From an AP cosmology story, much repeated, March 2013:
“The universe is described amazingly well by a simple model,”
said
Charles Lawrence, the lead Planck scientist for NASA […]. ***
“We [may soon] understand the very early universe […]
better than we understand the bottom of our oceans” […]. ***
Two
of [… the] theorists […] said before the announcement
that they were
sort of hoping that their inflation theory
would not be bolstered.
[...] because taking inflation
a step further leads to [... an] infinite number of universes.
In "The Graveyard Scene" in
Hamlet
(5.1), Prince Hamlet asks the Gravedigger, "How long will a man lie i'
th' earth ere he rot?" and is told that if the man isn’t already rotten,
for they have many syphilitic and otherwise corrupted corpses
"now-a-days that will scarce hold the laying in," a corpse will last
"some eight year or nine year," with the Gravedigger adding, "A tanner
will last you nine year." Hamlet asks, "Why he," a tanner, "more than
another?", and the Gravedigger replies, "Why, sir, his hide is so tanned
with his trade that a' [= he] will keep out water a great while, and
your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body" (152-62
[lineation may vary]).
Now if you're preparing for a quiz on
Hamlet,
you should note that Hamlet's exchange with the Gravedigger is preceded
by our learning that Hamlet is thirty years old — so he is, so to
speak, a grad student at Wittenberg U. (1.2.112-14), not some callow
youth — and that the dialog here gets in water imagery (a motif in this
play) and hits on some important themes about the corruption of the
flesh and hints about the possible corruption of mothers. That Hamlet
can joke about death and corruption and let pass a word like "whoreson"
indicates that he's in a much better mental state than we've seen him in
earlier, soliloquizing at length and depressingly on life and death and
corruption and his mother. Ah, there's nothing like getting away from
the ol' castle for a bit of sea air and fighting pirates and bumping off
a couple of school chums to chase away that nasty
manic-depression!
But let's assume you're not going to be quizzed on
Hamlet
any time soon and let me get to the "your" in the Gravedigger's
phrases, "your water" and "your whoreson dead body." Just what it means,
or doesn't mean, will be important when I finally get around to my
topic.
(Hey, if your whorechild typical journalist
nowadays can habitually shoot to hell the opening three paragraphs of
just about any news story by devoting them to "human" and "local
interest" bullsh*t, then I can enlighten and entertain you recycling
bits and pieces of my Shakespeare
study guides.)
Basically, when the Gravediggers refers to "your whoreson dead body,"
the "your whoreson" could be replaced by the article "a"; the phrase is a
kind of vulgar place-holder with all the meaning and lack of meaning
of, say, "your dumb-ass" in "your dumb-ass sprocket wrench" in the mouth
of a stereotyped New Jersey mechanic in an old comedy routine.
And "your water" just means "water," although if you want to hear an
undertone suggesting urine, go ahead: the company Clown played the
Gravedigger, and the Clown is supposed to be a little foul-mouthed.
Anyway, keep in mind the meaning and nonmeaning of "your" when you
consider Hamlet's more earnest colloquy with Horatio on ghosts and
Hamlet's "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are
dreamt of in your philosophy" (1.5.166-67).
Horatio's
philosophy is mostly a fashionable Renaissance Stoicism in the reformed
Roman tradition: as Horatio melodramatically says of himself — he's
gesturing at suicide here — "I am more an antique Roman than a Dane"
(5.2.330). This means that Horatio is like Mr. Spock in
Star Trek:
a rational being, by our standards unemotional, anti-emotional, and
detached: but not totally detached; Mr. Spock is loyal, and good Stoics
should practice rational brotherly love. More relevant here,
Stoicism holds
that the universe is determined and, most relevantly, the universe
makes sense, and a sense humans can figure out and, rationally, live by.
Now, I firmly believe that our universe is a
universe:
one thing, governed by laws that do make sense. I believe in one
universe, at least for us — multiple or infinite universes would only
reinforce my point; I
believe in one universe, that makes sense, and which humans can have some success in figuring out and must attempt to figure out.
This I believe (though not in ghosts).
I am certain, however, that the human species is vanishingly small
compared to the size of the universe and our history only a moment in
the history of the universe. Given our radically limited perspective and
experience, we are as a species necessarily parochial in our knowledge.
Necessarily, there are more things in that universe
than we can know with any degree of confidence, and just short of
necessarily there are far more and far, far different things than can be
dreamt of by even the most profound philosophers.
Physicists may eventually work out a
Grand Unified Theory of
the physical universe and work from there to a Theory of Everything —
everything in terms of physics; however, we're not going to get
certainty with some general,
philosophical Theory of Everything.
"Pretty bloody obvious," you may say. I'll answer that I was taught
early on in grad school that "The first duty of a critic" — literary
critic in this case — "is to state the obvious"; and I've learned since
that it's the duty of social critics to keep harping on the obvious and
sensible until a few additional people eventually get it.
So, then, a pronouncement: Yea, verily,
no theory is complete, except in an ironic and paradoxical sense this theory of
no theory being complete, and this unfortunate fact of existence has important ethical and political implications.
Most centrally, it means that political Grand Theories of Everything —"
totalizing theories,"
"metanarratives" — are always suspect.
Does that mean we shouldn't use such theories?
Nope.
Does that mean a radical skepticism where you doubt everything, or a
radical relativism where you say, "Everyone is entitled to their
opinion" (sic on the "their") — and all opinions are just opinion and
equal? Does it mean comfortable acquiescence in paradox and
contradiction?
Nope, and nope, and not that either.
If you act in the world, you make decisions, and you make them on the
basis of some sort of ethics, though for some nasty people an ethical
system not much beyond "Hurray for me, and piss on you all." If you live
in the world, you theorize the world, and there's much to be said for
developing a philosophy of life and a way of life and not just some sort
of life-
style; there's much to be said for at least occasional commitment.
If you act in the world, you should think about the world, and you should be very, very
uncomfortable with contradictions and paradoxes and find "
cognitive dissonance" not just uncomfortable but downright painful.
There are situations in which you must act
as if
you were confident of the rightness and justice of your actions; it's
just that you should never, ever come to believe in your own rightness
and righteousness. There are situations in which you must commit
yourself to actions you know are problematic.
I for one
am not an absolute pacifist, which means I believe there are situations
where the least bad thing one can do involves minimally the threat of
killing, wounding, and maiming people, and a willingness to carry out
the threat. What you may not do is say that such killing (etc.) or even
just destruction of property is a good thing. You must keep in mind
something Oliver Cromwell said and should have kept in mind more
himself: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ,"
Cromwell, wrote the Church of Scotland, "think it possible that you may be mistaken" (3 Aug. 1650).
Cromwell was a good Puritan, who followed a Way and had a philosophy,
theology, and theories about politics and very effective theories about
the organizing and applying of military force to resolve political
issues. He would have done well, though, "think it possible that" he
might have been "mistaken" when, say, ordering the
massacre of Drogheda in 1649, part of Cromwell's brutal (re)conquest of Ireland.
In my teaching Eric Hoffer's 1951 study of fanaticism,
The True Believer — with a touch or two of Søren Kierkegaard's 1843
Fear and Trembling — I used a thought experiment I called, "
The Grand Inquisitor." Fyodor Dostoevsky had his version in
The Brother's Karamazov, and Steven Pinker uses a similar argument in
The Better Angels of Our Nature,
but this was my version, and I have priority on Pinker here and can
claim to have offered a pedagogical "homage" to Dostoevsky.
I asked the class to consider a nice Jewish girl in the hands of the
Grand Inquisitor in the Year of His Lord 1500-something, having her
breasts torn off by the Inquisitor's torturers (a detail I did not make
up); or they could picture less sentimentally an energetic and
persuasive male heretic —
converso or Christian — being racked. I asked the class to judge the Inquisitor.
And after a moment, I noted that if the Inquisitor's theology was
correct, souls were of infinite value and the loss of one soul to the
Devil would be an infinite loss. I also reminded them of Hoffer's
observation that coercion can be effective; people converted by force
can be quite devout, at least in part because the faith forced upon us
had better be true, or we were cowards and traitors to our faith to
succumb to force.
To get technical, and mathematical,
the salvation of a soul could be well bought at the price of the
destruction of the material universe: the material universe is finite.
Certainly, the salvation of a soul is worth the wrecking of a body or
two: for eternal bliss one would do well to exchange a few minutes or
hours or weeks of worldly torment. So torturing the girl could be an act
of Christian love.
Torturing the heretic can also be
an act of Christian love, and it would certainly be (in an Inquisitor's
view) a necessary and sound act of religious policy: heresy endangers
many souls and heretics must be converted or, minimally, silenced and,
where practicable, silenced in a way — to apply a formulation from the
1561 play
Gorboduc — "As may be both due vengeance to themselves, / And wholesome terror to posterity" (5.3.91-92).
If you throw in Kierkegaard, the Grand Inquisitor gets nicely
problematic: there is the possibility he's a Knight of Faith, and, as
such still dangerous but not despicable. Knights of Faith are very rare,
however — as Kierkegaard was well aware — and it is way more likely
that inquisitors were fanatics and therefore dangerous and, especially
in Eric Hoffer's interpretation, highly despicable.
A
Grand Inquisitor thought experiment demonstrates the problem of any
system that sets up a knowable and achievable good of infinite value.
Actually achieving an "end" of infinite value would justify
any
means. Transcendent immortal souls, especially those separable from the
body, are clearly such good things. But you don't need souls or God for
a transcendent Good; eutopia will do. Pinker makes this anti-utopian
argument, and it's one of the few clichéd parts of
Better Angels. I'm a member in good standing of the Society for Utopian Studies, and I'll put the matter like this. In
The Soul of Man Under Socialism,
Oscar Wilde said, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is
not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which
Humanity is always landing."
Wilde said that in 1891. After the utopian disasters of the 20
th
century, including experiments calling themselves "socialist," it is
better to say that our mental maps must always include a eutopia like
Sir Thomas More's Utopia: a thought experiment of a Good Place — not a
perfect place but a good one — an imaginary place that can provide a
Norm, standards, which we can use to judge the existing places: possible
futures by which we can judge the present and get ideas for
improvement. But if a mental map of the world without eutopias is
incomplete, maps giving routes to utopia — singular — are disastrous to
navigate by.
A single, uncomplicated, total, and totalizing theory of the world can lead to paranoid and/or totalitarian horrors.
This side of the abstruse math of the basic forces of the universe,
there is little hope for Grand Unified Theories of anything. Indeed, in
physics and math it's been clear since the early 20
th c. that their systems can be unified, coherent, powerful, and beautiful, but not totally
certain nor
complete.
As a practical matter, in the world of everyday human scale and
experience, theories and whole world-views are inevitable, necessary,
and usually useful; it's just that sooner or later, and often sooner
rather than later, they run into problems.
A joke from
the former Soviet empire has it that "Everything Marx told us about
communism was a lie; unfortunately everything he told us about
capitalism was true." Allowing for the hyperbole of joking, the point is
well taken. There is more in heaven and earth and practical economics
than dreamt of in the philosophies of old Marxists
or the works of aging neocons and neoliberals.
There is much to be said in both classical physics and military theory
for equating speed with mass. In the US wars against the Iraqi military
under Saddam Hussein, "speed kills" worked for tactics, and the
war-wonks' "
Revolution in Military Affairs",
American style, was highly effective in the First (1990-91) and Second
(2003) Iraq Wars. Effective, that is to say, in formal war, against the
Iraqi military; to put the matter mildly, the theories haven't worked
out so well from, say, 2005 on, with the Iraqi insurrection.
Similar arguments can be made about US warfare in Vietnam, and God
knows that's where I'm coming from. The accusations of "
military madness"and "the illogic of war" have their points, but what I recall most is guys in power confident about their theories.
It was a complicated world out there, Horatio, just here on Earth in
the Danish Empire of the Dark Ages or in Renaissance Europe. It was more
complicated world for Donald Rumsfeld or Robert McNamara, and remains
so for economists and politicians and social critics. "Your philosophy"
just won't cover it all, and you — we, all of us — need to be open in
deriving our philosophies and for modifying them. Indeed, we can even
learn now and then from our opponents: we may think them vicious, evil,
and stupid, and they may
be vicious, evil, and stupid; but our enemies just may, occasionally, have some good ideas.
And Hamlet, I'll allow you this bit of insight from a royal rationalist from a happier play. As Duke Theseus says in
A Midsummer Night's Dream, with multiple ironies he doesn't understand, "shaping fantasies"
can
sometimes "apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends"
(5.1.5-6). Still, outside of make-believe Denmark, Horatio's first
hypothesis is correct: ghosts are
just people's "fantasy" (
Ham. 1.1.23).
You were and are right, though, Hamlet — basically, more right than you
and Shakespeare could know: even without supernatural ghoulies and
ghosties and mythical beasties, there are far, far more things in a vast
and incredibly ancient universe than can be dreamed of in any mode of
human thought; there are far more things about mere human society than
any theory will entirely comprehend.
