| 15 April, 2009 |
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For every living creature that succeeds in getting a footing in life there are thousands or millions that perish. There is an enormous random scattering for every seed that comes to life. This does not remind us of intelligent human design. "If a man in order to shoot a hare, were to discharge thousands of guns on a great moor in all possible directions; if in order to get into a locked room, he were to buy ten thousand casual keys, and try them all; if, in order to have a house, he were to build a town, and leave all the other houses to wind and weather - assuredly no one would call such proceedings purposeful and still less would anyone conjecture behind these proceedings a higher wisdom, unrevealed reasons, and superior prudence. A reasonable probability is the only certainty. We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. What happens depends on our way of observing it or on the fact that we observe it. My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we *can* suppose. Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phatasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it. Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. [F]or academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read. He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Stay away from needle drugs. Richard Nixon is the only dope worth shooting. There are, however, people in this world who seldom pick up a newspaper, people who, when watching television, sneer in displeasure and change channels at the first glimpse of an anchorperson. While such willfully uninformed citizens are rare, emerging from seclusion only to serve on juries in trials of great national significance, they do exist. The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page. Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries; and though, perhaps, somethimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturbe them. This place makes Mayberry look like a think tank. Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind- boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it. I have the distinction of speaking to you from one of the few countries that still has a communist party. The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part under ground. For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency. If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, "Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?" No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? . . Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our sakes was the world created. Women and cats do as they damned well please, and men and dogs had best learn to live with it. You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happen if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it? Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body. The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domesticated animal. Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes! Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want. All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: "Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains? All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second. Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss. Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too? Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund. The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different. Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week. Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own. Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it. There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others. Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more "Malinowski" the more compelling the book. No "Malinowski," and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all. A book of quotations . . . can never be complete. Few things in life are more embarrassing than the necessity of having to inform an old friend that you have just got engaged to his fiancee. Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty. Truth, springs from agrument amongst friends. |
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