The Superversive - The Emperor’s New Depth (Part One)

sartorias inquires into the matter of ‘writing deep’, and there is evident puzzlement on all hands about what ‘deep’ means. As you might guess from the title of this post, I am not much taken with the idea of ‘deep’ writing in fiction. I therefore propose to examine the Emperor’s garments one by one, until I find a windcheater that actually, you know, cheats the wind. This turns out to be a longish task, so I shall hide most of it in the cuts, and take it one heading at a time. To begin with:

1. Armchair philosophizing as a substitute for character development.

This, I suspect, is what most adolescents (and nearly all college students) are likely to mean when they call a book ‘deep’. As in: ‘Who-o-o-a . . . that’s, like, so deep.’ Ayn Rand is so deep, and so are Camus and Vonnegut, and various other hardy campus perennials. Adolescence and early adulthood are naturally given to a kind of ill-focused antinomianism, which, having been trained to do so by its elders in the media and academe, readily expresses itself in scorn poured out upon ‘the metaphysics of savages’, as one of those elders notoriously called what other people call ‘common sense’.

We are taught early in life that the earth is really round, though ‘obviously’ flat, and that it is really in motion, though ‘obviously’ stationary, and that ‘obviously’ solid matter is really mostly empty space between atoms. All of these teachings are half-truths, and the short half of the truth at that.

There are several obvious proofs of the roundness of the earth, from ships’ masts and lunar eclipses and the like, which even the most savage metaphysician can verify. From a spot quite near my house, on a clear day, I can see the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains, but not the lower slopes or even the quite high foothills leading up to the front range. Everything below 2000 metres or thereabouts is hidden from my view by the curvature of the earth, and if I travel west, it gradually heaves over the horizon and into view. The earth is quite obviously curved, if I give the matter just a little thought.

The ‘obviously’ stationary earth is in fact quite stationary with respect to ourselves, and that, as anyone versed in relativity can attest, is what chiefly matters. Motion is not a property of a body in itself, but only a property that bodies have in relation to one another. Quite obviously the sun and the other planets are in motion with respect to the earth and each other; nobody ever denied this. For most everyday purposes, such as navigation, it suits us to take the earth as our stationary point of reference, which is what the geocentric ancients did. When we want to work out the patterns in the motions of celestial bodies relative to one another, we take the sun as our stationary point, because it greatly simplifies the maths, but that (pace Galileonis) is not a law of physics.

As for the empty space between atoms, any quantum physicist will tell you that this space is not empty at all, but seething with electromagnetic fields and awe-inspiring energies — which is why solid bodies cannot pass through one another. The ‘emptiness’ is an artifact of a naive model of the atom, picturing the electrons as tiny bits of grit flying in planetary orbits about a nuclear pebble: a model that was completely discredited nearly a century ago, and is now used only by grade-school science teachers trying to feed their charges upon the proper intellectual pabulum, without actually knowing any real science themselves.

But all these half-truths instil into our unformed minds the idea that the obvious is something to be sneered at, and that anything we can see for ourselves will presently be disproved by that arch trickster-god, Science. So when some clever duck comes along with a so-called novel filled with sermons on the evil of altruism, or the futility of human effort, or the nonexistence of physical reality except as a socially agreed-upon construct, or any other such manifest nonsense, the adolescent mind is liable to accept it uncritically because it is manifest nonsense. This is the New Sense, we intuitively feel, that supersedes the despised Common Sense we were always taught to distrust. But this intuition is unsound because it is based upon a thoroughly false premise. If we examined our reasoning in the cold conscious daylight of logic, we would see the error soon enough; but intuition works in the dark, and we trust it even when we should not.

At its worst, this tendency tempts us to believe in wild conspiracy theories, which is why (for instance) The Da Vinci Code is taken by many persons as a serious and damaging attack on the Catholic Church, and not as a silly pot-boiler of a thriller based on a mishmash of half-baked Gnostic aphorisms. But if your teachers have always told you that your senses are liars, and the truth is never what it seems, you may well pick up Dan Brown’s rather unhinged novel and mistake it for Revelation. I have known many potentially good minds spoilt from early youth by this pernicious habit.

The worst thing about amateur philosophizing in novels is that it is so easy to do badly, and so uninteresting when done well. There are, in effect, two kinds of philosophers, those who set out to examine the obvious and discover how we know it to be true, and those who set out to disprove the obvious and substitute their own system of the universe. This is very nearly the same thing as saying that there are real philosophers and sophistical quacks. There is a very famous bit of criticism that is inflicted upon nearly all neophyte writers, for it is nearly always true, and attributed to any Great Name that comes handy (most often Samuel Johnson, who did not say it): ‘Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.’ This is still truer in philosophy. A writer of fiction is allowed, indeed required, to invent her own world, which may be quite different from the real universe and is at any rate a great deal simpler. A philosopher who invents his own world is either a lunatic or a con man.

To be both good and original in philosophy is a rare mark of greatness, and nobody can accomplish it except by building a tiny new addition to the great edifice of existing knowledge. A philosopher who rejects the basic rules of logic is like a mathematician who rejects the multiplication table. Unfortunately, the philosopher will do better in the world than the mathematician, for most people have at least a little training in mathematics, and none in philosophy. If an architect miscalculates the loads and stresses when designing a building, the building will not stand, and any fool can see it fall down. But if a politician designs his political system from a bogus philosophy, it may take a courageous and discerning mind to recognize that the failures of the system are intrinsic to the design. Marxists have been making excuses for their fallen temples since 1848, and some unhappy souls are doing it still.

When a novelist bases her world on the original (but not good) philosophy of a plausible crank, her book may be full of interesting ideas and clever arguments, which may cause the unwary reader to consider it deep, or even so deep, like Atlas Shrugged. It will be noticeably short on characters that behave like human beings, for the philosophy of her world is not one that real people can live by; but an inexperienced reader may not notice this.

For high-school kids, and the slightly overaged kids who have gone straight on to university at eighteen, have a very limited and cockeyed experience of the human condition. They have been sheltered, as convicts are sheltered: isolated from the normal laws of human society, because they are confined in a place ruled by the Law of the Jungle. Convicts are subjected to this treatment because they have shown themselves unwilling to abide by the gentler laws outside of the prisons. Children are subjected to it because everybody agrees that schools are necessary, but nobody can agree on how they should be run. Our school systems are built on a jury-built compromise between half a dozen mutually incompatible ideologies. Nobody has the authority to fulfil his responsibilities, and every decision made is liable to be unmade as soon as it offends some powerful vested interest: and so power devolves upon the bullies and fanatics, who don’t care.

It is no part of my job to suggest a solution to the manifold problems of the education system. I merely wish to point out that if you educate a child in a bizarre mix of unworkable philosophies, you will almost certainly produce an adult who has trouble telling sense from nonsense, and who prefers a colourful and consoling lie to a dull and daunting truth. The Philosopher’s Stone was supposed to turn dross into gold. If you have a bit of worthless rock that you want to pass off as the genuine Philosopher’s Stone, you will have an easier time if your victim cannot tell gold from pyrite or pinchbeck. Fortunately, such people are easy to find, especially among the young, who have not yet learned to replace the muddled philosophy of the schools with ‘the metaphysics of savages’. And they will pay you in the coin of their highest accolade, worth every bit as much as the counterfeit you sold them. They will bow to you in awe, and say that you are, like, so deep.