nurse. Or that of the Japanese in the period of competing religions (1560 - 1614). 

The sociological value of a clear exposition of what constitutes 'good' behaviour has been so great that every human civilisation (that we know anything about) seems to have created a set of moral rules and invented a religious myth to justify them. 

These sets of rules, these lists of 'to do' and 'to not-do', are interestingly similar, comparing one civilisation with another. (Tell the truth, honour the elderly, do not kill, do not steal.) Their corresponding religious myths, by contrast, are sufficiently different to occasion wars, and genocides. 

A different, and perhaps separate, question concerns the presence, or absence, of a mind, or a will, behind everything, guiding, planning, intending, and above all caring. Such a mind is to me both incredible on the one hand, as too obviously human, and showing too little evidence of supra-terrestial interests and concerns. And, on the other hand, the existence of such a mind seems contradicted by events: the Lisbon earthquake, the Malaysian tsunami of 2004.

But, to many people, both complex and simple people, the absence of such a mind is intolerable. 

What is to be done? We could [1] postulate such a mind; pretend it exists. If the claim is believed, it would give the believer purpose, and at the same time authorise the rules. But it is deceitful, and it would require extraordinary insight and consistency, or it would slide into [2]  a cloud of prevarications, obfuscations, hints and ambiguities. Or [3] we could try to generate such a mind collectively, to care for the needs of each other, using the collective wisdom of the best guides, past and present, continuously updating the rules by judging each new situation afresh; each participant telling only what is true for himself. This is essentially what Quakers do. (Perhaps an AI substitute for God?) 

I find repugnant the idea of telling a giant lie. Nor does obfuscation and prevarication sound any better. I advocate a deliberate system of mutual support, and caring; for those who want it, and want to provide it. 

There is a caveat. If the group is too small it can fall under the sway of a single charismatic leader (See my essay on 'Death Cults'.) Quakers have, so far, avoided this danger by linking local meetings together into area meetings, and these into yet larger 'Yearly' meetings.

(Fine)

Why I am a Quaker

Please read this very compact little essay again from the top. (Da capo al Fine) That will tell you why I am a Quaker. 

(Comments are welcome direct to: Cawstein@gmail.com)

Living the Dream

 Living the Dream

It was noon, one sunny, summer, Sunday, and I was walking down Parson's Street towards the bus-station. I was struck, as I often am, how polyglot we are in Banbury, how ethnically and culturally diverse. It speaks to the tolerance, and basic decency of a town that was for centuries a byword for non-conformity. The racial mix may be partly due to Oxfordshire's policy of housing waifs and asylum seekers in the cheapest housing available in the county. And there is as much evidence of cheapness in Banbury as of heterogeneity: pound-shops, nail-bars, charity shops, and rough-sleepers. 

Banbury, the second largest town in Oxfordshire, never attracted an upper class; but it grew moderately rich in the middle ages as a wool town. Iron ore abounds in the rust-coloured stone and clay; and ore was smelted here in charcoal bloomeries for at least 2.5 millennia.  But Banbury acquired access to coal with the completion (in 1778) of the canal from the midland coalfields. In the nineteenth century Banbury added metal-working to its skills, making farm machinery and bicycles, as well as blankets, horse-girths and plush.

Pedestrianised Parsons Street runs eastwards down towards the Cherwell, so it has a sunny (north) side and a shady (south) side. The former is favoured by cafés and pubs; the latter by the nail-bars and charity shops.  On the sunny side, at the chairs and tables outside 'Roma Coffee' , there was the usual cluster of slavic families, 

teaching the natives how to enjoy pavement life.

Sitting in the sunny doorway of a closed shop, a dishevelled man was angrily haranguing an imaginary audience. Nobody minded him. Grubby sleeping-bags and sheets of cardboard gave evidence of rough-sleeping in some doorways facing what was once the 'Cow Market'. Two elderly Pakistani gentlemen, in kurta and pyjama, were enjoying a bearded chin-wag. Beautifully dressed African children held their parent's hand, while a black-hooded, black boy on a black scooter, whizzed harmlessly past. Following her father came a little Indian girl on a bike with blue stabilisers and pink ribbons on the handle-bar ends.

        Under a shelter, down by the canal, a weather-beaten, white-moustachioed man guarded his half-dozen plastic bags. At first glance you might think he was selling something, but a second glance suggests the goods were of little value; except that they are his. A steady, sober man; day after day in the same place. I imagine he has a good decade of life ahead of him,  and that this was as good a place to wait as any other. Or he might move on; after all, he was not here a year ago.

I have occasionally found Banbury depressing. It, and its citizens, look a bit stuck; not going anywhere. But on this sunny day I took a fresh look and realised that my neighbours were not dissatisfied with their situation. I must try to see their lives as they see them; not using my perspective. In many cases I could plausibly believe that they were happy, or at least content; perhaps they were even living their dream.

My Books

My Books

Michel de Montaigne wrote an essay 'On Books', disclaiming scholarship; claiming rather to be clumsy, slow-witted and forgetful, but explicitly intending to throw light on aspects of himself. Here I frankly do the same. 

I love my books as friends. Each book shares with me at least one common interest, and in many cases more than one. Sometime I discover an interest and recruit the books to share and deepen it. Sometime a book will initiate the friendship and open my eyes to a new fascination. Sometime a book will introduce me to its friends, as when I met Coleridge as a friend of Wordsworth. Then, through Coleridge, I met Hazlitt and Lamb.

Some of my books are old friends, going away back to my earliest childhood.  At that age books appeared at the whim of grown-ups. Some I retain largely by chance, for I had to share family books with six siblings. Thus, I have Father's copy of  'Household Stories from the collection of the Brothers Grimm', and Granny's 'Lives of the Hunted'. My mother must have brought to the family shelves S. R. Crockett's 'The Lilac Sunbonnet' (the first time that my pre-adolescent heart-strings had been played upon in that way). Two more books that were chosen for me, but which I dearly loved, are: 'The Secret Garden' (by F.H. Burnett, illustrated, Heinemann, 1949 printing); and a book of Irish folk tales called 'The Little Good People' (by Kathleen Foyle, illustrated, Frederick Warne, 1949 printing), given me (as I always imagined) by our Irish nanny.

When I was only eight, I was allowed to cycle by myself down from our home in Juniper Green to Colinton Library, one of the many public libraries in Scotland that benefited from Andrew Carnegie's support. I remember the excitement at seeing so many books. And borrowing Tom Brown's Schooldays, though that was read to us by Father. Mother (or Father) read to us the entire "Swallows & Amazons" series, Gone with the wind, Vanity Fair and several Scott novels; but those volumes are now on other's shelves.

        As a teenager I roamed the shelves of the two public libraries in Shrewsbury, and the dustier recesses of the town's second-hand bookshops. I owe to those dusty shelves my love of the helplessly irascible Walter Savage Landor, and his 'Imaginary Conversations'. From Landor (the first man I heard described as a 'Literary Lion') I learned what little I know of the private life of Aesop. Also his fascinatingly arrogant 4-line 'Finis'. But alas, his sun has set; his name is scarcely known today. 

Likewise to those dusty shelves I owe my transient admiration of Herbert Spencer. What heroic ambition!; his plan to summarise all knowledge in a 10-volumed 'System of Synthetic Philosophy', a work that took him forty years to compile. Knowing my limits as a slow-reader with meagre funds, I bought only his 'First Principles', intriguingly divided into two sections: (i) The Unknowable, and (ii) The Knowable. When I moved to the Biology sixth form at school, I quickly concluded that I would learn nothing about biology from Spencer, and disposed of my 'First Principles'. Like Landor, Spencer is another sad relic, passing in a hundred years from clubbing at the Athenaeum with Presidents of the Royal Society, to virtual anonymity; his fossilized remains barely discernible in the forgotten strata of second-hand bookshops. 

I may confess here my pride in owning a 1847 edition of Robert Chambers's 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation'.  What a lovely conceit, that of prying into the mind of God as he fumbled his way towards the creation of man! Chambers wondering (for example) if those two small nipples were added to a man's chest "for mere appearance sake" (p. 200). This 6th edition (like the earlier ones) was anonymous, as the canny Robert Chambers did not want to bring trouble on himself or his family. This book was acknowledged (by Darwin himself) as paving the way for the acceptance of Darwin's  Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. It seems clear that Chambers was as convinced as Darwin, and Lamarck, of the long slow process of evolution, but he suggested no mechanism. If the animals and plants had been created by a divine hand, then clearly God had been at work experimenting for many thousands of years. Today it seems amazing that church leaders were still, mid-nineteenth-century, so outwardly confident in their opposition to the idea of evolution. 

I might mention one other book where my pride in ownership (such as it is) outweighs my regard for the book. The preposterous Lord Chesterfield wrote some 400 letters to his illegitimate son, trying to teach him the superficial polish that he himself valued so highly. He told his son: “I shall love you extremely, while you deserve it; but not one moment longer.” The illegitimate Phillip himself fathered two sons before secretly marrying their mother. He died before his father who, in his will, provided for the two boys, but not for their mother; whereupon she exposed the mean-spirited Earl to ridicule by selling  the accumulated letters for 1,500 guineas. I bought my copy in 1990 when my son was 12, thinking I might learn some tips in parenting; but was horrified at the advice it so earnestly advocated.

I do not know how Plato's shorter dialogues first came into my hands. Were they simply 'in the house', or was I rooting about in Shrewsbury's town library where Darwin himself had been a schoolboy? The first I read was either 'Gorgias' or 'Protagoras', which I read as an elegant routing of a pompous windbag. I soon chased up the others. I was perhaps most impressed at Socrates's demonstration (in 'Meno') that the slave boy intuitively knew Pythagoras' theorem; and was most moved by the death of Socrates (in 'Phaedo'). Socrates became one of my adolescent heroes, and for years was shoulder to shoulder with Jesus.

Yes, I love my books, deeply but not exclusively. In the spring of 1962, the family moved from the fine 18 century dower house at Dorrington that we had rented for 7 years, to a smaller, newer, house in Carding Mill Valley. I came back from college to find the family already in occupation. Instead of my old room, under the eaves on the 2nd floor, facing south over the rose-garden, where the swifts swooped and screeched as they came in to their nests, I now shared a bedroom with my older brother. But I still had my fumed oak dining table, and my mahogany chest-of-drawers; and my books. One evening, after I had retired from the drawing room, Father came up to tell me that Mother had been quite hurt by my saying, over our postprandial coffee, that "I loved coming home to my books". Oh dear! I could not un-say it.  Of course I loved my mother too. But let me return to my theme, for that was meant as a brief aside; we still have a way to go.

        We were a moderately large family; by 1958 we numbered six boys and one girl. I was in the lucky position of being born second.  By inclination and by choice I did not compete. I was a slow, but retentive, reader. And it may be for that reason that I read relatively few novels; perhaps some forty (or 100) in my entire life. I remember Father buying several copies of Sartre's La Nausea and Kafka's The Castle and handing them round, saying that this was the sort of stuff his psychiatric patients were telling him. But I think my main fascination was to learn about things; people, their ideas and their doings. Not people's fantasies ("wouldn't it be nice if" ). 

I suppose I was rather normal as a teenager, but unique for all that; at least in my reading, where I differed from my siblings. And who else might I compare myself with, for we were a rather isolated family, perpetuating perhaps our shy father's own boyhood isolation, and his insecurities. In Dorrington, we had entertained for several days a visitor from New Zealand, a Dr. Armstrong; he who had established the medical practice and built the house in Taupo that became for three years our home. He gave me a book called 'The Boy's Country Book', containing articles on camping, fishing, gliding, underwater swimming, plant hunting, beach combing, and more.  Why me? Perhaps I already showed signs that I would become a botanist. Or, perhaps my path in life was determined by the book. In either case it became a favourite. In the next few years I made myself a canoe, kept pigeons, grew carnations, caught fish with my fingers, fly-fished our stream, collected and identified wild-flowers, bought myself flippers and snorkel, camped rough-and-light, and youth-hosteled.  

Two others of my favourite teenage books may be mentioned here: E.V. Lucas' 'The Open Road' anthology, and Stephen Graham's 'The Gentle Art of Tramping'. The latter explained how to make coffee in a billycan, and advised plenty of handkerchiefs. I have since walked (sleeping rough): Edinburgh to Moffat and back, Church Stretton to Llanbister Road station, Göttingen to Kassel, and part of the way from Paris to Dieppe. 

I love my volume of Mathematical Tables: Logarithms to 7 decimal places, Trigonometrical, Nautical and other Tables. The Log(base 10) of 3 is 0.4771213. Not that I can navigate, but I like the idea that I am able to correct celestial altitude observation for refraction according to the temperature and pressure of the atmosphere. And calculate the distance (in nautical miles) to the visible horizon from my height above sea-level (in feet). And I enjoy my volume on 'Driving'  (1890) for its binding, for its haughty exclusion of the 'motor carriage'; but chiefly for its coverage of 'single-harness' and 'tandem-driving' by Lord Algernon St. Maur and Viscountess Georgiana Curzon respectively.  Even though I, myself, never drove more than a two wheeled 'governess cart'. 

My real-life heroes are mostly intellectual: Socrates, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, J.S. Mill, Darwin, Einstein. I have biographies and, where available, autobiographies. Regarding men of action, I have biographies of Nelson and Wellington, and bought (or was given) Slocum's 'Sailing Alone Around the World', George Bayly's Sea Life Sixty Years Ago, and Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. Yet I am amongst the least nautical members of my family;  for half of the family sail, and half do not, just as half play music and half do not. 

I have numerous books of biography, travel, history and philosophy; too many to list. And, in any case, owning, reading, and loving, are three very different things. I have several large dictionaries, and a similar number of grammars or guides to usage, poetry in collections and single authored volumes, and some hundred works of fiction ranging from Chaucer to the present. But these do not clamour to be listed. 

        However, I fear I bore my readers with this deliberate and un-called-for exhibition of my inner life.

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979)

    Seeing the title of the previous post ("Six Dimensional Man") reminded me that I had a book upstairs by Herbert Marcuse called "One Dimensional Man" that I had never read; never even opened. Marcuse rocketed to world fame in the nineteen sixties, together with Hannah Arendt, as leading thinkers of the New Left. Perhaps it had belonged to my brother Peter (1944–1965). 

    This morning, while brewing my morning coffee, I brought the book down and took it out into the conservatory to read with my coffee. I could not make any sense of it. Even the title baffled me. Was it good to be one-dimensional, or bad? Did one-dimensional mean narrow, or focussed or obsessional. On page 50, half-way through a long paragraph, there was a line of type that had been carefully scored out, in ink. Had it not been scored I would have stumbled on that line, for it did not fit with the preceding line; nor did it fit with the following line. So my predecessor was right: there was a whole line of extraneous type inserted in the middle of the page. That rather knocked my confidence.

    The second-last chapter was titled "The Catastrophe of Liberation" –– and seemed oxymoronic.  I flipped through the final Conclusion, and put the book down defeated; and disappointed. My weary 83 year-old brain was not up to that sort of turgid prose writing and error-prone typography.

    Seeing my problem, the ingenious Google imp quickly found and proffered a 30 minute video [Ref.1] in which Bryan Magee interviewed the 79 year-old Marcuse, brilliantly revealing the important question raised by the Frankfurt School in 1930, two or three of the key answers they came up with in subsequent decades all carefully and cogently expounded by the aging Marcuse. I shall try to summarise [a] the question, and [b] the answers; then [c] turn to critique. (But I do recommend the video [Ref.1]). 

[a] The question raised by the Frankfurt philosophers was: "Why did Marx's proletarian revolution against capitalism not produce communism (as Marx had predicted), but produced instead the monster of fascism? And, after the (military) defeat of fascism, the present chaotic loss of values. 

[b] Obviously, society adapted.  On the one hand the proletariat changed; it was no longer true that "it had nothing to lose but its chains"; it had acquired many comforts and benefits, and it was better educated.  Capitalism also changed. It learned to manipulate the un-conscious and sub-conscious minds of its customers (the proletariat), creating false goals and selling empty dreams. But 'alienation' remained; the work of the average worker is unrewarding. The proletariat might even own shares, and thus the 'means of production', but it does not control the company; that is the role of the bosses earning grotesque salaries. 

[c] Critique. 

(i) Marcuse remained a loyal Marxist, in spite of the fact that all Marxist regimes were corrupt and brutal dictatorships, and in spite of the numerous and extensive corrections and modification that Marxism required in the mid-twentieth century. He remained a devotee of young Marx, sincerely believing that the ideal community involved sharing, co-operating and a 'subsuming of the Self'. (As, of course, did Buddha and Jesus.) Did Marcuse perhaps underestimate the strength and ubiquity of selfishness, and the role of 'Self' in concepts like liberty and libertarianism? 

(ii) Magee suggested that it is impossible to integrate individual egos into a class-based theory. Marcuse categorically disagreed. He had explicitly attempted (In "Eros and Civilization", 1955) to add Freud to Marx. But, while such an integration is highly relevant and necessary, it is a giant task. It may be that Marcuse only half succeeded. Economic theorists prefer to model individuals as motivated by rather simple forces like need, greed, fear, habit. The truth is absurdly more complex. 

(iii) Magee asked Marcuse why the philosophers of his school wrote such unreadably turgid prose. One might point out that these German philosophers all became refugees, living in the USA, writing and lecturing in a language that was not their mother tongue. Marcuse added Adorno's defence: that the Frankfurt School believed that the 'establishment' had so manipulated the language and syntax of social discourse that arguments automatically came out in their favour.  For example, people will tend to vote for 'liberty', till they eventually realise that 'regulation' better protects them from other people's liberties. To combat that deliberate manipulation, these philosophers felt driven to circumlocution and neologism. 

(iv)  Magee asked what positive benefits accrued from the Frankfurt School's updating of Marxism. Marcuse suggested that it provided, under the name of Critical Theory, a way of understanding the woes of our present post-capitalist Western society, claiming that while getting richer and more technically competent, we are getting more brutal, selfish, and dishonest. Magee suggested that this was a philosophy of disappointment.

(v) But (and this is my question, not Bryan Magee's) is Western society less happy now than in the nineteenth century?

   Anna Berry built a "constantly moving happiness machine" [Ref.2], to mimic and ridicule that created by the Techno-Military-Industrial-Complex, whereby the proletarian finds himself meaninglessly turning a handle, creating profit for someone else. 

References

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U23Ho0m_Sv0. "The Frankfurt School – Herbert Marcuse & Bryan Magee

[2] https://www.annaberry.co.uk/the-constantly-moving-happiness-machine/

Six Dimensional Man

                         The Six Dimensional Man

        Our hero, Steve, stood in front of the brown varnished door labelled 'Maker'. Under the label was one of those sliding shutters that allowed only one of two options to be seen: 'IN' or 'OUT'. It showed 'IN'. Steve hesitated a moment, took a deep breath and tapped tentatively on the door. A muffled voice called "Come in", so in he went. 

"Complaint or compliment?", asked the duty officer.

"Well, compliments obviously", said Steve "but I have been thinking, and wondered if it would be too bold of me to make a suggestion."

"We mostly get compliments, but you have a suggestion, eh? I don't see why not. Wait here till that red light goes green. You are lucky we are not too busy today."

Steve sat down on the last of a row of empty chairs, near a second varnished door and the red light, and waited while he tried to compose his thoughts.  At last the door slid open and out stumbled a young woman with outstretched hands as in a trance; or as a rabbit might if exposed to a car's headlights. A moment later the light went green and in went Steve. 

The figure before him seemed perfectly familiar; in fact very like all the pictures, though somewhat larger than he had expected; fatter, more easy-going, and more smiling. Steve bowed his head a little in unconscious modesty. 

"Well," said the Maker, "I gather you have some ideas. Are you wondering why you only have two legs, perhaps? I often get that."  And he beamed a good-natured smile down on Steve. "I really don't think you would find an extra leg any better; or two, for that matter. Think of sitting down. Where would you put them? Or typing, or playing the piano?"

"No, it wasn't more legs. I think two is just fine, thank you. Brilliant, in fact. It is just that I heard someone say it was possible to have more than three dimensions. Is that really possible?"

"Yes, of course it is. You can have almost as many as you wish. Would you like a fourth dimension; temperature perhaps?  That would perhaps make you feel more distinguished, feel you had one more degree of freedom. How would you like that?"

"That is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of. Wonderful. How would it work?". 

" Just as you and the others can go forwards and backwards, or up and down, so you would be able to get hotter or colder. Not exactly like up and down, for you cannot go very far down in temperature before you get to the bottom. But you can go up without limit. "

"Very interesting," said Steve. "Up is easier than down is it? " and he glanced up for the first time to catch the trace of a blush on the Maker's face, who sat for a few moments at his desk playing with a paperknife.

"Give it a try", suggested the Maker. "I do not think you will find that to be a serious limitation; most people prefer moderately warm temperatures. You can come back next week if it does not do the trick."

Steve, overcome with a feeling of blessedness, thanked the Maker, and left. Out in the street he looked around him. Would his fellow citizens realise his distinction? He popped into a stationers and had some cards printed 'Four dimensional man' followed by his name and address. These he would give out whenever he got into conversation with somebody he judged able to appreciate the implications. 

On one such occasion the recipient, after hearing the explanation, looked at the card a second time, and said: "But I think I also have a temperature; I use this little thermometer, and can find the numerical value of my temperature in centigrade or absolute degrees, whenever I want."

Steve was back outside the brown varnished door at the same time on the following week. He was admitted again and greeted again with the same grace and genial good humour.

"Dissatisfied?" asked the Maker. 

"No, no; very satisfied" said Steve. "It is just that I find a number of people also have a temperature, and was wondering if I could have something a tad more esoteric. You said one could have almost as many dimensions as one wanted."

" Sure thing; no problem. What about 'Glow', or 'Spin'? They are a little more esoteric. ".

"Yes, those sound intriguing. Do tell me what they govern?"

"Well, 'Glow' governs happiness. You can travel from very, very unhappy to very, very happy. Once again there is a limitation, I am afraid; you cannot get away from the mean. You cannot always be happy. 'Spin' is a bit more mysterious.  You cannot have two bodies in the same place if they have the same spin; but you can if they have opposite spins. It works well in some long-term marriages."

"I shall try that one, if I may", and Steve left the presence as delighted as he had been the previous week. He asked the stationer if he could cross out the word 'Four' and over-print with 'Five', but was persuaded to scrap the old cards and start with some new ones. 

With his Spin he felt he was getting closer to his dream-world of sub-atomic mysteries. But he was still not completely satisfied. He felt he was still a long way from being able to be in two places at once.  Nor could he be alive and dead at the same time; though admittedly that was not a high priority in his dream world, except perhaps as a stunt. 

So he turned up again at the now-familiar door and, as before, was admitted to the antechamber; and there he waited as before, until the red light went green and he was allowed into the presence.

"How goes it with Spin", he was asked. 

" Oh, fine! Yes, quite fine, thank you. It turns out my wife and I do not get on all that well, so it is not as much use as it might have been. Do you know anything about alternative universes". 

" Not much" admitted the Maker. "We could try reversing 'Time' for you. Before the Big-Bang and the origin of this universe there was another universe exactly like this one, only the mirror image, as it were."

"What about the multiverse?" asked Steve. 

"Oh that's just a theory, and probably a wrong one." The Maker gave a chuckle, before modestly adding "In my opinion." 

"Oh," said Steve, in naïf admiration at the straight-forward frankness of his Maker. "Do explain –– please."

  "Well, you know how a single electron can go through two adjacent slits at once, and give an interference pattern. You might well ask how a single entity and a single instance can give a  probability pattern. One possible explanation  is that the one electron in one instant is really present simultaneously in a hundred or more parallel universes. So you can talk of an average position, or a probability. But that interpretation depends on the Quantum Theory being right,  and I am not sure it is. "

  "Is there an alternative theory?" asked Steve.

"Well, yes, there are several, as a matter of fact; for example David Bohm's 'Hidden Variable' theory. If you knew the value of that hidden parameter, the electron's  initial state would not be indeterminate, and nor would any of its subsequent states. But this is very new stuff, you know. Not confirmed."

"I wouldn't mind testing out a hidden variable, if you like", Steve offered. 

"I think it would be very unwise to tinker with anything you do not fully understand", said the Maker.  But for Steve the idea of a new batch of business cards bearing the words 'Six Dimensional Man' had already seized his mind; he could think of nothing else. 

"Please", said Steve, then added "if you can", which provoked a slight frown on the previously bland face of his Maker. 

Out on the street he gave a skip of sheer delight, and hastened off to the stationer. The next day the stationer brought the neat box of new cards to Steve's house, but Steve's wife explained that she had not seen her husband since the previous evening. 

        And indeed, Steve was never seen again. Not around town and, as far as we know, not anywhere. 

 

De l'Amour

 De l'Amour

Max and I sat sipping wine in my conservatory as the light slowly faded.

"So," I asked, "what do you say when your girlfriend says she loves you and asks if you love her?'"

"Huh!" he shrugged, "Of course I murmur something about me loving her too. But in truth I am thrown into confusion."

"Even panic" I volunteered.  "What is love, anyway? I was never sure that I had ever experienced love. Fondness, liking, friendship, familiarity, I know all these. And wanting something, desperately; like a boy for a bicycle, or a girl for a pet.  I rotated my glass by its stem, tilted it and sniffed the heavy vapour. "How would I know love if I had it? Is love the same for everyone?  etc, etc."

"Is love perhaps a female thing?" Max asked.

"Now there you are!  I can see why a girl might want to know the level of her man's commitment, as it is she who might have to carry the consequences.  Fair enough, but how on earth can our merely claiming to be in love convince anyone of anything?"  

Max agreed. 

"Are there no visible signs? Reliable, objective signs. Perhaps a distracted air, dilated pupils, or something in the gait, or carriage? Perhaps someone could devise a test kit; a colour-changing dip-stick. I am sure there would be a market for that."  

"You might think", continued Max, "that bringing a bunch of flowers should be enough; if they are red ones."

"Come on Max, you are being frivolous, as you often are. I am being serious about this, as is my wont. Some sixty years ago I read Stendhal's 'De l'Amour', but I never got much into it, nor much out of it. All I remember at this distance is his concept of 'Crystallisation'; the way additional virtues accrue spontaneously to the 'love-object'; as salt crystals grow in the saturated atmosphere of a salt-mine."

"All the great essayists treat of 'Friendship'; do not some also consider love?". I believe I have read Montaigne on 'Friendship', and Emerson, and Francis Bacon."

"We can soon test that idea", I said, getting up. I returned in 2 minutes with those three authors, as well at Marcus Aurelius's 'Thoughts', Stendhal's 'De l'Amour', and Plato's 'Symposium' . 

"Of the essayists you mentioned, only Bacon treats explicitly of love. And he does not rate it very highly. He quotes someone as saying "that it is impossible to be in love and wise". 

        I waved Plato's 'Symposium' at Max, saying "I think Aristophanes gets as close to my understanding about love as any of them. He covered both the aspect of looking for your soul-mate, and Nature's canny trick of so positioning the genitalia that procreation is the unintended consequence. 

"Then what is left for us to discover?" asked Max. "Stendhal covers the progressive distortion of perception as the lover succumbs to his obsession. And Aristophanes propounds the truth that the two fundamental rôles of love are to promote conception, and to improve childcare; at least for a sufficient portion of the population to maintain the species."

"I was coming to a similar conclusion myself," I said. "But, in addition, I had decided that a common characteristic of love is its lack of reason; so much so that to call an emotion 'love' almost requires the presence of folly. My friend writes to me from Colombia that she will fly back to sit at my bedside while I recover from my operation. 'No, no,' I protest, 'you were here only a month ago; when I am fit I shall come to Bogota.' What, I ask you, could be sillier than that exchange?". 

"Would you really go to Bogota?"

     "Yes I would. And that is how, for once, I feel I can honestly tell her that I love her. No need to mumble."