THE LAST QUESTION
Here we are in the final interruption. I promise.
People waste their time being entertained by cheap and obvious films, by books that are nothing more than a chain of flimsy set pieces, strung out on an ordinary plot and mildly enlivened with forced jokes, puns and similes so bad they would embarrass the manufacturers of Christmas crackers. At least I hope you are being entertained. You’ve read this far.
How many times can people sit through the same film, the same episode of some nineteen seventies ‘classic’ sitcom, or worse a season of repeats of an American sitcom where every episode is essentially the same?
People have no sense of occasion. The greatest day of their lives was when their side beat another side in some sporting fixture. It is not difficult to create your own magic moments. To stop waiting for it to be handed to you on a plate by some sportsman, film star, musician or bartender.
Yes, these thrills are tried and tested, and can be shared, but it is a little more difficult than that to obtain some authenticity.
Look at how hard it is for people to turn off their televisions.
You might get carried away by the stories they feed you but what truly do you get out of it?
Not much more than the distraction from the passing of time. Your life is ticking away and you do not notice.
Maybe I get bored too easily.
Why do we feel that getting through a day of work is an achievement enough? That an evening in front of the television is a well-earned and worthy reward?
Reward for what, for having avoided having to face up to the inevitability of death? Of embracing life’s futility and accepting that this is as good as it gets?
There is no rush to reach death but would it matter if it arrived tonight. We have been living by proxy anyway, letting all the really exciting things happen on the screen. Let adventures be nice and clean, life simplified.
Straight off the page we find lives that we have the subtlety to understand and relate to. We are all inside Hamlet’s head but we cannot look so clearly at our own internal monologues. They are mostly disjointed daydreaming and self-deceiving self-justification.
We are even worse at reading the minds of others. We think we know the thoughts of others. We pigeonhole our friends according to the simple labels. He is shy, she is judgemental, he is selfish, and you are so thoughtful. We see these ‘characters’ acted out by a thousand hams, who themselves think they have a handle on how it all goes. But it is another form of language, a vocabulary of personality.
Yes, it comes close but this is not definitive, as soon as you assume that you are in tune, that they are playing only one melody that you will always hear.
The arts are good when they are creative, when they represent things you could not have guessed at yourself, remind you that you did not know everything and suggest new things to know.
There will always have to be a neat ending.
The worst bits are the endings; they never resist the opportunity to tie things up, to tell us how it all should be.
The Bible has a good ending, or the gospels do, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all end their books in an unsatisfying incomplete way. I like it. They leave a lot hanging, ending on an inverted deus ex machina. The sky comes down to Earth and God vanishes up into Heaven, off the stage, never to be heard from again and leaving nothing explained and everyone wondering. Is He coming back? When can we expect Him? What should we do in the meantime?
What a wonderfully ambiguous way to end an otherwise unremarkable story. Why did it end like that? Why could they not have been more clear?
And for two thousand years, people who know better than you (they must do because they said they do) have offered explanations. They have tried to tied the ends up neatly into a social and political package that involves a lot of unquestioning obedience and a long time on our knees.
The best ending is the one that admits our own stupidity. This takes us back to the story of Socrates. I think the story of Christ ought to be one like that of Socrates but ends up looking more like that of Santa Claus.
Belief in Santa Claus is a ‘good thing’ for children, it makes them happy and maybe even makes them less naughty and more nice (for a few weeks in December at least). As such, it is a lie adults are happy to perpetuate, but none of them choose it for himself or herself.
I think there is a strong parallel to be found in many of the liberal apologies for religion.. ‘it isn’t necessarily true but it’s good for society’, ‘my own faith is complex but churches shouldn’t confuse people with subtle points of theology’ .
Socrates on the other hand was the Clint Eastwood of early thinkers. The first person to say “A man has got to know his limitations.”
Socrates was one the first people to come up against this question. Someone went to the Oracle at Delphi, and asked who was the wisest man around. The answer was ‘Socrates’, and this deeply vexed the great man when he heard of it, for he was well aware of his own shortcomings. But being a simple trusting fellow he did not for a moment consider that the Oracle was mistaken. It was after all the most reliable Oracle around.
So Socrates set himself the task of discovering why he was the undisputed heavyweight thinker of the time. (And this was before Plato’s hour in the sun, so there was in our historical opinion some justification in the appellation.) What was more, if he was indeed the wisest of men, then he should, if anyone could, discover why.
After much thought and discussion on the subject, Socrates came round to the Oracle’s way of thinking. (That is, if Oracles can think, which, probably being almost omniscient, they have little need to do.) He reasoned thus: “I, Socrates, know nothing. That is I know that I cannot be certain of anything, and this is the only thing I know. It must be this that makes me wise, and what is more other men must be ignorant of their own ignorance, making them, by the judgement of the Oracle, doubly ignorant. The fools. Right that solves that I think I will go off and corrupt the young with these fashionable theories, and with any luck cause a political storm resulting in my own martyrdom to my cause and bestow upon myself certain, if dubious, immortality. “
What happens is you are not paying attention to what is going on, really paying attention. Now that I think about, that is going to be hard work. You have a drunken conversation with someone and if you agree that you will both endeavour to achieve some grand dream. Yet when you wake up the next day so many more drinks later although the idea remains a good one you are not interested. Tipped over into hangover, you skip over that part of the night. You remember it clearly enough but you are embarrassed by your former enthusiasm. You cannot fathom where it came from because right now you could not care less if your entire family was being threatened with death.
Sartre said that Hell is other people. It goes without saying that Heaven is other people too. Life is other people.
Morality is like inertia. A single object alone in an empty universe feels no inertia. There’s nothing to compare it to, to be able to tell where it is going or how fast. Add another thing and then there are relationships between them. But it’s different every time. It’s only when you add a whole universe that inertia becomes a universal property.
Morality is the same. It doesn’t exist because of God, It isn’t decided by a single expert. It’s the emergent property of a whole load of people trying to get along. If you deny morality you are denying humanity. If you invoke God, so be it. But you are just another man.
Or to look at it a different way, is morality absolute or relative? Does it precede the existence of people? Or is it a consequence of who we are and how we live? Let’s say it was absolute and one of the rules was that killing is wrong. Would killing be wrong in the world populated entirely by ants? Are the ants sinning? You may say yes. I say, good luck trying to convince the ants.
We think killing another person is wrong because they are another person. Morality derives from understanding that we all share something that
This is a little bit simpler than the Golden Rule which states “Do as you would be done by.” The trouble with that is that relies on your predilections.
This is more like a Crystal Rule, “Do as someone would be done by.” It has crystal clarity because it is empty of you. But it is also like a crystal ball, you have to peer inside and imagine a morality that works for some unspecified person. The Crystal Rule is shot through with uncertainty and ignorance. You have to decide what will be done before I tell you who that someone is. In fact, philosopher John Rawls’ said we could call this the Veil of Ignorance argument. Imagine yourself reincarnated into a society run by your rules. Would you still feel it was fair? Ideally, it has to be just as fair to a millionaire as to an orphan with AIDS. Not surprisingly, Gandhi was a big fan.
But even if Crystal rule is an abstract starting principle. Morality doesn’t involve one rule applied to everything. It’s everything your society has ever learned. The Ten Commandments with ten million amendments. It is every bit of advice you have ever received and every bit you’ve given to yourself or others. There isn’t a shorter answer than that.
Remember Gyges? He’s still stuck in that room. There’s that button on the desk. If he presses it a distant stranger dies but Gyges gets £10 and is free to go, safe from any punishment. Gyges seems to be taking a long to do the right thing so it’s time we helped him out. It’s pretty easy, all he has to do is remember that there is a world outside that door. Let him take a step back and ask who has put him in this tricky situation?
If he believes that a God or a Devil has placed him here then his choice about the button ought to be easy enough. In fact, the same goes for any third party. He should do the right thing, knowing that whatever he had done he was sure to have much bigger problems once he goes outside. The real problem here is very little to do with the button. It is about working out what ‘they’ expect of him and whether they’ve really given him any real freedom at all.
But, more often than not, we get ourselves to these messes. Gyges most likely put himself in this situation. He is welcome to my advice but ultimately, he has to make a choice for himself. He may find it difficult to discern the ‘right’ answer. But I will tell him this for nothing acting on my advice only is certainly wrong. If he can’t look around him at everything and see that some things are wrong and some things are right, then he must have been living in a box.