Easter Island

I was interested by a recent debate on Radio 4 between Friends of the Earth’s Tony Juniper, and the former Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson.   They were talking about shale gas, and Lawson’s position was simple: this stuff is cheaper than renewable energy, and therefore that’s what we should go for.   Tough, hardnosed, realistic.  Like the guy on Easter Island, who argued that wood was cheaper than other fuels, so it was just silly not to chop down the last tree.

‘But how are we going to make boats?’ someone wondered, as they were all toasting themselves round the fire.

A pebble on Mount Everest

It occurred to me while I was driving home that, if it wasn’t for Adolf Hitler, I wouldn’t exist.

I’m not sure if my parents would have met at all if it wasn’t for my father’s family moving out of London as a result of Hitler’s war, but, even if they had, it’s inconceivable that their lives would have gone down such a similar track – and I’m trying not to be too graphic here: it’s my parents I’m talking about – that the, er, same combination of genetic material would have occurred that ended up resulting in me.  That would be like throwing billions of dice on two different occasions and coming up with exactly the same combination of numbers.

It’s not just me of course.  No one else below the age of about 70 would exist either.  There surely can’t be any doubt that the disruption of lives in all the countries involved in that war was sufficient to ensure that every single one of their citizens would have had their daily timetables put out at least to the extent that, assuming they survived the war at all, they had a different set of children, if not entirely different partners.  Even in countries not directly touched by the war, people would soon feel enough of the effects of what was happening in the world outside for the pattern of their days to be altered to at least that extent.

And then – I was driving along the A14 in the dark, the lights of other cars all around me – it occurred to me that any individual in the past would have the same affect: it didn’t even have to be a history-changer like Hitler.  Go back to the 18th century, and disrupt the daily routine of one randomly chosen person anywhere in the world, and by now we’d be a completely different set of human beings on Earth.

In fact, I decided – I was now not far from the Newmarket turnoff – never mind people, a stone would do the job.  Travel back in time with a small pebble and place it on the top of mount Everest.  No one would notice any change, but the airflow over the mountain would not be quite the same.  Every moment millions of molecules would end up in different places from where they otherwise would have been, and they in turn would displace other molecules.   Quite quickly, the entire atmosphere would be differently configured from what it would otherwise have been: trivially different, but still different.

And then weather events would occur very slightly earlier or later than they otherwise would have done.  Departures would be delayed by seconds, journey times increased or decreased, so that people went to bed a few seconds earlier or a few seconds later.  And accidents would occur that wouldn’t otherwise have happened, or fail to occur when otherwise they would, and so on and so on.   And each of these events would in turn change the flow of things just like that pebble still sitting on top of the mountain, albeit now covered with snow.   And by the time a century had gone by, that one pebble would have caused an entirely different cast of human beings to be living on Earth from the ones who would have otherwise come into being and lived out their important irreplacable lives.

Not a very original thought, I know – it’s butterflies’ wings and all of that, something which has been written about many times, including by me – but it absorbed me sufficiently that I forgot where I was on the road, and turned off at the Newmarket exit rather than continuing straight on to Cambridge, delaying my arrival home, and thereby changing the course of history and the entire population of the Earth.

The Christmas Story

As a child I was sometimes taken to church at Christmas.  I saw countless nativity scenes, both 2D and 3D.  (Often, like the German advent calendar above, they linked the old Christmas story to the wintry weather of Northern Europe, where the Christian holiday has subsumed an older solstice festival.)  I sung many carols (‘In the deep mid-winter, long ago, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone….’).  I heard readings from the gospels.  I saw nativity plays, and even participated in at least one (I was a shepherd).   I was exposed to all this, but I don’t remember at any point, even for a moment, believing the story- the virgin birth, the angels, the shepherds, the wise men – was actually true.  In fact it seemed to me obvious that nobody really did believe that, just as it was obvious to me that no one really believed in Santa.

But I liked the story.  I liked the way it came round every year, like midwinter itself, and I liked the way that we all came back to it together.   For me, it became a story about human birth: the mystery of a living being emerging into the inanimate mineral world (‘hard as iron’, ‘like a stone’), a tiny thing, dwarfed by the great inanimate universe, but yet in a way, bigger than all of it put together.  The story wasn’t true, but it brought me into the presence of a truth, allowed me to experience it not simply as a fact, but in my imagination.   It allowed me to participate in it.

The value of these stories is not just a question of their literal truth or falsehood.  This is what Dawkins and Co don’t get, useful as it is to have them yapping round in the yard to see off the fundamentalist crazies.  The fundamentalist crazies don’t get it either.

One of the most interesting writers on the complexities of the distinction between truth and falsehood is Philip Dick: it is his constant theme.  His Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, famously, is about real humans hunting down fake ones (the crucial difference being the capacity for empathy).   Many of the real humans in the book subscribe to an austere religion called Mercerism, and regularly commune by electronic means with the figure of Mercer himself, forever toiling up a barren hill, while rocks and stones are thrown at him.   Late in the book, this central scene of Mercerism is shown to have been faked up in a studio: Mercer, it seems, was just an actor, the hill a painted set.

But here’s the interesting part.   People carry on being Mercerists anyway.   The ones who exposed the hoax were androids, andys, fake humans.  Their mistaken assumption that, by exposing the hoax, they’d destroy the belief system, was perhaps itself evidence of their lack of human understanding, their fakeness.  Empathy and imagination, after all, are closely related things.

A new story

I’ve just finished writing a new short story.

I can spend days slogging away at a story, adding words and ideas, playing with points of view, but the good bit – the bit when I know the story’s going to be strong enough to go out into the world – is the moment when it comes alive and begins to write itself.   From that point on I find, as I work and rework it, that there’s more in the story than I realised.  The things I consciously wove into it are only part of it.  It speaks about things, and makes connections, that I didn’t plan with my conscious mind, yet are unquestionably part of the design, like the details in a dream, which your own mind constructed, and yet whose meaning doesn’t immediately dawn on you, and is never completely clear.

It is a lovely feeling when this happens.  I can’t think of many that are better.  I feel sort of cleansed and redeemed, and just more alive as I go about my day.  Sounds a bit over the top, I dare say, but that’s how it is, and it reminds me that writing these things really is more than just one of the things I do, but is a big part of what my life is all about.

You can’t force those moments though.  In the meantime, you just have to keep trying, like a surfer who has to keep paddling out again and again, and heaving himself up again onto his board, before he catches a wave he can really ride.

 

From Bodhisattva to St Josaphat: the adventures of a story

I visited some Buddhist temples during a recent brief visit to Thailand, and this led me to reflect on the differences between Buddhism and Christianity (see previous post) but also on the similarities.

I noticed that large statues of the Buddha tended to have a smaller Buddha sitting in front of them.  I assume (perhaps wrongly) that the smaller Buddha represents the historical Siddharta Gautama, while the larger figure represents the universal spiritual state which he is supposed to have attained. It struck me that this relationship was not entirely from different from the relationship in Christian theology between Jesus and God.  And there are other parallels.   Both religions have a tradition of celibate monasticism.  Each bears a similar relationship to a parent religion (Hinduism and Judaism respectively).

I wondered if it was possible that Buddhism, as the older of the two by several centuries, might have had a direct influence on the formation of Christianity.  It’s not implausible, given that both Palestine and Northern India were within the sphere of influence of Hellenistic culture.  (Idea for a historical novel: a bright young Jewish man in Nazareth in Roman-occupied Palestine, hears about Buddhism from an Indo-Greek soldier in the Roman army, and decides to try and do something similar).

Anyway, when I was looking up possible connections,  I came across (in wonderful Wikipedia) one particular connection which I had never heard of before: the story of Barlaam and Josaphat.  This story was originally about the early life of Gautama Buddha, but ended up as a popular story in Medieval Europe, when both characters were regarded as Christian saints by Catholics and Orthodox Christians alike .  The name Josaphat comes, apparently, from the Sanskrit Bodhisattva, successfully modified as the story was retold and retold first in Persian (Bodisav), Arabic (Budhasaf then Yudasaf), Georgian (Iodasaph), Greek (Ioasaph) and finally Latin.

I find it rather delightful that the founder of one religion can find himself a saint in another.  I find it delightful too that a story can itself have a story, making its way slowly from Asia to Europe, and from the Buddhist world, to the Islamic world, and on into the Christian one, passing from language to language, and changing all the while to meet the needs of its new hosts.

The one in the crown is Josaphat, formerly known as Buddha

 

A Buddhist temple

I don’t know if they call it an altar but, at one end of the room, there is a tall symmetrical gilded structure, very intricate and ornate in design.  On the floor in front of it, is a forest of objects, including statues and another ornate artefacts.   I guess they are presents from worshippers.

But here is what holds me.  In the middle of that gilded screen is a window, and inside that window, set back a little way, is a golden Buddha, illuminated by a light from behind the screen.  Its face is serene.  From certain angles it seems almost cruel.   It is at the very centre of the gilded intricate structure and at the same time behind and completely apart from it.  It looks out at the world, and is at the centre of a teeming and restless structure that resembles golden flames, yet it is itself untouched.

How unlike a Christian or Muslim god.  It is not a father demanding respect and obedience.  It is not a king or a judge who will dispense eternal reward or punishment.  It is not a shepherd looking out at its flock.   It does not dictate holy books.  Nor has it died for us and come alive again, or loved the world so much that it has gave us its only son.

Why doesn’t it care for us?  Why doesn’t it offer us help, out here on the far side of the screen, out in the world of grief and pain and dreariness and hate and wickedness?  Do our sufferings mean nothing to it at all?

But those are the wrong questions.  They are questions for a father or a son or a king, a creator apart from us and above us.  And this is not separate from us.  It is the thing that looks out from our own eyes.

Science fiction and religion

I took part in a panel discussion on this recently at the British Science Festival at Bradford (along with Steven French, Una McCormack,  Shana Worthen and Katy Price).   Coincidentally  (and very usefully), my friend Prof Rowlie Wymer had delivered an inaugural lecture on this very same theme the previous day at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He plans to write a book on the subject.

On the face of it, it’s odd how often science fiction (which after all has ‘science’ rather than religion in its title) deals with religion.  But it’s a perennial theme (my own The Holy Machine being one example). Rowlie Wymer pointed out that even avowedly atheistic writers such as Stanislaw Lem or Arthur C. Clark can’t leave religious themes alone.

There are several connections.  Firstly, SF is a form of fiction that is interested in Big Questions.  It deals with people’s relationship with the universe, and not just people’s relationship with other people.   This is something it has in common with religion.   Secondly, SF is interested in how people and societies cope with new and unfamiliar environments.  It would be impossible to seriously deal with this question without considering religion, which up to and including this point in history, has provided one of the means by which people explain to themselves how they fit in.   (In Dark Eden, I show a society that is beginning to evolve its own religion).  Thirdly, SF traditionally deals in ‘sense of wonder’ which (as Rowlie Wymer pointed out) is not unlike some forms of religious experience.

We live in a world in which religious fundementalism frequently makes itself the enemy of science.  In that battle I’m definitely on the side of science.  A set of beliefs about the world that are based on accepting as literally true an old book written one or two millenia ago versus a set of beliefs based on systematically examining the evidence.  There’s no contest.  To dismiss the latter in favour of the former is just infantile intellectual vandalism.

But I don’t align myself with atheistic fundementalism either.  To reject religion in all its forms as worst than useless is, in its way, also intellectual vandalism.   It is to ignore the fact that science looks at the world from a particular perspective which is not the perspective from which we actually live our lives, and is least good at answering the messy complicated questions which most concern us as human beings (for most of us are not going around worrying about what happened in the Big Bang or the precise nature of the fundemental building blocks of matter).   There are a whole set of questions about life which cannot be answered in terms of cause and effect, cannot be answered at all, in fact, in the way that science answers questions, but which can be assuaged by stories.

Stories are pretty basic.  Every night in our sleep, our brains weave our experience into stories.  Stories are what we naturally do, not causal explanations, and religions have provided or inspired a pretty good batch of stories.

I am not defending literal-minded religion, or even religion at all, but I am saying that ultimately facts are not what our lives are about.   In order to engage with the world, and other people, we need imagination.

 

 

“Sense of wonder”

Most people who read or write science fiction identify a “sense of wonder” as part of the original appeal of the genre.   This was certainly true for me.  Reading SF as a teenager with an as yet unjaded palette, I enjoyed the almost spinetingling sense of strangeness that it evoked.

I think one of the things science fiction can usefully do, is remind us that, outside the tiny tiny realm which has come to seem ordinary to us  as a result of habit and familiarity, this is a very strange universe.   (Science fiction has a particular way of doing this, but you could argue that all artistic-type activity ought to be aimed at tearing away the veneer of ordinariness.)

Science fiction can however contribute itself to a kind of dulling and deadening:  a kind of inflationary process exists which is in danger of debasing the currency of wonder.   The first time you see or read about a gigantic space ship, for instance, it inspires wonder.  When you have seen the same thing repeated over and over again, it grows tedious – and just making the spaceship even bigger does not help.  As Ian Sales says:  ‘Scale is not sense of wonder, and a lot of sf confuses the two.’    I wonder if it is possible that a failure to understand this fact has led to the decline in prestige and popularity of SF?

This is a related, but not identical point, to that made by the proponents of Mundane SF who propose that science fiction ought to be more scientific, more committed to the world that actually exists, and confine itself  to futures and technologies that might actually occur.   Faster-than-light-travel and galactic empires, are really just escapist fantasies, on this argument.  They will almost certainly never happen, and to write about them as if they were possible futures is perhaps to downplay the uniqueness and importance of our home on Earth, possibly dangerously so.

I go along with the spirit of this argument, but not entirely with the letter of it.   I agree that it is important that SF should connect with the world we actually inhabit and I am not interested in SF that doesn’t (not just for reasons of principle but also because I find it very tedious).   But sticking literally to what is actually possible is not the only way of reflecting and exploring the world we  live in, and not only SF but all branches of literature work by taking some liberties with the literal truth.

Literature and Science Fiction

Science fiction writers are often touchy about snobbery directed against their genre, the assumption that because something is set in the future, or has robots in it, or is set on another planet, it can’t be ‘serious’ literature (unless, of course, it’s written by someone who is already known for ‘serious’ literature, like Lessing or Ishiguro).   See recent observations by Philip Palmer and Stephen Hunt.

I share this irritation.  Of course science fiction can be badly written, poorly characterised etc etc but so can historical fiction.  That doesn’t mean we dismiss War and Peace because it happens to be set in the past.  Of course science fiction can be light-hearted, intended as a diversion and nothing much more, but this is undoubtedly true too of a lot of romantic fiction, and it doesn’t make us dismiss Jane Austen just because her novels fall into that bag.   And of course science fiction involves making stuff up, and indulging the reader in imaginary worlds, but so does The Tempest and  Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The tools of science fiction can be used for a lot of purposes (like a pack of playing cards that can be used for many different games).  I use them to write, as originally and interestingly as I can, about things that matter to me, and strike me as important, which I believe is what Tolstoy, Austen and Shakespeare did too.   I don’t know if the end result is literature and, assuming that this is even a meaningful question, it would be for others to judge not me.  But it’s annoying that there are a lot of people out there who’d be happy to make that judgment  without even reading what I have to say.

Us from the future

I’ve read a couple of books lately about the Tudor era: Anna Whitlock’s book about Mary Tudor, and Chris Skidmore’s book about Edward VI (Edward and Mary being a brother and sister under whose reigns first Catholics and then Protestants were persecuted).   I also recently saw the film The Other Boleyn Girl, which I enjoyed, and seemed true to what I had read about the Tudor world-view, though I gather its not that strong on historical accuracy.

I was struck by all of these – as I also am when I see Shakespeare plays – with how different people’s world view was.  The acceptance of extraordinarily cruel punishments.  The killing of political opponents as more or less standard procedure.   The way that family duties flow upwards (children to parents) rather than downwards, and the way that the needs of a family’s ‘head’ trump the wishes of individual members.  The strange mix of a very frank and earthy way of talking about sex with strict rules about marriage and inheritance.  The massive double standards about chastity and sexual fidelity.  The seemingly cynical manipulation of religion oddly combined with a faith so intense that people are willing to die horribly for it…

The Tudor world-view  seems strange and even perverse from the perspective of now, and I wonder what about our own present western world view will seem equally strange and perverse from the future.  My guess is that we will be seen as having elevated the human individual to an odd degree: with individual freedom of choice as the supreme good, or in any case held up as such.  (For of course just like the Tudors we are capable of holding something up as supremely important but not necessarily treating it consistently as such in practice) .

I’m not very well-read in these matters but I guess this sanctification of individual choice is a product of capitalism.   The customer is always right.  (Again, as a matter of theory and rhetoric, though not necessarily in practice).  In the modern UK,  even the citizens of the  state are constructed as its customers, always justifiably aggrieved by the poor service, and always deserving of a better one.   In Tudor times, from what I can see, the idea of ‘citizens’ as customers of the state would have simply seemed bizarre.  Rather they would have been component elements within it, each one supposed to play a part, like cells in the body politic.

I guess there are other ways of seeing this relationship between individual and society, perhaps as yet inconceivable.

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