Does this matter?
Indeed it does. Perhaps Owen Harry, who had himself risen from a poor Welsh beginning near Cardiffs Tiger Bay to become a very young chief technician in Jack's zoology dept at Birmingham University, and later became a senior lecturer at Belfast University, put this best when he described its main negative consequence as `a lack of sergeants'.
There is a story about officer training and examination in the British Army in the 1950s. One of the most important questions was 'How do you dig a trench?'. The correct answer was `I say "Sergeant, dig me a trench!"' Sergeants are people who organise the doing. They are not experts in what to do, or when: that's the prerogative of officers, who theoretically constitute the brains of the organisation. Officers decide what has to be done, but don't know how to do it. Sergeants don't actually do things, either, except occasionally when they have to. Their role is to organise squads of ignorant men, often incompetent, but well trained to obey orders, so that they cooperate effectively. Sergeants are the layer that makes cooperation effective: they know how to get things done. Privates know how to do what they're told, and are trained not to do anything else.
We didn't say efficient; it's a common mistake to see efficiency as something to be striven for. Efficiency is a concept borrowed from engineering and physics, a measure of how much you get out for how much you put in. Sergeants are in some respects the least efficient way of getting things done; they have a tendency towards repetition and sarcasm, confident that a few of their recruits will graduate from basic training with some degree of competence. But sergeants are very effective, and the system they are part of is very robust.
Darwin and Wallace, Spencer and Wells, all came up through a system that was very robust in this way. All of them, different as they were, knew that writing books was a prime way of affecting the society around you. There was no television, no films, and only a fraction of people went to the theatre or the opera ... mostly to music hall and pantomimes around Christmas. Dickens, Kingsley, the Bronte sisters, and Thomas Hardy made people - lots of people - think new thoughts and lead new lives. The working men's clubs and their links with the public libraries brought reading skills to a higher level than ever before.
So this audience was ripe for persuasive texts that could take them out of simple biblical knowledge into new theologies, even into atheism. Huxley, `Darwin's Bulldog', promoted Darwinism as the antithesis of a God-made world. From the aspiring middle class of Victoriana grew our modern secular age, with God relegated to the plaything of a few of the less modern clergy. Modern clergy don't believe in a twelve-foot Englishman up there in the sky, with Heaven as an eternal Buckingham Palace garden party. Particularly from those French philosophers who continued sophisticated theological criticism in lineages derived from Voltaire, our clerics learned to do without that strong Victorian style of Christianity. That form of Anglicanism, confident that God really was looking after the English, didn't need to embarrass itself with overt prayers. The rituals would suffice (provided they weren't noisy like the Welsh, or showy like the Catholics).
We have lost strong simple religion, we have lost academic excellence, we have gained a secular society that maintains the heterogeneity that made it so robust in Victorian times and later. However, we are now pursuing policies, particularly in education, that fail to provide society with all those able people who built the Victorian and Edwardian edifices, both material and theoretical.
There are routes away from this pessimism. In The Science of Discworld 2 we referred to humans as Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. Our overall message was that humans need to make stories to motivate themselves, to identify goals, and to distinguish good from evil.
Here we go a step further.
Technological and Civilised Man, we believe, must become Polypan multinarrans[62], to extend the metaphor rather further. Human beings must become ever more diverse, valuing and enjoying each other's differences rather than fearing them or suppressing them. And mere explanation is not enough. To gain understanding, a useful working philosophy as appropriate for action as for judgement and decision, an explanation is only rarely good enough. People find simple explanations satisfying because they enable thin causal chains of the kind we build for our own personal memories and causalities. But the real world, even the world of other people and their likes, dislikes, and prejudices - sometimes so rigidly held that our own lives and those of our loved ones don't matter to them - doesn't work like that.
We owe it to ourselves, and to those for whom we are responsible and those who respect us, to develop multi-causal understanding. We can do that, as suggested here, by simultaneously encompassing several explanations of each puzzle, explanations that disagree productively with each other. Multinarrans: many stories. So one person, even a Newton or a Shakespeare or a Darwin, will not really be enough, despite the story we have just told you. Our fictional Darwin is a symbol for an endless stream of Darwins, challenging orthodoxy and being right, a glorious network of innovative thinkers and radicals. People who try to keep ancient cultures alive by blowing up the competition achieve nothing, except widespread contempt for their objectives. They doom their own enterprise by their methods, and they betray a terrible lack of confidence that what matters to them can survive without coercion and violence.
Back to sergeants, and the way things are really done: `Sergeant, dig a trench.' This is how Polypan multinarrans gets things done. How many people are needed to understand a jet airliner? To build one? Recursion in technology really is like biological evolution, it really does expand the phase space. It expands it so much that most of us have virtually no understanding of how the world we live in works. In fact, it is essential that we don't, because there would be too much for anyone to understand.
But we do need to understand that this is what the world is like. Otherwise we don't just lose the sergeants: we lose the ability to build aircraft that fly, dishwashers that clean, cars that don't pollute (as much). We stop being able to cure (some of) the sick, to feed (most of) the planet, and to house, clothe, and wash a burgeoning humanity.
Our world is changing, and it's changing very fast, and we ourselves are the inescapable agents of that change. If we stagnate, like our fictional Victoriana, we die. Staying where we are is not an option. Static resources cannot continue to support us.
We make our world work by introducing new, undreamt-of rules and possibilities, by considering alternatives and making decisions, which feel like `free will', and work that way, even if they are `really' deterministic. We build on the present to create a bigger future. Science standing on technology, and technology standing on science, provide a successful ladder that leads to extelligence.
Is it, perhaps, the only one?
The past was another country, but the future is an alien world.
And yet ...
The most remarkable thing about the universe, as Einstein once said, is that it is comprehensible. Not in every aspect, but in enough to make us feel at home in it. It makes sense - almost as much as a Discworld story. Which is amazing because facts don't have to make sense: only well-crafted fiction has to obey such rigid rules.
Part of this comprehensibility can be explained. We evolved in the universe, and we evolved to survive in it. Being able to tell ourselves `what if stories about it - to understand it - has survival value. We have been selected, by nature, to tell such stories.
62
Sorry, it's one of those horrible Graeco-Latin hybrids. But, like `television', it's comprehensible.