Tetherdown Trundlers CC vs Eltham CC, Sunday 14 July 2013

Eltham:  Eltham CC 183/9 dec. vs. Tetherdown CC, 129/7: Match Drawn.

Sunday 14 July 2013 might go down as the day the Tetherdown Trundlers franchise came of age. 

Both in the field and at the crease we found an inner resolve in the face of environmental conditions, a want of numbers and canny opposition. In the contribution from the first graduate of Trundlers’ Academy we saw vindication of our long term strategy. In our bowlers’ trailing hands, we discovered an unexpected and age-appropriate dimension to our wicket taking.

But let’s first set expectations: we didn’t win, or really even come close. But, courtesy of a different match format, we discovered an outcome that suits the Trundlers perfectly: the stubbornly eked-out draw.

Limited overs cricket is binary: you win or you lose, in the Trundlers’ experience with a stout preponderance for the latter. Thus have we overlooked the excellently English psychology of our sport, delivered by the gap - the same one by which all Englishmen commemorate Dunkerque - between victory and defeat. On Sunday there was to be no limit to either side’s overs; to win, a team needed to outscore the opposition and dismiss its innings entirely. A third outcome, in which neither side wins or loses, was on the table.

And how we Trundlers had forgotten the different complexion that third way casts! How agreeable we found it is to wallow in the tepid purgatorial waters of no particular result! The broad smile on Skipper Frais’ face at stumps, as he tucked his bat under his arm and stalked grandiloquently from the field, said it all.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves: a conclusion is nothing without its premises.

The premises in this case belonged to the Eltham Cricket Club, not far from the Sidcup bypass, some miles the far (or, as it is known in N10, “wrong”) side of the Dartford Tunnel.

Our opponents boast a century and a half of proud history. This is their sesquicentennial year. They point also to auspicious forebears: Eltham is where the 66 year-old W. G. Grace played out his cricketing dotage, his last match concluding as the Great War erupted around him.

So, rarely has a day been so generously filled with auguries. Cricket was in the air at every level of abstraction. We left our sons and wives contesting the pride of Tetherdown Primary as North Middlesex Under 10s (stewarded by Honourable Trundler Hayward) took on their Highgate counterparts (stewarded by Honourable Trundler Ball). As we navigated the sweltering traffic of Hackney Wick, Agnew and Blofeld jacked the temperature further with reports from Nottingham. Messrs Pattinson and Haddon of the formal penal colony were making easier work of their tenth wicket partnership than expectation predicted they should.

Amidst the heat shimmer of Sidcup, the spirit of Grace himself awaited. It is a handsome and generously-proportioned oval, well concealed from the road. It promised a fast outfield and a dry but well-matted playing surface. Skipper Frais took an executive decision to field (he now equivocates about whose decision it was, but no one else of the playing 22 has made any claim to it). He resorted immediately to his New Zealanders, and given the option, Buxton at once took the uphill, upwind end intending to let gravity do its work.

Eltham’s innings

Eltham’s openers had a resolute look about them. They were not especially troubled by our opening armoury. Buxton was relieved to see his first few looseners allowed to glide harmlessly down the leg side. Gordon’s first ball was not treated quite so magnanimously, Bulpitt getting quickly into position and lofting it mightily for six behind square. As the mercury touched thirty it looked like it might be a long day.

Skipper Frais, still adorned with the Duck, kept his horses fresh by frequent rotation. While Master Bonfield’s line and length was enough to have Buxton openly pondering his shelf-life as an opener, still it couldn’t crack the Eltham starting pair. That task fell to the crafty Mr Morris, a label I hope he will not be affronted to hear gives him the benefit of some considerable doubt.

To a ball well flighted and of good length Eltham’s Fisher drove full-bloodedly and straight. It wasn’t with malice aforethought that Morris laid fingers on it, nor even reflex, but the simple inability to get out of the way. This was nonetheless enough to do for the non-striker Bulpitt who, backing up correctly, could only watch in horror as the ball cannoned from Morris’ annular and clipped his bails. As his team arose incredulously, Morris composed himself, assembled a nonchalant air and, while not in so many words saying so, evoked the idea that this turn of events might have been part of his plan. His watering eyes, bitten lip and swelling fingers told a different story.

1/72 off nine: Eltham’s tail seemed a long way off, especially if that was how we were going to get them out. Wouldham was the next man in, and after some circumspection he too set about accumulating runs with apparent ease. Frais brought Buxton back on to stem the flow which he did, to the accompaniment of the day’s only minor controversy. Having failed in a Leg Before Wicket appeal that might have succeeded on another day, (a day for which your correspondent will also save his treatise “On The Manifold Injustice to Left Armers of the LBW Rule”) and then being carted around the ground for an over, Buxton again trapped Wouldham low, this time with a faster yorker unequivocally bound for the base of the middle stump. The Trundlers went up, as did the umpire’s finger and, to our surprise, the batsman’s dudgeon. Wouldham marched off giving unsubtle indications that he felt we knew he’d hit it. He was the only one of that view. To his credit he was able to concentrate and apply this sense of injustice to an impressive bowling spell later on, and was to have a revenge of sorts on the New Zealander.

Still, Tetherdown’s fortunes began to turn. Gordon switched to the downwind end while Trunders debutant Ritterband commenced a lengthy spell of Left Arm Orthodox - his first in 20 years - into the breeze. Fisher, now well over his half century, was scoring freely until he leathered one firmly but uppishly into the mid-off area. Gordon, mid-way through exit manouevres from that magisterial bowling action of his, conjured a change in momentum to his left which, though deft, went far enough neither to catch the ball nor, fortunately, to impede Buxton at mid-off who managed to catch it with that trusty solar plexus of his.

With Fisher’s admirable knock at an end and three wickets down for 128, Frais felt able to tighten his ring*. Having taken a couple of overs to rediscover his range –no disgrace after a couple of decades’ layoff – Mr Ritterband started to get the better of the new batsmen with generous flight, immaculate length, and unpredictable bounce. James, an enthusiastic cutter of the ball, looked less at home playing off his legs and eventually lobbed a noncommittal stroke straight down Everett’s throat at wide midwicket.

Eltham were still regrouping themselves when the curse of the flailing hand saw for another non-striker, this time Meeson, off Gordon, who celebrated the wicket with a similarly disingenuous look of wisdom after the fact.

Not long after, Seeds failed to make his ground for a cheeky single and Swain, who had been holding up the middle order, chose the wrong ball to have a slash at, and lost his leg stump to Gordon. Morris compounded a fine tight bowling spell with a sharp catch (mostly with his other hand) off Bonfield senior at point. With the run rate slowed to a trickle and the afternoon wearing on, Eltham declared their innings closed. Over quite splendid array of cheese and pickle rolls Tetherdown girded (and girdled) themselves for the run chase. 178 needed, and as many overs as could be fitted in, with a maximum of 20 after 6pm.

After a hard day in the field Tetherdown’s bowling attack, with thirty seven overs between five of them for just thirteen culpable extras, felt as keenly as ever that they’d done their bit and should be allowed to observe the remainder of the match from the shade of the pavilion. It was not to be so.

Trundlers’ Innings

Still, as things started out we were hopeful. Everett and Phillips both looked good in the face of a disciplined opening spell from Tanveer and Swain. Indeed, the first departure from the field of play was not a batsman, but the Elder Bonfield, shaken from his umpiring stupor by the realisation that he was due to bat at number 3, was therefore next in and really ought to have his pads on. In hindsight he may wish he’d stayed put. 

In any case, as is so often the way with the Trundlers, both openers got a start – we were fully eight overs in before Phillips caught a thin edge to the keeper, and Replacement Umpire Grays, with a doleful look, raised his finger. Phillips felt he had cause to regret the absence of a TV replay, but none of the Tetherdown men with a view of the incident shared his misgivings (with the exception of incoming Bonfield: had he known what was coming next he might have sought Phillips’ reprieve from hotspot, a third umpire, an appellate court and might even have thrown himself on the mercy of his maker).

Still flustered from his moment of umpiring panic, Bonfield D played all around his first ball from Swain, and it played all around him, striking his toe, pad, bat and wicket like some sort of pinball before coming to rest in the keeper’s glove. In the confusion, Bonfield stumbled forward and the keeper stumped him for good measure.

Now it is just as well a man can only be out once in a cricket innings, or we might have been four more down on the spot. “I don’t believe it”, Bonfield muttered as he gazed at the parched earth.

Mr Grays adopts a charming air of bafflement when he umpires, and here it was well justified. For a moment, as Eltham’s inner ring carried out their war-dance, hopping excitedly from foot to foot, Mr Grays froze, overwhelmed by the choice for which he was spoiled on what to give Bonfield out for. Finally, having decided a single finger wouldn’t do the occasion justice, he raised two.

Now if ever a team needed a skipper’s knock the Trundlers did, two down and hardly batting down to eleven (by this I mean no slight on our lower order: we only had ten players). And out strode Skipper Frais, having ostentatiously coated himself with suncream, as if to say he had come to stay for a while, but with a large yellow duck on his back, as if to say he hadn’t. It was between him and Mr Everett to salvage the situation.

Mr Everett is a fine strokemaker on his day: put a mullet and a walrus moustache on him and, in the throes of a crashing cover drive, you might mistake him for a young David Boon. Having held “judicious” as his watchword for ten overs the Bristolian thought he’d done enough to start playing expansively. Alas, Eltham’s Swain had other ideas and his containing line and length proved too much: dreaming no doubt of a fine ton at Launceston, Everett chased outside off, intent on one of those blazing Boonian drives; the ball stayed true to the line it was bowled on and accounted for his leg stump.

With 40 odd on the board, three down and a good 30 overs’ worth of play remaining, those making arrangements for an early supper back in N10 would not have been dissuaded by the sight of Mr Grays approaching the wicket. Certainly not if they had heard him remark, as he set off, “well, the main thing is to score a run. As long as I manage that, I’m happy”.

Your correspondent is an experienced lower order batsman, having waited upon all kinds of late wicket stands over his career. There are times where the not-out batsmen are in such apparent control that the next drop can relax, catch a few winks, even pop across the road for a pack of cigs and the latest issue of the Racing Post. Attending on Mr Grays’ batting affords no such tranquillity. You feel more like an anxious relative visiting a trauma ward. But never for long: Grays got his run, cut deftly through the vacant leg slip area, added another the same way, before lofting one gently off the shoulder to midwicket and retreating gratefully to the pavilion, his day’s work done.

With no specialist batsmen to come and just forty two on the board, it once again fell to the workhorses to do something about the situation. Your correspondent was next, and the skipper came out to greet me for some encouraging words. Residual sunblock gave skipper’s face a pale and waxen aspect which I misconstrued as the early signs of heart failure. I feared the heat may be getting the better of his pulmonary system; it was certainly getting to mine. I felt quite light-headed.

Now bowlers are from Mars, batsmen from Venus. They think about the world in contrasting ways. Often they misunderstand each other. My Captain started babbling in ways I had trouble making sense of.

“Occupy the crease,” he said.

I looked about me to check. “But I am occupying the crease,” I replied. I began to fear he was being patronising.

“Only hit the balls that are there to be hit,” he said.

Now I knew he was. “But they’re all there to be hit. That’s what they’re bowling them for.”

The idea of remaining at the crease for longer than the handful of deliveries it usually takes a social cricketer to put one on the sticks seemed oppressive. But as the first over passed I had an epiphany. Swatting wildly at deliveries wide of off stump lost its appeal. I had a go at leaving one. You heard me: I left it, completely alone! I even waved my bat flamboyantly in the air! O, how strange and bracing a sensation!

Then one pitched at a good length on middle stump, given enough air for me to override my fight/flight instinct. I held my bat vertically out in front of me. The ball bounced off it, rolling harmlessly back down the pitch. I wasn’t out! Umpire Phillips looked ready rub his disbelieving eyes with his cravat, but they were not deceiving him. By Jove, this new idea of defence is marvellous! Mr Frais and I started taking gentle singles! We rotated the strike! I PADDED OFF!

I can’t deny there were moments when my natural instinct to wallop the living daylights out of the cherry got the better of me, but generally our partnership was one of caution, taste and elegance. The runs began accumulating. Then Mr Wouldham, with whom you may recall there had been a testy exchange earlier, came into the attack. He was still simmering about my successful Leg Before Wicket, and creditably marshalled his frustration into a parsimonious bowling spell. He finally got his just desserts when, at the Non-Striker’s End, I upheld our club’s venerable tradition of inexplicable running between wickets.

Captain Frais pushed the ball to the fielder at short midwicket, and transparently no run was available. I ran anyway. I believe it was Mr Seeds at Midwicket who heeded Wouldham’s strangulated cry, and so it was that, with me well short of my ground, the bowler set about obliterating my wicket with his bare knuckles. He was still at it as the younger Bonfield, my replacement, arrived at the crease.

Such a display of animal spirits might have unnerved another lad of that age, but young Bonfield displays worldliness beyond his years. He was quickly into his stroke-play, which is handsome indeed, and promptly cracked his first to the boundary and snuck a single from his second. It was only courtesy of an extraordinary snatch low down in the gully (from Wouldham, I believe, mostly with his other hand) that Bonfield was dismissed following what looked from the boundary like a gracefully carried-out late cut.

Only Gordon, the untried Ritterband and Morris remained. Your correspondent has voiced  concerns before about Morris’ excessively low place in the order, but today there looked to be no doubt that he’d get a fair old go, especially once Mr Gordon had completed his customary round trip to the crease and back. But this was to reckon without the ministrations of Mr Ritterband, the debutant. Ritterband’s casual references earlier in the day to “not having played since the first XI at school” were presumed by all to be unfalsifiable braggadocio. They were now clothed in hopeful plausibility.

There were eight or nine overs remaining of the 20 after six, perhaps more. Mr Ritterband took a conventional guard on middle stump, left his bat there, but then stationed his feet six inches outside leg, affecting a curious stance resembling nothing so much as a gothic arch. Anxious looks were exchanged between Frais at the non-striker’s end and your correspondent, out for another spell of umpiring. We wondered wordlessly what kind of first XI encouraged this sort of display. So did Eltham: the ring came in, far tighter than anything Frais could imagine, all ten of them stationing themselves around the bat at a radius of about six feet, like jackals at a poisoned watering hole.

Yet as Mr Tanveer’s arm rolled over, Ritterband snapped into an orthodox position and batted correctly, smartly across the square. This was to be the unvarying sequence for the remainder of the game: Frais at one end, Ritterband at the other, a scrum of fielders intruding from all sides, but masterful and resolute defence rolling across the block from each ball, as the sun lowered in the sky. Not a run was scored in the last seven overs. It was magnificent to watch, though it might pall on a ball-by-ball description. Skipper Frais was magnificent in concentration, Ritterband a revelation as his foil, and as they walked from the field at stumps, the men of Tetherdown felt the joy of Dunkerque, made real in South London. W.G. Grace, the spirit of cricket himself, would have been smiling.

*It is, as Trundler Oral History records, a thing of rare complexity in any weather, and its tightening only adds to the sense of marvel.

Apocalypse/Nirvana

When the universe wakes up, will it smell the coffee? 
Not everyone is as certain as Ray Kurzweil that the End of History is at hand.

L'observatoire de St-Véran by Сергей'

JULIAN JAYNES rounds out his wonderful The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind with a sanguine remark that the idea of science is rooted in the same impulse that drives religion: the desire for "the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause".

Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resemblant of a religious one, than in Ray Kurzweil's hymn to forthcoming technology, The Singularity Is Near. For if ever a man were committed overtly - fervently, even - to such a unitary belief, it is Ray Kurzweil. And the sceptics among our number could hardly have asked for a better example of the pitfalls, or ironies, of such an intellectual fundamentalism: one one hand, this sort of essentialism features prominently in the currently voguish denouncements of the place of religion in contemporary affairs, often being claimed as a knock-out blow to the spiritual disposition. On the other, it is too strikingly similar in its own disposition to be anything of the sort. Ray Kurzweil is every inch the millenarian, only dressed in a lab-coat and not a habit.

Kurzweil believes that the "exponentially accelerating" "advance" of technology has us well on the way to a technological and intellectual utopia/dystopia (this sort of beauty being, though Kurzweil might deny it, decidedly in the eye of the beholder) where computer science will converge on and ultimately transcend biology and, in doing so, will transport human consciousness into something quite literally cosmic. This convergence he terms the "singularity", a point at which he expects with startling certainty that the universe will "wake up", and many immutable limitations of our current sorry existence (including, he seems to say, the very laws of physics) will simply fall away.

Some, your correspondent included, might wonder whether, this being the alternative, our present existence is all that sorry in the first place.

But not Raymond Kurzweil. This author seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds rather desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, in those aspects where it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn't often. One thing you could not accuse Ray Kurzweil of is a lack of pluck; but there's a fine line between bravado and foolhardiness which, in his enthusiasm, he may have crossed.

“Kurzweil seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, where it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn’t often.”

His approach to evolution is a good example. He talks frequently and modishly of the algorithmic nature of evolution, but then makes observations not quite out of the playbook, such as: "the key to an evolutionary algorithm ... is defining the problem. ... in biological evolution the overall problem has always been to survive" and "evolution increases order, which may or may not increase complexity".

But to suppose an evolutionary algorithm has "a problem it is trying to solve" - in other words, a design principle - is to emasculate its very power, namely the facility of explaining how a sophisticated phenomenon comes about *without* a design principle. Evolution works because organisms (or genes) have a capacity - not an intent - to replicate themselves. Nor, necessarily, does evolution increase order. It will tend to increase complexity, because the evolutionary algorithm, having no insight, is unable to "perceive" the structural improvements implied in a design simplification. Evolution has no way of rationalising design except by fiat. The adaptation required to replace an overly elaborate design with more effective but simpler one is, to use Richard Dawkins' expression, an implausible step back down "Mount Improbable". That's generally not how evolutionary processes work: over-engineering is legion in nature; economy of design isn't, really.

This sounds like a picky point, but it gets to the nub of Kurzweil's outlook, which is to assume that technology evolves like biological organisms do - that a laser printer, for example, is a direct evolutionary descendent of the printing press. This, I think, is to superimpose a convenient narrative over a process that is not directly analogous: a laser printer is no more a descendent of a printing press than a mammal is a descendent of a dinosaur. Successor, perhaps; descendant, no. But the "exponential increase in progress" arguments that Kurzweil repeatedly espouses depend for their validity on this distinction.

The "evolutionary process" from woodblock printing to the Gutenberg press, to lithography, to hot metal typing, to photo-typesetting, to the ink jet printer (thanks, Wikipedia!) involves what Kurzweil would call "paradigm shifts" but which a biologist might call extinctions; each new technology arrives, supplements and (usually) obliterates the existing ones, not just by doing the same job more effectively, but - and this is critical - by opening up new vistas and possibilities altogether that weren't even conceived of in the earlier technology - sometimes even at the cost of a certain flexibility inherent in the older technology. That is, development is constantly forking off in un-envisaged, unexpected directions. This plays havoc with Kurzweil's loopy idea of a perfect, upwardly arcing parabola of utopian progress.

It is what I call "perspective chauvinism" to judge former technologies by the standards and parameters set by the prevailing orthodoxy - being that of the new technology. Judged by such an arbitrary standard older technologies will, by degrees, necessarily seem more and more primitive and useless. The fallacious process of judging former technologies by subsequently imposed criteria is, in my view, the source of many of Ray Kurzweil's inevitably impressive charts of exponential progress. It isn't that we are progressing ever more quickly onward, but the place whence we have come falls exponentially further away as our technology meanders, like a perpetually deflating balloon, through design space. Our rate of progress doesn't change; our discarded technologies simply seem more and more irrelevant through time.

Kurzweil may argue that the rate of change in technology has increased, and that may be true - but I dare say a similar thing happened at the time of the agricultural revolution and again in the industrial revolution - we got from Stephenson's rocket to the diesel locomotive within 75 years; in the subsequent 97 years the train's evolution been somewhat more sedate. Eventually, the "S" curves Kurzweil mentions flatten out. They clearly aren't exponential, and pretending that an exponential parabola might emerge from a conveniently concatenated series of "S" curves seems credulous to the point of disingenuity. This extrapolation into a single "parabola of best fit" has heavy resonances of the planetary "epicycle", a famously desperate attempt of Ptolemaic astronomers to fit "misbehaving" data into what Copernicans would ultimately convince the world was a fundamentally broken model. 

If this is right, then Kurzweil's corollary assumption - that there is a technological nirvana to which we're ever more quickly headed - commits the inverse fallacy of supposing the questions we will ask in the future - when the universe "wakes up", as he puts it - will be exactly the ones we anticipate now. History would say this is a naïve, parochial, chauvinistic and false assumption. 

“Assuming there is a technological nirvana to which we’re inevitably headed is to suppose the questions we will ask when the universe “wakes up” will be same the ones we ask now. History would say this is a parochial and chauvinistic assumption.”

And that, I think, is the nub of it. One feels somewhat uneasy so disdainfully pooh-poohing a theory put together with such enthusiasm and such an energetic presentation of data (and to be sure, buried in Kurzweil's breathless prose is plenty of learning about technology which, if even half-way right, is fascinating), but that seems to be it. I suppose I am fortified by the nearby predictions made just four years ago, seeming not to have come anything like true just yet:

"By the end of this decade [i.e., by 2010] computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses and electronics woven into our clothing"

On the other hand I could find scant reference to "cloud computing" or equivalent phenomena like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing project which spawned schemes like SETI@home in Kurzweil's book. Now here is a rapidly evolving technological phenotype, for sure: hooking up thousands of serially processing computers into a massive parallel network, giving processing power way beyond any technology currently envisioned. It may be that this adaptation means we simply don't need to incur the mental challenge of molecular transistors and so on, since there must, at some point, be an absolute limit to miniaturisation, as we approach it the marginal utility of developing the necessary technology will swan dive just as the marginal cost ascends to the heavens; whereas the parallel network involves none of those limitations. You can always hook up yet another computer, and every one will increase performance.

I suppose it's easy to be smug as I type on my decidedly physical computer, showing no signs of being superseded with VR Goggles just yet and we're already two yeasrs into the new decade, but the point is that the evolutionary process is notoriously bad at making predictions (until, that is, the results are in!), being path-dependent as it is. You can't predict for developments that haven't yet happened. Kurzweil glosses over this shortfall at his theory's cost.

 

How to philosophise with a hammer

I am a hopeless handyman. I have poor attention to detail and lack patience. I am disorganised. When hanging a picture, rather than finding a hammer, I bash the tack in with whatever first comes to hand. Recent examples: A tin of Rawleigh's Medicated Ointment (reasonably effective), an ornamental porcelain donkey (bad - it didn't survive) and a book (a hard-backed edition of E. O. Wilson's Consilience: better than nothing, but now pocked with pinholes).


That we tend to do that sort of thing lies at the root of a big problem with the ideas inside Professor Wilson's book (just as well, therefore, it has some use for hammering in picture hooks). Using a familiar object to do an unfamiliar job is rather like coining a metaphor: It's a creative act. As well as being pragmatic, it has its advantages. (It must have some advantages - convenience; it overcomes the lack of botheredness to find the hammer - or you wouldn't do it). But while my tin of ointment (or ornamental donkey, for that matter)  might not be conventional (and, in the donkey's case, might not work awfully well) it's not wrong. It is as good as the job it does. A "proper" tack hammer has been designed, to the exclusion of all other purposes, for hammering in tacks. You can imagine other objects being better or worse at functioning like hammers. Blu-tack, for example, would be hopeless. But not wrong. Just not much use.

And so it is with metaphors:  they deliberately take a conventional concept and put it to work in a concept it wasn't designed for. As a result metaphorical meanings are different from literal meanings (in a manner of speaking) but no worse or better - while they might be more or less effective, effectiveness is in the eye of the beholder.

Often, a metaphor can more elegantly or succinctly some aspects of its "target" (which Julian Jaynes would call a "metaphrand") than a literal construction. "Love is a rose": I suppose you might take this to mean love is a delicate, beautiful, fragile, thing that can prick you if you aren't careful with it. Or that is is a soft, rich and complexly enfolded collection of different facets. These aren't mutually exclusive metaphors, but they're not entirely consistent either. Both of them make some sense, where a literal interpretation of "love is a rose" doesn't.

Now while I was bashing in my picture hook with Professor Wilson's book I got to thinking about what was inside his book, and how Professor Wilson's whole enterprise, his desired end state, is one which overlooks the metaphor. This is some irony as metaphors, and rich ones at that, are scattered prodigally around his text.

Professor Wilson, in Consilience, sees the possibility (not yet arrived) of a unified, unique, continuous, contiguous spectrum of knowledge, encompassing not merely the physics and the physical sciences, but all of the humanities too. In fact, I think he sees the necessity of it. Wilson is an unabashed reductionist. Wilson embraces a hierarchy of physical sciences (physics at the bottom, grounding everything else; Chemistry sitting atop it, Biology atop that, and so on. Higher sciences can be reduced to lower ones; all sciences are consistent with each other, and it is only a lack of data which prevents completion of the total blueprint of the physical universe. Thereafter the social sciences and even the arts will fall into a pre-ordained and logical place and will similarly be logical, consistent and unambiguously explicable. Wilson is excited by this idea (it horrifies me, personally), and sets out in his book to give it some intellectual underpinning.

Wilson is running before he can walk. Metaphor gets in the way - literally, and metaphorically. The same thing happened to Bertrand Russell following a similarly hubristic exercise restricted to the logical underpinnings of mathematics. In the infancy of the twentieth century Russell tried to chart the entirely cosmos of the mathematical universe by reference to a single, finite set of well-defined logical axioms. By limiting himself to numbers, Russell took up an easier challenge, you would think, than Wilson has. Mathematics was, Russell supposed, a closed logical system: finite, reducible and therefore well susceptible to his kind of enterprise.

But Russell failed to complete his mathematical globe. Russell didn't just not manage to get to all points in a large whole; he failed totally: his entire project, so pointed out a precocious young German chap by the name of Goedel, was logically flawed. Doomed.

The reason? Metaphor. Even though Russell had decreed some ad-hoc rules to guard against logical cul-de-sacs - for example, no item was allowed to be a member of its own set - it was possible to run mathematical operations by analogy - metaphorically, in other words, that could tell you things that a literal mathematical operation could not. And any ostensibly complete description of a language which forbade expressions such as "the set of all possible sets" was going to be practically useless anyway. There are some excellent accounts of Goedel's dramatic insight, Douglas Hofstadter's a particularly good one (though his ultimate conclusion seems wildly wrong).

When he does refer to metaphor, Wilson's is a rather unimaginative account: what he describes isn't metaphor so much as definitional drift occasioned by metaphor. To use one of his examples, by the time "plot" - a physical site and a building plan - came to mean "plot" - the narrative structure of a story - any figurative content in the expression had long since evaporated; seawater gone, a residue of salt.

Wilson's idea of a metaphor therefore is a dead one: these are the ones "normal scientists" like, of course, because dead metaphors can't get up and bite you by suggesting what you meant to say might be taken in a number of ways. If there were a substantive distinction between art and scientific literature - and like Wilson, but for radically different reasons, I'm inclined to think there isn't one - it might be found in the systematic exclusion of metaphor from scientific discourse. Science is about exactitude; consensus on a literal way of speaking enhances that end.

But at some cost, and not just in the notorious dullness of scientific literature. Literalness encourages and perhaps compels compliance with orthodoxy. Paul Feyerabend - another conspicuous absentee from Wilson's reading list - makes the inspired observation that scientific revolutions rely on inspired observations: a willingness to disregard the formal language of the discipline. If you stick rigidly to the rules of the prevailing scientific paradigm it is not possible to see, much less formulate, contradictions to it: Anything which looks like a contradiction, by the terms of the theory, must be explicable some other way (wind interference; malfunctioning equipment).

To find a new solution to a conundrum you are forced to use existing concepts in a new way. You can only do it by being creative with your language.

The land of colloidal suspensions and monosaccharides

Is the cosmologist’s yearn for unification a religious impulse?

In this period of transition from its religious basis, science often shares with the celestial maps of astrology, or a hundred other irrationalisms, the same nostalgia for the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause.

- Julian Jaynes

In the cultural troposphere we frequently encounter great, conclusive quests: for the Grail, the End of History, Nirvana, Sunlit Uplands, a Grand Unifying Theory, the Final Reckoning, a Universal Acid, the Promised Land, a paradise of virgins, the Land of Milk and Honey, the Great Day of Judgement – the Singularity – as these if are things we should expect imminently, or at least one day hope to see.

Our collected values – these tales we retell ourselves compulsively – reinforce and hammer home the idea of an eventual conclusion to our labour: in literature the mythical archetype identified by Joseph Campbell is consciously and accidentally replicated in many of the stories we tell ourselves. 

The unvarying narrative is linear progression goes, roughly, like so: imbalance, challenge, fortitude, reckoning and, at the very last, final victory and dominion. Even Campbell’s “mono-myth” itself takes this form of unification: it is an uncomfortable shoe-horning of geographically and linguistically dispersed creation myths, that don’t quite fit, into a single archetypal story.

Mythical stories, of course, tend not to ask “and then what?” The archetype refuses to consider these very consequences (naturally: it assumes there are no more consequences). This bleeds into our metaphysics. We are acculturated to yearn for “closure”. It suits us to suppose we’re headed somewhere, that whether or not we personally live to feast our eyes upon the promised land, at least our descendants will. (Are we fated, like Moses, to be denied at the last, our greatest pleasure to watch from a distance? And was this really a disappointment for him? Did Moses not go to heaven?)

We predicate our existence on that hope: While we, personally, may fall by the wayside our struggle will not have been in vain.

This Will to Closure is a religious idea. We know – well, we ought to, by now – that there is no cure for war; that solutions create problems, reward takes risk, supply creates demand, fulfilment creates expectation. The land of milk and honey is a terrifying idea (what would we do all day? Just eat? Would we apprehend a need for literature? Art? Discourse? Change? Why?), it is also an absurd one, because what we call milk and honey is precisely what be believe to be just somewhat out of our reach. Gold’s intrinsic worth is its very scarcity.

So whatever Heaven might be, we know it can’t be filled with only compliant virgins and winged granddads plucking on harps. That would be ghastly, and heaven isn’t ghastly, Q.E.D. There will be strife, discord, bitterness and fury because on these things, despite ourselves, we thrive. Life is the very process of solving these problems, answering these questions.

“The land of milk and honey is a terrifying idea. What would we do all day? Just eat?”

 
The Will to Closure is an indulgence though; we truck with it only because, deep down, we know it to be misconceived. We can’t have it, and we wouldn’t want it if we could. Who wants a final solution?

So much for the religious Will to Closure. But there is a scientific analogue: the aspiration to grand theoretical unification: call it the Will to Reduction. This is the proposition that Science is a singular, proper noun, that it will accordingly eventually yield a single, coherent, closed system of rules; a complete operating manual for the universe.

This is no less religious an idea. 

To be sure, the Will to Reduction is a noble quest, but its practical importance is in its aspiration and not its outcome. It generates useful practical tools as a by-product. The prospect that Science might actually reach a conclusion would be as catastrophic as the great day of judgement, were it not as equally absurd:

For what would we then do? Our lot would be as dismal as an entrant’s to heaven. All knowledge, all fiction, all superfluity, all contingency would cancel out to a common factor, and a single, integrated über machine would be left; a super brain. What would remain would be no different from God, and in a final hot blast of logic we should redundantly shrivel and evaporate in His sight, the question WHY AM I HERE? having been answered, without irony or compassion, AS OF NOW, YOU’RE NOT.

Absurd, of course, because such an extrapolation isn’t possible. Like our moral knowledge, or technological knowledge is path-dependent, contingent on the questions we want to ask. The contingency of knowledge is fundamental to its acquisition, and to its use. 

It's a Dappled World, as Nancy Cartwright put it, and thank the Lord (if you'll excuse the expression) for that.