Science of Discworld III

by Terry Pratchett

  There are routes away from this pessimism. In The Science of Discworld II we referred to humans as Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. Our overall message was that humans need to make stories to motivate themselves, to identify goals, and to distinguish good from evil.

  Here we go a step further.

  Technological and Civilised Man, we believe, must become Polypan multinarrans,5 to extend the metaphor rather further. Human beings must become ever more diverse, valuing and enjoying each other’s differences rather than fearing them or suppressing them. And mere explanation is not enough. To gain understanding, a useful working philosophy as appropriate for action as for judgement and decision, an explanation is only rarely good enough. People find simple explanations satisfying because they enable thin causal chains of the kind we build for our own personal memories and causalities. But the real world, even the world of other people and their likes, dislikes, and prejudices – sometimes so rigidly held that our own lives and those of our loved ones don’t matter to them – doesn’t work like that.

  We owe it to ourselves, and to those for whom we are responsible and those who respect us, to develop multi-causal understanding. We can do that, as suggested here, by simultaneously encompassing several explanations of each puzzle, explanations that disagree productively with each other. Multinarrans: many stories. So one person, even a Newton or a Shakespeare or a Darwin, will not really be enough, despite the story we have just told you. Our fictional Darwin is a symbol for an endless stream of Darwins, challenging orthodoxy and being right, a glorious network of innovative thinkers and radicals. People who try to keep ancient cultures alive by blowing up the competition achieve nothing, except widespread contempt for their objectives. They doom their own enterprise by their methods, and they betray a terrible lack of confidence that what matters to them can survive without coercion and violence.

  Back to sergeants, and the way things are really done: ‘Sergeant, dig a trench.’ This is how Polypan multinarrans gets things done. How many people are needed to understand a jet airliner? To build one? Recursion in technology really is like biological evolution, it really does expand the phase space. It expands it so much that most of us have virtually no understanding of how the world we live in works. In fact, it is essential that we don’t, because there would be too much for anyone to understand.

  But we do need to understand that this is what the world is like. Otherwise we don’t just lose the sergeants: we lose the ability to build aircraft that fly, dishwashers that clean, cars that don’t pollute (as much). We stop being able to cure (some of) the sick, to feed (most of) the planet, and to house, clothe, and wash a burgeoning humanity.

  Our world is changing, and it’s changing very fast, and we ourselves are the inescapable agents of that change. If we stagnate, like our fictional Victoriana, we die. Staying where we are is not an option. Static resources cannot continue to support us.

  We make our world work by introducing new, undreamt-of rules and possibilities, by considering alternatives and making decisions, which feel like ‘free will’, and work that way, even if they are ‘really’ deterministic. We build on the present to create a bigger future. Science standing on technology, and technology standing on science, provide a successful ladder that leads to extelligence.

  Is it, perhaps, the only one?

  The past was another country, but the future is an alien world.

  And yet …

  The most remarkable thing about the universe, as Einstein once said, is that it is comprehensible. Not in every aspect, but in enough to make us feel at home in it. It makes sense – almost as much as a Discworld story. Which is amazing because facts don’t have to make sense: only well-crafted fiction has to obey such rigid rules.

  Part of this comprehensibility can be explained. We evolved in the universe, and we evolved to survive in it. Being able to tell ourselves ‘what if’ stories about it – to understand it – has survival value. We have been selected, by nature, to tell such stories.

  What is less easy to explain is why the universe can be represented by human stories at all. But then, if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be telling them, would we?

  Which brings us back to Charles Darwin, architect of our own present, which was his future, and would surely seem alien to any Victorian. In Chapter 18 we left him sitting on an ‘entangled bank’, watching birds and insects, and musing on the nature of life. The final paragraph of The Origin, which began with gentle musings about entangled banks, now works its way to its revolutionary conclusion:

  From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

  1 See Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos (Viking, 1994).

  2 In their 1980 book Autopoiesis and Cognition, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela confused this kind of recursion with a life force, and called it ‘autopoiesis’. Many self-consciously modern management experts cite this concept, without having the foggiest idea what it is.

  3 When Jack started at Birmingham University in the 1950s, the factory behind the university made cooking pots for missionaries, just like the ones that were popular in the cartoons in Punch – with the missionaries as ingredients, not cooks, you appreciate. No doubt the same factory had once made the original sauce vats used in Madagascar and Goa.

  4 Details can be found in many personal diaries, such as those kept by the foremen of the spinning and weaving mills in Lancashire as exercises in writing for their evening classes. We learn that sexual engagement with women employees was sometimes necessary for these men, in order to retain the respect of their colleagues, to maintain obedience by the workforce, even when they found it horrible themselves. In the armed forces, of course, and in prisons, the social ‘rules’, the peer pressure to sin grossly, were too powerful to resist, too awful for us to contemplate now.

  5 Sorry, it’s one of those horrible Graeco-Latin hybrids. But, like ‘television’, it’s comprehensible.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE ENTANGLED BANK

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT IN THE museum’s Central Hall when the wizards appeared. There were a few lights on; just enough to see the skeletons.

  ‘Is this a temple of some kind?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, patting his pockets for his tobacco pouch and a packet of Wizlas. ‘One of the weirder ones, perhaps?’

  +++ Indeed +++ boomed the voice of Hex from the middle air. +++ In all the universes of the The Ology, it was the Temple of the Ascent of Man. Here, it is not +++

  ‘Very impressive,’ muttered the Dean. ‘But why don’t we just show him the big snowball? He’d be pretty pleased to know it was because of him humans got away.’

  ‘We’ve scared the poor chap enough, that’s why!’ snapped Ridcully. ‘He’ll understand this. Hex says they started building when Darwin was alive. Stuffed animals, bones … it’s the kind of thing he knows. Now stand back and give the chap some air, will you?’

  They stepped away from the chair on which Charles Darwin had been transported, wreathed in the blue light. Ridcully snapped his fingers.

  Darwin opened his eyes, and groaned.

  ‘It never ends!’

  ‘No, we’re sending you back, sir,’ said Ridcully. ‘That is, you’ll soon wake up. But we thought there is something you should see first.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough!’

  ‘Not quite enough. Lights, gentlemen, please,’ said Ridcully, straightening up.

  Light is the easiest magic to do. A glow rose in the hall.

  ‘The Museum of Natural History, Mr Darwin,’ said Ridcully, standing back. ‘It opened after your death at a ven
erable age. It’s your future. I believe there is a statue to you here somewhere. Place of honour, no doubt. Please listen. I would like you to know that because of you, humanity turned out to be fit enough to survive.’

  Darwin stared around at the hall, and then looked askance at the wizards.

  ‘The phrase “survival of the fittest” was not—’ he began.

  ‘Survival of the luckiest in this case, I fear,’ said Ridcully. ‘You are familiar with the idea of natural catastrophes throughout history, Mr Darwin?’

  ‘Indeed! One only has to examine—’

  ‘But you will not have known that they wiped intelligent life from the face of the globe,’ said Ridcully, sombrely. ‘Sit down again, sir …’

  They told him about the crab-like civilisation, and the octopus-like civilisation and the lizard-like civilisation. They told him about the snowball.1

  Darwin, Ponder thought, bore up well. He didn’t scream or try to run away. What he did do was, in a way, worse: he asked questions, in a slow, solemn voice, and then asked more questions.

  Strangely, he kept away from ones like ‘how do you know this?’ and ‘how can you be so sure?’. He looked like a man anxious to avoid certain answers.

  For his part, Mustrum Ridcully very nearly told the whole truth on several occasions.

  At last Darwin said, ‘I think I see,’ in a tone of finality.

  ‘I’m sorry we had to—’ Ridcully began, but Darwin held up a hand.

  ‘I do know the truth of all this,’ he said.

  ‘You do?’ said Ridcully. ‘Really?’

  ‘Indeed, a few years ago there was a rather popular novel published. A Christmas Carol. Did you read it?’

  Ponder looked down at the hitherto blank piece of paper on his clipboard. Hex had been told to be quiet; Charles Darwin was probably not in the right frame of mind for booming voices from the sky. But Hex was resourceful.

  ‘By Charles Dickens?’ said Ponder, trying not to look as though he was reading the writing that had suddenly filled the page. ‘The story of the redemption of a misanthrope via ghostly intervention?’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Darwin, still speaking in the careful, wooden voice. ‘It is clear to me that something similar is happening to me. You are not ghosts, of course, but aspects of my own mind. I was resting on a bank near my home. I had been wrestling at length with some of the perturbing implications of my work. It was a warm day. I fell asleep, and you, and that … god … and all this, are a kind of … pantomime in the theatre of my brain as my thinking resolves itself.’

  The wizards looked at one another. The Dean shrugged.

  Ridcully grinned. ‘Hold on to that thought, sir.’

  ‘And I feel sure that when I awake I will have reached a resolve,’ said Darwin, a man firmly nailing his thoughts in order. ‘And, I fervently trust I will have forgotten the means by which I did so. I certainly would not wish to recall the wheeled elephant. Or the poor crabs. And as for the dirigible whale …’

  ‘You want to forget?’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Oh, yes!’

  ‘Since that is your clear request, I have no doubt it will be the case,’ said Ridcully, glancing questioningly at Ponder. Ponder glanced at the clipboard and nodded. It was a direct request, after all. Ridcully was, Ponder noted, quite clever under all that shouting.

  Apparently relieved at this, Darwin looked around the hall again.

  ‘“I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls”, indeed,’ he said.

  The words ‘Reference to a popular song written by Michael W. Balfe, manager of the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1841’ floated across Ponder’s clipboard.

  ‘I don’t recognise some of these very impressive skeletons,’ Darwin went on. ‘But that is Robert Owen’s Diplodocus carnegii, clearly …’

  He turned sharply.

  ‘Humanity survives, you say?’ he said. ‘It rode out to the stars on tamed comets?’

  ‘Something like that, Mr Darwin,’ said Ridcully.

  ‘And it flourishes?’

  ‘We don’t know. But it survives better that it would under a mile of ice, I suspect.’

  ‘It has a chance to survive,’ said Darwin.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Even so … to trust your future to some frail craft speeding through the unknown void, prey to unthinkable dangers …’

  ‘That was what the dinosaurs did,’ said Ridcully. ‘And the crabs. And all the rest of them.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I meant that this world is a pretty frail craft, if you take the long view.’

  ‘Ha. Nevertheless, some vestige of life surely survives every catastrophe,’ said Darwin, as if following a train of thought. ‘Deep under the sea, perhaps. In seeds and spores …’

  ‘And is that how it should be?’ said Ridcully. ‘New thinkin’ creatures arisin’ and being forever smashed down? If evolution didn’t stop at the edge of the sea, why should it stop at the edge of the air? The beach was once an unknown void. Surely the evidence that mankind has risen thus far may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future?’

  Ponder looked down at his clipboard. Hex had written: he is quoting Darwin.

  ‘An interesting thought, sir,’ said Darwin, and managed a smile. ‘And now, I think, I really should like to awaken.’

  Ridcully snapped his fingers.

  ‘We can get rid of those memories, can’t we?’ he said, as the blue glow enveloped Darwin yet again.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ponder. ‘He’s asked us to, so it’s ethically correct. Well done, sir. Hex can see to it.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Ridcully, rubbing his hands. ‘Send him back, Hex. With perhaps just a tiny recollection. A souvenir, as it were.’

  Darwin vanished. ‘Job done, gentlemen,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘All that remains now is to get back for—’

  ‘We ought to make sure there are no more Auditors left on Roundworld, sir,’ said Ponder.

  ‘On that subject—’ Rincewind began, but Ridcully waved him away. ‘That at least can wait,’ he said. ‘We’ve established the timeline, it’s nice and stable, and we can—’

  ‘Er, I don’t think they want to wait, sir,’ said Rincewind, backing away.

  Shadows were pouring in to the Central Hall. Over the double staircase, a cloud was forming. It looked like the grey robe of an Auditor, but hugely bigger, and as the wizards watched the greyness darkened to coal-mine black.

  The bloated shape drifted forward, while hundreds more of the empty grey robes continue to merge with it.

  ‘And I think they’re a bit angry,’ Rincewind added.

  Trailing greyness after it, filling the hall from edge to edge, the Auditor bore down on the wizards.

  ‘Hex—’ Ponder began.

  ‘Too late,’ boomed the Auditor. ‘We have control now. No magic, no science, no chocolate. We have to thank you for this place. Never was there a species so determined to destroy itself. In this world, we can win without trying! Do you know the wars you’ve unleashed upon this toy world? The plagues, the famine, the whole science of death? Are you not ashamed?’

  ‘What’s he talking about, Stibbons?’ said Ridcully, not taking his eyes off the cloud.

  ‘There are a number of wars in the next couple of hundred years, sir,’ said Ponder. ‘Big ones.’

  ‘Darwin’s fault?’

  ‘Er, sir.’

  ‘Just “er”, Stibbons?’

  ‘“Er” is a very precise term in this context, sir. It means we don’t have time for a big debate. But certainly the wars are bigger and more frequent than the ones that took place in the world of The Ology.’

  ‘Bad thing, then?’ said Ridcully, who liked his philosophy succinct.

  ‘Er again, sir, I’m afraid,’ said Ponder.

  ‘Care to expand?’

  ‘In short, sir, more people will die in wars, far fewer will die of disease and medical problems of all kinds. And humanity survives the snowball. The first humans lef
t the planet in converted weapons of war, sir.’

  ‘That’s monkeys for you, Stibbons,’ said Ridcully. He looked up at the cloud of pure Auditor.

  ‘No, we’re not ashamed,’ he said. ‘Humans get a chance to go on.’

  ‘They won’t have earned it!’

  ‘Strange that this concerns you,’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Do you know the terrors that will confront them?’ the Auditor demanded. ‘And the terrors that they will bring with them?’

  ‘No, but I doubt if they’re worse that the ones they’ve met already,’ said Ridcully. ‘Anyway, you don’t care about them. You just want them to die quietly. Don’t you?’

  The Auditor shimmered. Ponder wondered how many Auditors had come together to create it. It seemed, now, to be hesitant, unsure …

  It said: ‘I want … I …’

  … and exploded into fog which, itself, faded away.

  ‘Not learned quite enough, then,’ said Ridcully, and sniffed. ‘Well, let’s send Darwin back and go home, shall we? I’m sure we’ve missed at least one meal. Where’s Rincewind?’

  +++ Hiding in the Minerals Gallery +++ said Hex.

  ‘Impressive. I didn’t even see him move. Oh well, I dare say you can pick him up later. Let’s go.’

  ‘What did it mean by the terrors they bring with them?’ said the Dean.

  ‘Well, they’re still monkeys,’ said Ridcully. ‘Still screaming at one another, trailing all that evolution behind them, wherever they go.’

  ‘Darwin said something like that, sir. In The Descent of Man,’ said Ponder.

  ‘Good chap, Darwin,’ said Ridcully. ‘Would have made a good wizard.’

  ‘Did you know they put his statue in the canteen, sir?’ said Ponder, a little shocked.

  ‘Did they? Good idea,’ said Ridcully brusquely. ‘That way, every sensible person sees it. Ready, Hex.’