A Spinozan view of child development sees the opposite of wish-fulfilment. There are rules, constraints, that limit what we can do. The child learns, as she grows, to modify her plans as she perceives more of the rules. Initially, she might attempt to cross the room assuming that the chair is not an obstacle; when it doesn't move out of her way, she will feel frustration, a 'passion'. And throws a paddy. Later, as she constructs her path to avoid the chair, more of her plans will peaceably, and successfully, come to fruition. As she grows and learns more of the rules -God's Will or the warp and woof of universal causation -this progressive success will produce a calm acceptance of constraints: peace rather than passion.
Kauffman's At Home in the Universe is a very Spinozan book because Spinoza saw that we do indeed make our home, with the reward of peace and the discipline of passion and its control, each of us in their own universe. We fit the universe as a whole, we evolved in it and of it, and a successful life is based on appreciating how it constrains our plans and rewards our understanding. 'Please' and 'thank you' have no place in Spinozan prayer. That view melds the artisan with the philosopher, the tribal respect for tradition with the barbarian virtues of love and honour.
And it gives us a wholly new kind of story with a civilising message. Instead of the barbarian
'And then he rubbed the lamp again ... a again the genie appeared', we have the first king's son taking on a task, to win the hand of the fair princess ... and he fails. Amazing! No barbarian protagonist ever fails. Indeed, nobody ever ultimately fails except evil giants, sorcerers and Grand Viziers, in tribal or barbarian magical tales. However, the new story tells of the second king's s learning from this failure, and shows the listener -the learner -ho difficult the task is.
Nevertheless, again he fails, because learning not easy. But the third son -or the third billygoat Gruff or the third pig, with his house of brick -shows how to succeed in a Spinoza enlightened world of observation and experience. Stories in which people learn from the failures of others are a hallmark of a civilised society.
Narrativium has entered our Make-a-Human kit. It makes a different kind of mind from the tribal one, which is all 'do this because we've always done it that way and it works' and 'don't do that because it's taboo, evil and we'll kill you if you do'. And it also differs from the barbarian mind:
'That way lies honour, booty, much wealth and many children (if I can only get a djinn, or a dgun); I would no demean myself, dishonour these hands, with menial work.' In contrast, the civilised child learns to repeat the task, to work with the grain of the universe.
The reader of tales that have been moulded and informed by narrativium is prepared to do whatever an understanding of the task requires. Perhaps, in the universe of the story, qualifying for princesses' hands in marriage isn't the preoccupation of the average middle-class but the attitude of the third prince will serve him well down the mine, in the Stock Exchange, in the Wild West (according to Hollywood, a great purveyor of narrativium), or as father and baron.
We say 'he' because 'she' has a more difficult time: narrativium has not been mined and modelled for girls, and the way the feminist myths are shaping it does not seem to address the same questions as the old boy-oriented models. But we can put that right if we realise that narrativium trains by constraint.
Discworld, although technically a world run on fairy tale rules, derives much of its power and success from the fact that they are consistently challenged and subverted, most directly by the witch Granny Weatherwax, who cynically uses them or defies them as she sees fit. She roundly objects to girls being forced by the all-devouring 'story' to marry a handsome prince solely on the basis of their shoe size; she believes that stories are there to be challenged. But she herself is part of a larger story, and they follow Riles, too. In a sense, she's always trying to saw off the branch she's sitting on. And her stories derive their power from the fact that we have been programmed from an early age to believe in the monsters that she is battling.
CARGO CULT MAGIC
The phrase that kept occurring to Rincewind was cargo-cult. He'd run across it -he encountered most things by running across them - on isolated islands out on the big oceans.
Say that, once, a lost ship arrived, and while taking on food an water it handed out a few goodies to the helpful locals, like steel knives, arrowheads and fish-hooks.25 And then it sailed away, and after a while the steel wore out and the arrowheads got lost.
What was needed was another ship. But not many ships came to these lonely islands. What was needed was a ship attractor. Some sort of decoy. And it didn't much matter if it was made out of bamboo and palm leaves, so long as it looked like a ship. Ships would be bound to be attracted to another ship, or else how did you get small boats?
As with many human activities, it made perfect sense, for certain-values of 'sense'.
Discworld magic was all about controlling the vast oceans of magic that poured though the world. All the Roundworld magicians could do was to build something like bamboo decoys on the shores of the big, cold, spinning universe, which pleaded: please let the magic come.
'It's terrible,' he said to Ponder, who was drawing a big circle on the floor, to Dee's fascination.
'They believe they live in our world. With the turtle and everything!'
'Yes, and that's strange because the rules here are quite easy to spot,' said Ponder. 'Things tend to become balls, and balls tend to move in circles. Once you work that out, everything else falls into place. In a curved movement, of course.'
He went back to chalking the circle.
The wizards had been staying in Dee's house. He seemed quite happy about this, in a mildly bemused way, like a peasant who had suddenly been visited by a family of unexpected relatives from the big city who were doing incomprehensible things but were rich and interesting.
The trouble was, Rincewind thought, that the wizards were explaining to Dee that magic didn't work while, at the same time, doing magic. A crystal ball was giving instructions. An ape was knuckling in and out of, for want of a better word, fresh air, and wandering around Dee's library making excited 'ook' noises and assembling the books to make a proper entrance in L-space. And the wizards themselves, as was their wont, prodded at things and argued at cross-purposes.
And Hex had tracked down the elves. It made no sense, but their descent on Roundworld had plunged through time and come to rest millions of years in the past.
Now the wizards had to get there. As Ponder explained, sometimes resorting to hand gestures for the hard of comprehension, this wasn't difficult. Time and space in the round universe were entirely subordinate. The wizards, being made of higher-order stuff, could quite easily be moved around within it by magic from the real world. There were additional, complex reasons, mostly quite hard to spell.
The wizards didn't understand almost all this, but they did like the idea of being high-order stuff.
'But there was nothing back there,' said the Dean, watching Ponder Work on the circle. 'There wasn't even anyone you could call people, Hex says.'
'There were monkeys,' said Rincewind. 'Things like monkeys, anyway.' He had his own thoughts on this score, although the accepted wisdom on Discworld was that monkeys were the descendants of people who had given up trying.26
'Oh, the monkeys,' snapped Ridcully. 'I remember them. Completely useless. If you couldn't eat it or have sex with it, they just didn't want to know. They just mucked about.'