The science of discworld.., p.27
The Science of Discworld IV, page 27
‘Not at all, my Lord. He was nothing more than a random event, turning an instability into coherence – the same as a last snowflake just before an avalanche. Not the best way of putting it, but I think it will suffice for now. However, as a result, the whole business left certain effects in both Discworld and Roundworld; for example, Roundworld has traditions of wizards, unicorns, trolls and dwarfs; not to mention zombies, werewolves and vampires. Our research shows that although these things don’t appear in Roundworld, the concept of them is shared by both worlds.’
Ponder took a deep breath and continued, ‘The idea of gods has permeated cultures in both worlds. In our world gods are not only acknowledged but also, occasionally, seen. Although there are claims that they have been seen on Roundworld as well, the evidence is generally patchy, and sometimes simply wishful, thinking.’
‘Really,’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘I am surprised. Gods have their uses and a part to play, and I often thank Saponaria when getting into the bath; she generally arranges the very best of suds – wonderfully fine, smooth and plentiful. Of course, I never neglect a candle for Narrativia before I embark on a lengthy memoir. It would also appear that the small gods, the household gods, survive very well. I take leave to wonder what went wrong in Roundworld?’
Marjorie’s self-control finally snapped. ‘Such concepts of the gods as there were on Roundworld didn’t work!’ she cried. ‘Proud people and smart people started to put their ideas into the mouths of the gods, and shamefully it has not been unusual for two countries, ostensibly both running on the rules of the same one sacred God, to nevertheless engage one and another in combat such as never been seen on this world – the deliberate destruction of whole cities and even attempts to slaughter whole races. Today, many of those who saw the name of God invoked as part of this dreadful pantomime have stepped back and very much prefer reason to faith, because it is self-checking.’
Lord Vetinari sat for a moment taking this in. Then he stared at Marjorie like a cat assessing an amazing new type of mouse, and said, ‘I do not believe I know your name, madam, or your occupation; be so good as to enlighten me, will you?’
fn1 At this point it must be said that Marjorie also had a smile for a gentleman known as Jeffrey, who travelled the world inspecting, reviewing, cataloguing and pricing – and in extremis also restoring – the libraries of a very large number of people and organisations across the world. The two of them had an understanding, and understood quite a lot, especially about Bliss. In case anybody is now thinking of librarian pornography, this is an alternative way of cataloguing books: a system created by Henry E. Bliss (1870–1955), still in use in America and specialised libraries.
TWENTY
* * *
DISBELIEF SYSTEM
Roundworld has its own home-grown Omnians. We’re not referring to the great majority of religious believers, who are entirely normal people who happen to have been brought up in a culture that has its own distinctive set of beliefs in things that lack objective evidence. Neither are we referring to Roundworld’s equivalent of mainstream Omnians, who since the overthrow of the extremist Vorbis and his rerun of the Inquisition (see Small Gods) have been decent-enough sorts and kept themselves to themselves.
No, it is the Vorbises of Roundworld who cause all the trouble. Believers with a capital B. These are the people who not only know that their worldview is The Truth – the sole truth, the only truth, the truth revealed from the mouth of God himself – but are intent on forcing it onto everyone else, whether they want it or not, at any cost.
Most sane, rational human beings learn quite early on that you feel just as certain even when you’re wrong: the strength of your belief is not a valid measure of its relation to reality. If you have scientific training, you may even learn the value of doubt. You can certainly have religious beliefs and still be a good scientist; you can also be a good person and understand that people who disagree with your beliefs need not necessarily be evil, or even misguided. After all, most of the world’s people – even the religious ones – probably think your beliefs are nonsense. They have a different set of beliefs, which you think are nonsense.
But religious extremists seem unaware of the human tendency towards self-delusion, and decline to take even the simplest steps to counteract it. When the British Humanist Association hired a bus to tour the UK with the advert ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ on its side, the immediate response from some religious authorities was: ‘They don’t seem terribly confident about it.’ No, what they did with the ‘probably’ was to try not to let opponents score an easy point by criticising them for being dogmatic. Being too confident of their view. More practically, they were also worried about potentially breaching the Advertising Code. Another response from some of those of a religious persuasion was synthetic outrage and claims of persecution.
But Humanists are just as entitled to put their views on the side of a bus as tens of thousands of churches worldwide are to stick ‘The wages of sin is death’ on their walls. That’s why the Humanists hired the bus – one small voice crying out against the multitudes, many of whom were clearly intolerant.
Belief is a very odd word, and it is used in several ways. ‘Belief that’ differs greatly from ‘belief in’, which is again different from ‘belief about’. Our belief about science, for example, is that it’s simply our best defence against believing (in) what we want to. But we may also have, to some extent, a belief in science, as distinct from belief in a religion or a cult: we believe that science can find ways out of humankind’s present difficulties, ways that are not available to politics, philosophy or religion.
There is also a different usage of ‘belief’ altogether, one that we suspect is not always appreciated. Suppose that a scientist says ‘I believe that humans evolved’, and a religious person counters with ‘I believe humans were created by God’. On the surface, these are similar statements, and it’s easy to conclude that science is just another kind of religion. However, in religion, once you believe something, then you consider it to be an immutable truth. In science, the same word means ‘I’m not very sure about this’. As we might say ‘I believe I left my credit card in the pub’, when we haven’t a clue where it’s gone.
Ponder Stibbons believes that Roundworld is a construction whose genesis was events on Discworld. We, and you, believe the converse: that Discworld is a construct, created by Terry Pratchett in Roundworld. It’s just possible for both of these beliefs to be true – for a given value of truth. We all have beliefs of one kind or another. Let’s look at how we get them, and how we might judge them.
Do newborn babies have beliefs? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be ‘yes’. They are very primitive, ill-formed beliefs, and they are considerably refined even in the first six months of life, but a few behaviours, even of newborns, suggest that a lot of wiring-up of the brain has gone on in the womb. The baby is far from being a blank slate on which anything can be written – a stance that Pinker argues persuasively in his book The Blank Slate. The baby is especially responsive to the sight of its mother, and can become very disturbed if she simply disappears from view. It responds to music that is similar to what it heard while in the womb in the later stages of its development; it can distinguish jazz from Beethoven or folksong by attentively ‘listening’ for familiar sounds. It has a whole suite of beliefs about suckling, about breasts and what they’re for. These things are beliefs in the sense that the baby’s brain already holds some model of mother, and of music, and it prefers things that fit this model.
Soon, the baby begins to smile in response to a smile; even to a drawing of a smile. Is that a belief too? The answer depends on, but also illuminates, what we mean by a belief. The baby acts in particular ways – smiles, or suckles – because of the way its brain is wired up, because of programmes in its brain that could be otherwise, and, in occasional babies, are otherwise. Mostly, these are pathologies; apart from different musical preferences, there are few normal differences between baby brains. But very soon, because of a mother’s behaviour, whether the baby is swaddled or carried on a bare back into the fields, or left out on a mountainside, or has its feet bound, babies diverge. And very soon, they are inducted into the Make-a-Human-Being kit that is characteristic of, and specific to, each human culture.
There are several ways to look at how a baby interacts with its surroundings. When the baby throws out toys from its pram, for example, this can be read in at least two ways. On the one hand, we might simply assume that it cannot retain a good grasp of the toy, which falls. However, observing the radiant smile with which it welcomes the return of the toy, we might conclude that the baby is teaching its mother to fetch. Such apparently minor interactions have a strong effect on the baby’s future, and they complicate it in ways that often reinforce the culture concerned. They include little songs and stories; learning to walk, to talk, and to play. We say ‘learning’ here, but these processes are like birds learning to fly. Many features of the ability are already wired into the brain, but now they have to be adjusted in a kind of dialogue with the real world. ‘If I stretch this bit out, and pull it back, what happens?’ So these abilities mature: they are not learned from scratch.
In Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins likens juvenile humans to caterpillars, voracious in their uptake of information, especially from parents: Father Christmas, Heaven, fairies, what food to eat at festivals. He points out how credulous we must be as juveniles, to avoid obstacles to learning; but also how we should become more sceptical as adults, and that too many adults fail to do so, hence, alas, astrologers, mediums, priests and the like.
We can see just how indiscriminately juveniles pick up information through something that happened to Jack. He ran an extramural class in animal-handling for about thirty years, and became very impressed by the distribution of animal phobias (although he did realise that this was a very peculiar group of students in that respect). About a quarter of the students had a spider phobia, rather fewer had snake phobia (which, if bad, included worms). Some had a phobia for rats and mice. A few reacted badly to birds, feathers or bats. It seems likely (but we can’t document it in this instance) that these phobias came about by cultural infection: Mother screamed when she found a spider in the bath, or a television series depicted snakes as poisonous. (Less than 3% actually are, but it might be wise to assume lethality as a default, for solid evolutionary reasons.) Rats are often depicted as being dirty, and the same goes for mice. Jack never worked out what gave rise to phobias about birds and feathers, but it certainly passes on in families, and it’s much more likely to be learned rather than genetic. It might be a great example of how beliefs can pass from brain to brain like a computer virus, in this case not transmitted verbally. But we can see how useful these phobias would have been when we were much nearer to nature. They let us learn what creatures to avoid, instantly. And while it didn’t much matter if we occasionally avoided an animal that was actually harmless, the same mistake the other way round could be disastrous.
Beliefs are formed through interactions between an individual’s brain and his or her environment, especially other people but also the natural world (spiders!) So it’s worth taking a general look at interactions.
If A acts on B, we call this an action; but if B also (re)acts on A, we say that A and B are interacting. A baby and its mother are like that. But most interactions are not just some sort of exchange, and they have a deeper effect: A and B are, to a greater or lesser extent, changed by the interaction. They then become A' and B'; then they interact again, and again, and are changed still more. After several changes of this kind, A and B have become quite different systems.
For example, the actor walks out onto the stage, and the audience reacts; the actor reacts to this, and the audience in turn reacts to the actor’s new persona … and so on. In The Collapse of Chaos we called this deeper kind of interaction ‘complicity’, giving a familiar word a technical meaning that is not too far removed from the usual one, but also hinting at a mix of complexity and simplicity. The complicity between child and mother, later between child and teachers, then with sports teams, then with the whole adult world, is the Make-a-Human-Being kit we talked of earlier. We also need a word for this cultural interaction, and have suggested ‘extelligence’. Individuals are intelligent; there are useful ideas and abilities somehow represented, remembered and readied for use, inside their brains. But most of a culture’s collective knowledge is outside any given individual, forming a body of information that is not in any one brain, but outside; hence extelligence. Before the invention of writing, most of a culture’s extelligence resided in the entire collective of brains, but when writing came along, some of it – often the most important to the culture – didn’t need a brain to contain it; only to extract and interpret it. Printing boosted the role of this type of extelligence, and modern technology has led to its dominance.
Where do our beliefs come from? From complicity between our intelligence and the extelligence that surrounds it. This process continues into adulthood, but its greatest effect occurs when we are children. St Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits and a missionary, is quoted as saying ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man’. A trawl of today’s premier extelligence, the internet, will haul up an almost endless range of interpretations of that phrase, from benign to malign, but their common ingredient is the malleability of human intelligence at an early age, and its fixity thereafter.
Until fairly recently, almost all people were religious believers. The majority still are, but the proportions depend on culture in a dramatic way. In the United Kingdom, about 40% say they have no religion, 30% align themselves with one but do not consider themselves in any way religious, and only 30% say they have significant religious beliefs. An even smaller proportion attends some kind of place of worship regularly. In the United States, over 80% identify with a specific religious denomination, 40% say they attend services weekly, and 58% say that they pray most weeks. It’s an intriguing difference between cultures that have such a lot in common.
Most religious activity, for the last few thousand years, is based on belief in a god or gods that acted to create the world, human beings, the beasts of the field, plants – everything. We discussed some of these creator gods in chapter 4; they used to resemble human beings or animals, but nowadays they are often abstract and ineffable; either way, they have supernatural powers. They are believed to be in daily contact with the world, making thunderstorms, providing good and bad luck for individual people, acting as a source of wisdom and authority through oral tradition (maintained by a shaman, a priest, or a priesthood). And, in the last few thousand years, Holy Books. Such theist beliefs contrast with deist beliefs, in which there is no overt anthropomorphic god, but some entity, or process, looks after the whole caboodle in deep background.
Such beliefs can be very powerful, and they form the basis of most people’s views of the world and of our lives. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a strong movement among intellectuals to reform the structure of society, by basing it on reason, rather than on faith and tradition. This movement, known as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, was highly influential throughout Europe and America. It played a role in the formulation of constitutional declarations of human rights, among them the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Since then, the proportion of non-believers has increased throughout the Western world, especially among those who are well educated and well heeled financially (as a survey in the United States has clearly shown, for example). Such people, among whom we count ourselves, agree with Dawkins, though perhaps not so publicly: they maintain that there is no god, or God, out there: it’s all done by laws of nature, sometimes ‘transcended’ by changing the context for those laws. Good and bad ‘luck’ come from our own actions and the general cussedness of nature; there’s no supernatural entity that consciously affects our lives.
Why do so many people believe in a god? Dennett’s Breaking the Spell is an attempt to examine that question, for Christian fundamentalists, Islamic teachers, Buddhist monks, atheists, and others. He begins by pointing to the commonality of pre-scientific answers in groups of people: ‘How do thunderstorms happen?’ answered by ‘It must be someone up there with a gigantic hammer’ (our example, not his). Then, probably after a minimum of discussion, a name such as ‘Thor’ becomes agreed. Having successfully sorted out thunderstorms, in the sense that you now have an agreed answer to why they happen, other forces of nature are similarly identified and named. Soon you have a pantheon, a community of gods to blame everything on. It’s very satisfying when everyone around you agrees, so the pantheon soon becomes the accepted wisdom, and few question it. In some cultures, few dare to question it, because there are penalties if you do.
J. Anderson Thomson Jr’s book Why We Believe in God(s) devotes each chapter to a different reason for the existence of beliefs. It makes a good case for a Dennett-style system, and is persuasive enough that we’d expect aliens, if they have anything like the kind of social life we have, to have believed in god(s) during at least the early growth of their culture. The aliens would have to have had nurturing parent(s), tribes with a big alien as boss, and so on, but that’s a reasonable expectation if they are extelligent.
People in all cultures grow up and acquire a set of beliefs. One way of looking at this is to call the beliefs that are inherited ‘memes’. Just as ‘genes’ code for hereditary traits, so memes are intended to show the inheritance of individual items, rather than a whole belief system. A tune like ‘Happy Birthday’, a concept like Father Christmas, atom, bicycle or fairy – all are memes. A whole slew of memes that forms an interacting whole is called a memeplex, and religions are the best examples, which at various times and in various cultures have had, or still do have, many linked-up memes like ‘There is Heaven and there is Hell …’ and ‘Unless you pray to this God you’ll go to Hell’ and ‘You must teach this to your children …’ and ‘You must kill those who don’t believe in this …’ and so on. You will have some familiarity with other religions, and you will appreciate that we’re not saying that your religion is like that. It’s all the others, the mistaken ones …
