Free Will by Sam Harris No2

Anyone who comes out of reading Sam Harris's brain event-provoking book fully convinced that they did not freely choose to do so, obviously need not bother procrastinating for long about whether to follow it up with Kenneth Weisbrode's On Ambivalence.

As for Hamlet, what a complete bloody waste of time! For it may appear that we are having trouble making up our minds, but we aren't...at least according to Mr Harris.

New year, new novel idea

For the past year or so I have been working on a schema for a novel which has as its central conceit the notion that in the 'not-too-distant-future' Chinese scientists have developed a gene therapy which allows them to selectively offer a significant lifespan extension to individuals deemed valuable to the state.

Now whenever one starts with a high metaphyical concept and then attempts to graft on some sort of story, one finds oneself in a bind. This year, a not-disimilar concept came to my attention in the form of a movie called In Time, and from the critical response, I have gathered that Andrew Niccol has failed to disguise the fact that the underlying idea disappointingly denies any precedence to either plot or character. (Anyway, I hope to be catching that flick early in 2012.)

I was planning to locate my own narrative in Guatemala, a choice which would permit me some geographical and cultural distance from the hard technological core of my MacGuffin, and encourage me, the author, to focus on the familiar and the intimate.

A Chapin location would have also allowed me to explore another key theme: what would happen if the Chinese 'solution' would have negligible (or at least unforseen) consequences for individuals of WASPish ethnicity but, owing to the known affinities between the Mayan and Chinese chromosomes, gave a sudden advantage to one of the western hemisphere's ethnic have-not groups?

I still think this is a story worth writing, but I have struggled to find a way to set it in a fictional universe that is essentially more interesting than expressing it as a mere thought experiment.

Yet, almost inevitably when one considers how human beings would respond to extraordinary longevity, one starts to ponder what will happen once they realise that it wasn't really what they were after in the first place. And so, a parallel narrative idea has sprung to mind: how might we behave if given the chance to live out all of the possibilities that our individual lives offer us? The attraction of this premise (which, you guessed it, would also be tied down to Guatemala via an as yet undisclosable tie-in to Antigua's parque central) is that it would permit me to gratuitously meditate on my own philosophical notions relating to the nature of quantum phenomena and free will, as well as verbalising my gathering apprehensions about ageing and the gradual withering of personal possibility.

I would also be allowed the chance to signal my intellectual debt to the likes of Asturias, Rulfo and Borges and, something I have always wanted to do, couch an otherwise explicitly science fiction tale within the idiom and mood of magical (or to butcher Arthur C. Clarke's famous observation) suficiently technological-realism. It's also a much harder story to write. But then that is what New Year's resolutions are for, isn't it?

Dawkins plays Santa

Richard Dawkins has been honoured with the post of guest editor for the Christmas edition of the New Statesman and has been out there this week plugging the magazine via Sam Harris's essay on free will, the essence of which is encapsulated by a sentence one comes across about half way through:

"All of our behaviour can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge."

It bothers me that some rationalists (amongst whose numbers I generally like to consider myself) are unable to perceive the obvious holes in their arguments. Dawkins himself wrote an entire book that affected to dismiss the probability of God by comparing the creator to some giant spaghetti monster in space, a line of argument that completely failed to acknowledge that when men speak of God, as opposed to giant spaghetti monsters, they are talking about first causes, and that when they do so, the whole category of probability becomes moot anyway.

None of Harris's arguments are especially new, but given the nature of the publication, he has attempted to demonstrate how they can be deployed to trump prevailing political discourse, presumably in order to make new enemies as one munches on the Christmas turkey.

It's as if he is saying that we scientists, at least those of us who can face up to unpalatable truths, have a deeper fundamental grasp of the big issues than either liberals or conservatives (in the American sense). Not quite what his chum Dawkins meant when he coined the phrase Holistier than thou, but certainly a variety of smug superiority that does this little clique of science-led dogmatists few favours.

Harris believes he can dispense entirely with the notion of free will because human consciousness is little more than a package of illusions of acting in the moment, when in fact it is a "a totality of impersonal events merely propagating their influence." From this premise, he goes on to reach the following conclusion: "If I had been born with the brain, body and experience of Ted Bundy, I would have been Ted Bundy - a serial killer put to death for his crimes. There is no extra part of me that could have resisted taking his path in life."

But hold on, doesn't that word "experience" muddy things up a bit? What if he had just been born with the brain and body of Bundy? There's no question that there is something innate in this type of psychosis, but the dodgy genetic hand dealt to Bundy had to interact for many years with society via his inherently plastic human mind before he went out to make his first kill.

Minds are never wholly impersonal. Harris has deliberately tied the notion of free will to consciousness, a stream we now know is always playing catch-up with the actual decision-making processes of the human brain, but our on-going mental worlds encompass the past and the future as well as the present, and our behaviour and overall personality is surely forming and re-forming as a result of a feedback loop between our illusion of executive control and those hidden committees of brain function. So while I may not be able to directly influence what I decided to do a millisecond ago, what I do next week must potentially differ depending on how deeply I think about it. Surely the 'totality' must include some more personal events when one steps back a bit from the conscious moment?

An interesting correlation?

"If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them. Are the religious worse because they’re religious, or are they religious because they’re worse?

"The first direction of causation is well known, but it’s the second that is more prominent in everyday life. The religious (sociologically speaking) tend to be religious because religious belief provides them with a framework in which they can handle certain unattractive elements in themselves. In converts – those who take up religion without having been brought up in it, or without having previously taken it seriously – the correlation between religious belief and relative moral badness in the strictly descriptive sense (which is not incompatible with charm) is particularly striking."

Galen Strawson

No exceptions...

"It's impossible — no exceptions — for the genuine spiritual or religious impulse to achieve full expression in religions that mandate belief in a supernatural, personal God. There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only because they have somehow maintained the forms of personal God religions, while in fact having abandoned any such belief.

"Some people think that men like St Paul and St Augustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religious temperament. It's easy to see why they have this reputation as long as we stick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self."

Galen Strawson, British philosopher

Kids and computers

"Science is a tool for problem-solving - the best that humans possess. But it has this peculiarity, that when it is most successful it creates new problems, some of which are insoluble." (John Gray)

V's niece has a surprising fluency about the PC interface. Yet the notion that each generation is inevitably more au fait with information technology is a myth that could do with some challenging.

For example, V herself would have little trouble using the DOS prompt to deal with a tricky corrupted file that repeatedly crashes Windows Explorer once clicked on. Her niece meanwhile, for all her dextrous expertise, probably has little comparable understanding of the underlying hardware and software architecture of a laptop. For her, it's really just an oversize Blackberry that won't fit in her back pocket.*

I'm sure she knows how to use the simple Google search box to look up Justin Bieber, but if she didn't, I could show her in a matter of minutes. What I'd find a lot harder to pass on are the sort of sophisticated search techniques that became the basis of my living in the mid-1990s. This is because they are grounded in reasoning skills acquired across my formal education, many of which have little basis in either computers or technology in general (Medieval History for example!)

Here's another example that got us thinking. We have a young acquaintance in our colonia of apparently above-average intelligence and sensitivity, better-educated and certainly comfortable with computers. When V offered to help him improve his English conversation skills, we soon discovered that he didn't really know how to use a dictionary. Now you might think that this, rather like mental arithmetic, is exactly the sort of low-tech talent that kids today can dispense with, because there are electronic tools out there that make such tasks so much easier than they were in our day.

But dictionaries are systematised information, the very basis of the computational revolution that went mainstream in the latter part of the last century. And it's not just that our friend struggled, as so many Chapines do, with his ortografia: not knowing or caring for example if the translation of 'deep' is Hondo or Ondo. He didn't seem to have accurate mental map of how the letters of the alphabet are ordered, and once he got to the right letter for the word he was seeking, he started slowly reading every word in the sequence until he eventually found it.

It therefore surely goes without saying that the ability to mentally parse an index at speed without a computer is very much a preliminary life skill that one has to acquire before one has any hope of getting the most out of all that binary data stored on computers around the globe.

Most of the really important computer skills are not really computer skills at all. Hence, giving every teen in Guatemala a free laptop is unlikely to transform the nation into an IT powerhouse overnight...though it might drastically increase the number of irrelevant Facebook taggings.

The people who get the most out of these technologies are ultimately those who are using them as an extension — an enhancement even — of their own information processing capabilities. Yet the flipside of this 'solution' is perhaps a whole new set of problems, when one considers that the very same tools may actually be hindering a whole subset of children in education today from acquiring these capabilities in the first place.

*I'm reminded of my photographer cousin's gripes that somewhere between XP and 7, the dominant visual metaphor for Windows became that of a kiddies' playground.

More on Limitless and Surrogates

Red wine is my NZT; a couple of glasses and things really do start becoming so much clearer. The trouble is that somewhere between glasses three and four these new powers mysteriously vanish. As noted yesterday, Limitless had me flinching a little at the notion of what I might have achieved already in this life if I had been able to maintain my lucidity levels permanently at the one glass of vino levels.

It also reminded me of another excuse I have for underachievement: I could never sign off on a concept as sloppily concretised as this one was. If an outline idea for a narrative were to occur to me, say one along the lines of Limitless or Surrogates, I'd need to think it all the way through, to make sure there weren't any obvious holes in it and to make sure as well that my story at least attempted to explore all the more interesting implications therein.

Hollywood scriptwriters seem to have collectively opted out of this sense of responsibility / accountability. What exactly does NZT do, for example? Is it improving neural connections, memory, deductive reasoning or all of these things? Eddie can learn a new language in days, but he can also deal with some subway punks simply by accessing his recollections of Bruce Lee movies. Yet no matter how good my visual memory is I'm never going to be able to play tennis like Raffa Nadal just by watching him on court. Nor indeed could Nadal practice his own serve by viewing repeated playbacks under the influence of NZT. These are physical memories, not visual ones.

I imagine that whoever wrote Surrogates might have been hanging out in SL or World of Warcraft one day and thought to himself, what if the avatars were made of metal and latex instead of 0s and 1s? It's not a bad concept, but the plot that has been built around it is so perfunctory that one finds oneself seeking scraps of entertainment behind it in the production design and in the few occasions the director has been left with to showcase the sociological ramifications of the situation.

As for me, I'd have got stuck on the thought that physical avatars would transform a city of 10m individuals into one of 20m.

On Evil

In her keynote speech at TOC on February 11, Margaret Atwood observed that every tool has three sides, sharp, blunt and dumb.

The first two are available for good and evil uses respectively, while the dumb side delivers the almost equally prevalent effects we associate with the stupid and the banal. So, she added, a hammer might be used to build homes for refugees, to murder your neighbour's baby, or to accidentally blacken your fingernail.

Now, if I were a 'Christer', this is one of the explanations I would tend to deploy to account for the existence of evil in a created world, for a world with hammers that could only be used to build homes for the needy, would be a very different world to the one we actually inhabit, and a much less ethically-engaging one for sure. The potential for evil is, if you like, an inevitable part of the payload of good; in this world at least.

Norwegian thinker Lars Svendsen recently tackled this most elusive of concepts in his book The Philosophy of Evil. Rather like Niall Ferguson and his 'killer apps' for successful civilisation-building, Svendsen locates four different kinds of evil action:

Demonically evil acts - where one does evil for its own sake (whatever that may be).

Instrumentally evil acts - where the evil is done for a greater goal, not necessarily a good one either, and where the act is recognised as evil by its perpetrator.

Idealistically evil acts - where something bad has been mistaken for something good, and...

Brainlessly evil acts - rather self-explanatory this one, but controversially Svendsen thinks this kind of evil is best exemplified by Adolf Eichman.

This handy taxonomy externalises the issue somewhat, identifying evil acts independently of the mental (and moral) states behind them.

In Meno Plato argued that evil always resulted from ignorance, for who would actually want to pursue something they themselves did not perceive to be subjectively good?

That evil is a mistake — the kind made when one ignorantly confuses building a house for the needy with brutal murder with a household tool — strikes me as a flawed position.

Just last night I was reflecting on two individuals I know here in Guatemala, cousins in fact, who both seem to have a persistent tendency to behave in a nasty way to their fellow travellers on this planet, often in a manner that ends up harming their own cause.

While this last observation might support Plato's position, the key difference I can detect between these two people, is that the 'evil' in one — interestingly, the one more universally recognised as a bad egg — strikes me as predominantly the result of a particularly ropey upbringing, whilst the 'evil' in the other, appears to stem from something deeper, and therefore somehow more evil, in the bloodline.

Of course, this takes us back to the old nature-nurture antimony. I have no more ability than the next person to pry these two biases apart (more on this in a forthcoming post), but the idea of an evil state of mind that is somehow instinctual, certainly bothers me more than one that has been learned, or indeed simply manifests itself occasionally as a result of a disturbing lived experience.

To A Mountain In Tibet

My impression is that most westerners who dabble in Buddhism are essentially secular in outlook and not really seeking the big hit of revelation — though you might say that many of them do so in the context of a certain nostalgia for the numinous.

Colin Thubron's new book, To A Mountain In Tibet sounds like a fascinating read. I was intrigued to hear him state on a R3 pod this morning that historically Tibet has been one of the world's most violent societies, long sporting a standing army in excess of 200,000 soldiers and that many of the previous incumbents of the position of Dalai Lama were either murdered or themselves implicated in murder.

Thubron indicates that the era of the First World War represented the high water mark of western cultural mystification of Tibet, coinciding with the moment when Europe was bleeding its old certainties most profusely.

I recently heard the authors of All Things Shining define secular outlook as one which, while not rejecting religiosity, is not only tolerant of competing viewpoints, actively encourages individuals to adopt as many of them as they might feel comfortable with.

As well as a set of disciplines for the suppression of the self in everyday capitalist existence, Buddhism offers a deeper spiritual heritage for the post-modern notion that the best case scenario for the hereafter — full preservation of the individual persona in the hereafter* — is also the least satisfying from a rational viewpoint.

* Though I grant this might not be such a satisfactory end result for the damned.

A lost art?

I'm reading my first edition hardback copy of The Honorary Consul today and came across an instance of what appears to be an editorial slip: Greene wrote affected when he clearly meant effected. I wonder if this made it through to the current paperback edition?

Anyway, fellow pedants will be fascinated to read Alex Clark's piece in last Friday's Guardian on The Lost Art of Editing. I too have found e-books to be comparatively poorly edited for basic copy errors, which bodes badly for the future.

Have we eaten all the low-hanging fruit?

"My grandfather grew up in the 1900s in a world of horse-drawn carts and candle-lit houses. In the following 50 years he would live through a series of astonishing transformations – electricity, the motor car, television and radio, the telephone, the refrigerator, the vacuum-cleaner, penicillin and the aeroplane, just to name a few. It was not just these things that made the 20th century what it was. Their production was industrialised. They created huge employment and wealth. I grew up in the 1960s and have experienced no such parallel transformations."

Thus griped Will Hutton in last Sunday's Observer as he reviewed Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation, How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, a book which posits that scientists and technologists have recently not been able to come up with inventions that can be industrialised at the same pace as they once did.

The notion that the pace of change has become less rampant is one that has occurred to me too. After all I belong to a generation that grew up expecting to be colonising the moon and having philosophical chats with their household robots by now.

I note however that my father, who had no trouble getting his head around television, jet aeroplanes etc. struggles a bit with Facebook and the social media in general. This suggests that change is coming packaged with new complexities. Ask yourself which device brings the greatest social transformation, the telephone or its apparently less innovative spin-off, the mobile telephone?

Thinking about this I recalled a passage in Frode's new book Liquid Information, which suggests that young-ish westerners of our sort have by now traveled a greater distance than all of our ancestors combined. (Human ancestors, one presumes.)

That this kind of change, however great, might also be complex and non-linear occurred to me when I started to consider it in greater depth. I was thirteen before I made my first transatlantic journey, though I had by then boarded perhaps 50 or so flights around my home continent. In my teens I also went InterRailing around Europe four times.

Nowadays, I get the impression that young westerners are more likely to have been to Thailand (or indeed Guatemala) in the early part of their travel-histories than to have explored territories more closer to home, though the combined evil that is Ryanair and the city break may be partially offsetting this trend.

However this may also be one of the last generations for whom such low-cost long-haul air travel is available. (And let us not forget that only 37% of Americans have passports, even if they do have a large continent-spanning nation within which to collect their miles.)

Vehicular hacking

There's been much talk recently of new rules of engagement for state-sanctioned cyberwarfare, and in particular of a new definition of the nation state for the digital age.

One of the topics discussed at the conference was the possibility that hackers could soon turn to messing with the on-board computing systems incorporated into a new generation of motor vehicles. Such attacks could cause minor inconveniences such as re-routing you by modifying your GPS coordinates, or more serious setbacks such as turning off the engine when the car is moving at high speed. Some informed commentators have even suggested that fires or even explosions could be effected via cyberwarfare techniques. It may never happen, but attention all screenwriters, eh?

Hans Rosling's 'The West and the Rest'

From BBC4's The Joy of Stats (Thanks again to Scott).

We are all born divergent thinkers

A really excellent, riveting presentation by Sir Ken Robinson on how our native creativity tends to be educated out of us. (Thanks to Joel for the link.)



Here's Sir Ken in action again at TED.

The nativity play anecdote and its implications reminded me a bit of the following q&a session we once had with some of V's nephews. One came up with what seemed to us to be the perfect response:

— Y tu, que vas a ser cuando seas grande?
— Yo? adulto.

He was indeed the youngest and clearly the only one not unduly influenced by an impression of what we the incumbent adultos wanted to hear.

Macaronics

Up until 1066 England had effectively been part of Scandinavia, and may well have remained detached from continental affairs had not the Normans — Frenchified vikings with a seemingly irresistible urge to seek out sunnier climes — made one last detour to the north. (Thanks to the Gulf Stream southern England does enjoy generally milder winters than Normandy.)

Almost three centuries after the conquest, Geoffrey Chaucer, taking over as clerk of the King's works, was handed an inventory of stuff left lying around at the Tower of London, from which the following extract is now quoted:

"I ramme cum toto apparatu excepta i drawying corda que frangitur et devastatur, i fryingpanne, i lathe pro officio carpentarii."

(...a battering-ram with a winding-cord too damaged to be usable, a frying-pan, a lathe for a Latinised carpenter.)

This document was compiled by a fourteenth century white-collar worker who (like Chaucer) juggled three languages in his head on a daily basis. First there was Old English, the speech of the masses, by then grammatically-condensed and well on the way to becoming modern English. Then there was the elite dialect, Anglo-Norman French, and lastly Latin, the preferred communications system of the Church, public administration and cultural transmission in general.

Textual intercourse between the English and their new rulers had kicked off almost as soon as the old order had been crushed on the field of Hastings, such that many basic English words quickly picked up romance accretions. (Water...aquatic, aqueous etc.)

But the text above should not be read as an example of some smart-arse peppering his script with French or Latin insertions — as certain modern hacks might do, just in order to show off what a pretentious tosser on est enclin à être. There was a deeper, more reflexive linguistic interpenetration at work here; a process known in the field of poetics as macaronics.

Educated scribblers of Chaucer's day would tend to pick whichever word, phrase or even grammatical construction seemed more familiar or apposite without fear of fostering incomprehensibility, because most of their readers would be similarly blasé about the boundaries between their vocabularies.

Modern scholars debate the extent to which this fusion was reflected in the spoken language of the time; another example of one of those issues around which academic contention loves to coalesce, because there's ultimately no sure way for anyone to know if their strongly-held opinions are right or wrong.

Fast forward another three centuries and we encounter another fascinating example of commingling tongues in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Like many modern bloggers, for whom he was the great precursor, Sam was never quite sure if he was addressing an audience of one, or whether his words might indeed become of interest to a wider group of readers, possibly including posterity. Yet regardless of the tone employed, Pepys encoded all his daily musings in shorthand...just in case his wife Elizabeth should locate the diary and proceed to peruse its franker admissions. In modern geek parlance, the shorthand was his entry-level firewall. Access-levels further down were assigned via linguistics.

As an OP Pepys would have acquired his Latin and Ancient Greek at school and would surely have picked up a smattering of French through contact with Elizabeth's family, refugee Huguenots. Yet surprisingly, when slipping into his most intimate mode of discourse, and when conscious of having done something really naughty, Pepys writes in Spanish.

Lord Sacks v Stephen Hawking

In his latest book The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking, who had been wont to use the term 'God' in much the same way that Einstein did, has apparently taken a more public stance against first causes, asserting that it is now unnecessary to "invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going".

There's a small irony in this, because Hawking was instrumental in undermining the 'steady-state universe' paradigm of his early Cambridge years and in easing into mainstream secular consciousness the notion that the cosmos had a moment of conception.*

Taking issue with Hawking, last week the Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (pictured above) referred to this more radical stance as "an elementary fallacy of logic", adding that whereas science is about explanation, religion is about interpretation. (Thus echoing the views of our local Sunday morning casuist Jorge Loring. )

Sacks went on to say that the mutual hostility of science and religion is one of the "curses of our age". Science, he notes "cannot tell us why we are here or how we should live. Science masquerading as religion is as unseemly as religion masquerading as science."

This is not an unreasonable position, but one can still sympathise with scientists for wanting a degree of payback for all those centuries where religion did consider itself a system of explanation. And one of the reasons that scientists like Richard Dawkins have ended up so insufferably dogmatic is surely their fear that the achievements of the Enlightenment might somehow be undone in years to come by the West's most powerful nation, where anti-intellectual horrors like the Creation Museum have recently taken root.

Less militant atheists and agnostics could also be forgiven for thinking that all this talk of separate 'domains' for science and religion smacks of a last ditch attempt by religion to define a cultural space for itself from which scientific intrusions are excluded per se. After such a long retreat, it's time to stand and fight to defend the Fatherland!

However, what bothers me about this cosy bilaterality is that it would appear to suit both sides to avoid assigning a role to philosophy. To get an idea what gets lost when this is set up as a two-horse race, ask yourself one of the questions that consistently split believers and unbelievers: i.e. how could something have come of nothing?

Scientists have recently come up with an answer for this one. Down at the quantum scale the difference between something and nothing blurs and there is an underlying potentiality that means energy can flicker into existence out of the 'pregnant void'. (I haven't read Hawking's exposition of this process, but the insight is already common in cosmology.)

There you have it, a solution which will satisfy scientists but leave the religious rigidly unassuaged. Voices from out of the two domains may sound as if they are asking the same question, but they aren't — and this is where philosophy has a role to play, because it helps us to understand the assumptions that underly the big questions that we are bound to ask of existence.

People rightly want to know why there is something and not nothing. Yet this is a philosophical question and thus a more open one than the Book of Genesis and other creation myths allow for. If you insist that there must have been absolutely nothing (except for the Creator himself who must have always existed) followed by something, you are making two assumptions more than most true philosophers will permit themselves. Scientists meanwhile assume the 'ah, but who created the creator?' retort is enough to see this one off. But it isn't.

Anyway, the issue in the current Hawking v Lord Sacks controversy is actually a little more complicated than a straightforward explanation v interpretation dichotomy: it is really about the limits of knowledge.

In one of his more militant moments Professor Dawkins might insist that it would be wrong to set any artificial limits to what humanity can discover about its situation using the scientific method. But even if we agree with this, we also know that science is highly unlikely to come up with all the answers in our own lifetimes. There thus remains a profound mystery, and there are aspects of it which we may have to admit will never be solveable by reason alone.

The Selfish Gene has been widely misunderstood as a treatise justifying human selfishness. Not so, Dawkins contends. We might have all these calculating little robots inside of us, but the wonder of humanity is its ability to transcend them with genuine altruism. Nevertheless, while science can explain why we are kitted up for making moral choices, purely practical explanations for why it is best to be good seem inherently inadequate.

Across the globe and throughout history religious teachings have stepped into this breach, instructing people how they ought to behave, and one can examine each of the main traditions and quickly comprehend how successful they have been as guardians of moral rectitude. It's not hard to find numerous examples of how simultaneously oppressive and hypocritical they have tended to be, and yet within each, one can also trace individuals who have somehow escaped the worst excesses and distortions of the movement as a whole.

Anyway, on a personal level, I find that I am capable of living with an explanatory gap in my life — 'the mystery' — and can proceed with the rest of my life (and death) without needing to know how much of this gap will ultimately be filled by science or indeed by 'spirituality', while finding a good deal of solace in asking reasoned philosophical questions of this lacuna.

It is unquestionably the most startling fact of our existence, a truly significant something which exists, and which conceivably might not have. Just imagine that you had been born into a world where none of the fundamentals were open to question. Believers don't need to of course...which is one of my greatest objections to religion. If you deny yourself the urge to confront the greatest provocation for any conscious mind, you are in a real sense not really living. (Or at least attempting to live like the beasts, when you really don't have to!)

The assumption that out of nothing something cannot come is one I let go of some time ago. Philosophy teaches me to probe beyond such sticking points. And my academic background as a historian also taught me that denial is never the best response to new factual information which poses logical challenges to my pre-existing beliefs.

*The notion that the Big Bang was the absolute beginning of everything has become widespread in mainstream culture, but it is not something that can be backed up with any empirical evidence and is thus not something you will find eminent scientists asserting in print.

You say tomato...

When research was published last year suggesting that people whose Facebook friends are overweight are more likely to be piling on the pounds themselves, the story was handled very differently in the UK and US media, at least according to Harvard's Nicholas Christakis, physician, sociologist and all-round expert on social networks:

Standard US headline: Beware, your friends are making you fat!

Standard UK headline: Beware, you could be making your friends fat!

Now, what does this tell us about the differences an ocean makes?

Christakis appeared on a recent edition of the R3 Arts and Ideas pod, along with another American academic Philip G. Zimbardo who has just released The Time Paradox, in which he proclaims that societies which are more future-oriented are generally more successful (and more Protestant than Catholic), though apparently what we all need is a bit of balance in our approach to time.

He did not impress me all that greatly as a speaker and the host was right to pull him up for an notable American bias in his definition of success. However, I did like the story of a group of seminarians who were experimented on at Princeton a while back.

The ruse was to invite them to give a talk about the Good Samaritan. Nine out of ten of those who were led to believe they were running late by the experimenter were able to walk right past a groaning man on the street. On the other hand, nine out of ten who believed they had a little time to spare stopped to offer help. So, even with that highly relevant homiletic tale very much top of mind, our sense of urgency can radically distort our ethical nature.

This year's vampires

There are approximately 260 references to angels in the Bible, but only 6 of them mention wings.

This, and other fascinating factlets, cropped up on a recent radio interview given by Professor Peter Marshall of Warwick University, co-author of Angels In The Early Modern World.

Marshall was on mini-panel discussing the durability of these messengers of the divine, who seem set for a pop-culture resurgence in twenty ten.

Now, you might have expected them to have been first against the wall when the Reformation came, but it appears that there are just so many textual accounts of their activities in the scriptures that they proved rather difficult to expunge from the theological record.

Part of the explanation for this resilience may be the fact that angels pre-date the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and as representatives of a more ancient lineage of near-eastern superstition, which has been co-opted yet not contained by the church hierarchies, they appear to have genuine populist appeal.

In early Christian times the standard iconography presented angels as bearded males. But then came the Middle Ages and a whole load of hang-ups about sex. Pope Gregory VII and his fellow reformers insisted on a celibate lay clergy in order to ensure that church property held firm against the nascent nation state's inheritance laws; and so the de-carnalisation of angels ensued as a natural consequence of spurious retro-fitted ideas about purity.

I tend to equate angels with Tolkein's elves. Immortal yet somehow, not bored, they are a far more easy-to-comprehend embodiment of humanity's better self than God could ever be.

As Jeremy Rifkin puts it in The Empathic Civilisation, there's paradoxically no place for the more exalted human emotional responses such as empathy in Heaven or the Marxist utopia, because in such perfect environments there can be no suffering — which means there's nothing to get all empathic about. That an utterly perfect, omniscient being could take a real interest in the trivia of our miniscule existences is something only the vainest of believers can hold to be certain. Angels however, are just like us, without all those sinful tendencies.

Indeed, medieval thinkers started to relate angels to the formally chaste condition of human souls reawakening on the Day of Judgement, and pictorially angels duly shed their whiskers and assumed a decidedly androgynous look in medieval art.

An abiding characteristic of unregulated popular belief in the Middle Ages was the notion that animals and children were somehow closer to the supernatural than everyone else and could perceive beings on the edge of crossing over, so to speak. It's therefore hardly surprising that angels have developed a special bond with the immature and that one of the most attested loci for the summoning one of God's messengers has been the fingernail of a child. One doesn't have to be a qualified psychologist to detect a deep-seated fear of adulthood in western culture (And is it all that surprising given what priests — if not angels — have been getting up to with the children that they've taken a special interest in?)

Angeology, the hot new thriller by Danielle Trussoni (pictured above) — a recent addition to my Kindle 'pile' — is clearly pitched at a readership somewhere between those of Dan Brown and Umberto Eco. I'll probably get round to finishing it during my May odyssey.

The title is suggestive of another contributing factor to the unlikely durability of angels since science started to suppress superstition: they lend themselves to the empiricist's soft underbelly: pseudoscientific, occultic, taxonomic obessesiveness.

Anyway, so long bloodsuckers and hidehi super-seraphs. If Legion is anything to go by, this year's crop come with added testosterone. (No beards so far though.)

Hedgepads and iFoxes

"There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’."

Thus begins Isaiah Berlin's (OP) famous essay about what may well be the fundamental bisect affecting the way that thinking people do their thing. He continued...

"For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes selfcontradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes."

...and the iPad is a fox while the Kindle is a hedgehog.

Indeed, the moment I discovered that my Kindle wasn't even prepared to tell me the time was dramatically revelatory. There are technological reasons behind this, such as the fact that it only draws on its battery power when the user presses Next Page, but there's also a certain abstract loftiness about the Amazon device's determination to be very good at one thing, only.

I think of myself as a fox, but the hedgehogginess of the Kindle profoundly appeals to me; I wonder how common this is. In contrast, a device like the iPad, which might be almost ideal in multiple circumstances is a bit of a turn off. (The remainder of the Berlin essay focuses on the historical theories of Tolstoy who, while clearly being a fox, believed quite utterly in the need for hedgehog posturing and therefore set about throwing up a smokescreen around his 'real' beliefs. More on this another day...)

On another tack...America's culture wars are essentially a confrontation between that nation's hedgehogs and foxes. While these make for a rather playground-like political discourse, they are generally less deleterious in their effects than head on clashes by different forms of state-sponsored hedgehog-isms, as Europe learned to its cost in the twentieth century.

Should we be more worried now that the world's dominant civilisation is being stalked by the giant, mutant and militant hedgehog that is Islamism? Well, if we take the view that confrontations between foxes and hedgehogs create more noise than actual noxious consequences, then perhaps not. The Islamists appear to understand this, which is why their underlying strategy appears to be to bring out the hedgehog in the western politician — for the more like them we become, the more 'Biblical' the conflict is likely to become; which is just how they want it.

Some commentators up in el norte seem to think that the separation of church and state espoused by many of the founding fathers of the United States was intended to foster a prototype secular society....a project which has clearly gone spectacularly wrong.

In fact, the underlying foxy idea had a definite hedgehoggy current within it. You might even say that the Constitution was construed as the portal to a prickly arcadia — for if no one type of hedgehog can ever assume control of the state, the American citizen is left with a wonderfully diverse set of well-honed insectivorous lifestyles to choose from. Even atheism (Dawkins or Dennett-style) becomes just another little slow-moving and quite stupid spiny mammal amongst many.

One can have so much choice, so much freedom, that one can almost imagine that one lives in a genuinely pluralistic society.

Back to my Kindle.

The hand not so invisible

For all those of us who are generally too busy to read The Wealth of Nations before deploying Adam Smith in public discussion, here's a handy bulleted list of the areas of public life (hat tip to Economist's View) in which this otherwise laissez-faire thinker thought it appropriate for governments to get involved:

• Sterling marks on plate and stamps on linen and woollen cloth
  
• Enforcement of contracts by a system of justice
  
• Wages to be paid in money, not goods;
• Regulations of paper money in banking
  
• Obligations to build party walls to prevent the spread of fire
• The Navigation Acts, blessed by Smith under the assertion that ‘defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence’
• Rights of farmers to send farm produce to the best market (except ‘only in the most urgent necessity’)
• ‘Premiums and other encouragements to advance the linen and woollen industries’
  
• ‘Police’, or preservation of the ‘cleanliness of roads, streets, and to prevent the bad effects of corruption and putrifying substances’;
• Ensuring the ‘cheapness or plenty [of provisions]’
  
• Patrols by town guards and fire fighters to watch for hazardous accidents
  
• erecting and maintaining certain public works and public institutions intended to facilitate commerce (roads, bridges, canals and harbours)
  
• Coinage and the mint
  
• The Post office
  
• Regulation of institutions, such as company structures (joint- stock companies, co-partneries, regulated companies and so on)
  
• Temporary monopolies, including copyright and patents, of fixed duration
  
• Education of youth (‘village schools’, curriculum design and so on)
  
• Education of people of all ages (tythes or land tax)
  
• Encouragement of ‘the frequency and gaiety of publick diversions’
• The prevention of ‘leprosy or any other loathsome and offensive disease’ from spreading among the population
  
• Encouragement of martial exercises
  
• Registration of mortgages for land, houses and boats over two tons
  
• Government restrictions on interest for borrowing (usury laws) to overcome investor ‘stupidity’
  
• Laws against banks issuing low-denomination promissory notes
  
• Natural liberty may be breached if individuals ‘endanger the security of the whole society’
  
• Limiting ‘free exportation of corn’ only ‘in cases of the most urgent necessity’ (‘dearth’ turning into ‘famine’)
  
• Moderate export taxes on wool exports for government revenue.