Full House (26 page)

Nonetheless, and despite this important caveat on the difference between technological complexification and a proper vernacular sense of progress or human good, I must still reassert the bearing of the crucial difference between cultural change and natural evolution upon the central theme of this book: Cultural change operates by mechanisms that can validate a general and driven trend to technological progress—so very different from the minor and passive trend that Darwinian processes permit in the realm of natural evolution. And once you start to operate by general and driven trends, you can move very deliberately, and very fast. With directed motion of this sort, you ought to start running into right walls. Thus, as one crucial difference in interpreting our cultural history versus the natural evolution of life, our institutions should frequently be shaped and troubled by right walls (I have already given one example from the history of batting averages in baseball), whereas life’s evolution, with its massive and persistent bacterial mode, and puny right tail, should rarely encounter this bounding theme of full houses. Let us therefore consider three important aspects of our cultural life (I invite readers to contemplate many others, here omitted for no reason beyond my own limitations) that may be impacted quite differently by relevant right walls.

1. SCIENCE. God bless ignorance! If we were much smarter, or had been at it much longer, we might actually be approaching a right wall of complete (or at least adequate) knowledge, thus leaving scientists with little of interest to do. We are in no danger whatever of any such limitation over the next several generations. In other words, our current storehouse of knowledge lies so far from the right wall of what we might learn that science need not fear any obsolescence.

I do not, of course, say that all subfields remain forever open, or that we can never reach completion for certain circumscribed aspects of natural reality—but only that any closure leaves so many adjacent open fields that no good intellect need ever fear superannuation. For example, if you have a passion for describing new species of birds, then a right wall might stymie your desires, for nearly all of the earth’s eight thousand or so species have probably now been found and described. But why not switch to beetles, where you need never fear completion amid several hundred thousand already named, and probably a few million still undescribed?

I don’t mean to be entirely whimsical or completely sanguine. Certain victories in the game of knowledge are so sweet, so pervasive in their impact, so defining of a profession, that we can hardly hope to equal their importance within the same world of discourse. As a graduate student, I watched plate tectonics sweep through my field of geology. These were exciting times indeed, but who could ever match the thrill of an earlier discovery, vouchsafed to geologists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that time comes in billions (as we now know) rather than thousands of years. Once geology grasped this great reform, no other intellectual reconstruction could ever again be so vast. And whatever the excitement and pleasure of new discoveries made every year by biologists, no one will ever again experience the ultimate intellectual high of reconstructing all nature with the passkey of evolution—a privilege accorded to Charles Darwin, and now closed to us. But we have so much to do, so much to understand, so many puzzles so far from solution, that we cannot even conceive their formulation under constraints of our present world view. So why worry about right walls?

2. THE PERFORMING ARTS. In this domain, above all others, our best practitioners probably stand closest to right walls of human limitation— especially for any activity involving bodily strength and dexterity that has been practiced with great potential reward (thereby attracting the best candidates for sustained excellence) during a long period of time. I suspect that our very best performers have long stood about as close to the wall as humans are likely to get for several important activities. Consider musical performance on instruments of relatively unchanged design. I doubt that Isaac Stern plays better than Paganini, Vladimir Horowitz than Liszt, or E. Power Biggs than Bach. In some respects, particularly for lost skills and changing sensibilities, we may now be worse off. Can anyone today sing like Farinelli? Can anyone (or, in this case, could anyone) ever play the natural horn (precursor to the difficult, but playable, French horn) without embarrassing errors?

In sports, as discussed in Part Three, some records continue to decline substantially, especially for activities (like women’s track and field) only recently encouraged and honored. But the near stability, or only very slow improvement, in other records indicates a present position close to a limiting right wall.

And yet, although we stand so close to a wall for many activities in the performing arts, I don’t think that we find the implied limits troubling—for two reasons based on perceptions about the nature of this enterprise held both by performers and spectators.

First, we don’t demand transcendence in the performing arts. Repetition of maximal excellence is entirely permissible. We don’t expect Pavarotti to sing better every time; and we don’t expect Tony Gwynn to raise his batting average every season. When we thrill to Isaac Stern’s rendition of Beethoven’s violin concerto, we are not bothered by the probability that Paganini played the same piece just as well more than a century ago. Our standards, in other words, are absolute, not relative. Since so few people can ever get there, we honor any performance, at any time, that touches the divine realm of the right wall of human limits. A performer just has to exist in this region; he needn’t improve upon his past perfection, or exceed someone else’s surpassingly rare achievement.

Second, humans have a remarkable capacity to scale their expectations and excitements to the character of the enterprise. When maximal performance stands about a football field from a wall, only improvements measured in yards will be viewed as impressive. But when the best reside only one millimeter from a wall, even a measurable micron of improvement will send devotees into swoons of rapture.

This drive to betterment, this internal need to shave a micron, probably affects performers more than spectators—for many improvements in this category are entirely invisible to all but the most discerning spectator, while performers will often literally die for a chance at minuscule transcendence. If this isn’t divine madness, then such a sublime concept has no meaning. So long as the best of us are driven to seek heights of excellence, to stretch the proverbial envelope no matter how little, to regard compromise as beyond contemplation, there is hope for humanity.

My favorite examples come from a discipline that, perhaps more than any other, drives the best practitioners to a never-ending search for transcendence in realms already operating close to physical and biomechanical limits of Newtonian existence—circus performers. Only so many balls can be juggled aloft; a body can make only so many turns in the air before the speed of plunge defies any attempt by a catcher to hold his trapeze partner in descent.

Jules Léotard invented the flying return trapeze in 1859. No one managed to perform the supposedly impossible triple somersault to a catcher until 1897, though several performers died in the attempt (the driven and the foolhardy often refused to perform with nets—and one can also break a neck by falling badly into a net). Only in the 1930s did a trapeze artist, the great Alfredo Codona, manage to perfect the triple as a standard act (he succeeded about nine times out of ten, as his body flew through the air at sixty miles per hour in the height of his plunge to a catcher). Codona wrote of his quest:

The history of the triple somersault is a history of death; as long as there have been circuses, there have been men and women whose sole ambition was to accomplish three full turns in the air. The struggle to master it has lasted more than a century, beginning with the old days of the famous leapers who worked with a springboard, and the triple somersault has killed more persons than all other dangerous circus acts combined.

Subsequent history illustrates the joy and frustration of pushing envelopes toward a nearby right wall of strict limits. In 1982, Miguel Vasquez, flying at seventy-five miles an hour to a catcher, his brother Juan, first threw a quadruple somersault in public performance. Only a few aerialists have succeeded since then, and no one has been able to perform the quadruple consistently (I have witnessed five attempts—all failures, and several by the Vasquez brothers). But the passion for transcendence continues. On December 30, 1990, The New York Times Magazine featured a long article on the quest, not yet successful, by a Russian group to perform the quintuple.

The number of people who can balance in set configurations on a high wire should be defined by laws of physics, but great performers continue to pursue the impossible (and end up in glory at the right wall, or in death). Karl Wallenda, the greatest wire walker in history, drilled his whole family in the art and constantly sought new achievements deemed impossible. One admirer wrote (Hammarstrom, 1980, page 48): "Some people thought the great Wallenda was crazy; I think he was incredible." Wallenda perfected the seven-person pyramid on the high wire, but one night in Detroit the configuration collapsed as the lead man fell. Two performers died and a third was paralyzed. Wallenda himself, age seventy-three, died in Puerto Rico on March 22, 1978, when a strong gust of wind blew him off a wire strung from the tenth story between two beachfront hotels.

3. THE CREATIVE ARTS. If science stands too far from a right wall to worry about limitation, and if great performers nearly touch the wall but do not feel diminished by restricted domains of potential improvement, then a third category of creative arts does face a potentially painful dilemma based on our decision to adopt an ethic of innovation that awards greatness only to those who devise a novel style (a criterion not always followed in Western history, but very strong at the moment).

Suppose that the mile run had disappeared as a competitive sport as soon as a hundred people covered the distance in less than four minutes. Given an ethic that exalts perennial originality in style of artistic composition, the history of classical music (and several other arts) may fall into such a domain. One composer may exploit a basic style for much of a career, but successors may not follow this mode in much detail, or for very long. This perpetual striving for novelty may grant us joy forever if a limitless array of potential styles awaits discovery and exploitation. But perhaps the world is not so bounteous. Perhaps we have already explored most of what even a highly sophisticated audience can deem accessible. Perhaps, in other words, we have reached the right wall of styles that a sympathetic, intelligent, but still nonprofessional audience can hope to grasp with understanding and compassion.

The standard retort of artists to charges of inaccessibility has become such a mantra that any questioner gets quickly dismissed as a hopeless Philistine: "The complaint could only be made by a pitiful, dried-up old guard. They said the same thing of Beethoven, and of Van Gogh. The future will vindicate us. The cacophony of today will be hailed as a grand innovation tomorrow." As Beethoven said to a conservative musician who wondered out loud whether his Razoumovsky Quartets could be defined as music: "They aren’t for you, but for a later age."

Fine. Sometimes. But will this claim always wash, and should we regard its venerable status as above criticism? I think that we should take the argument of the right wall as a serious alternative: perhaps the range of accessible styles can become exhausted, given the workings of human neurology and the consequent limits of understanding. Perhaps we can reach a right wall of potential popularity, where our continued adherence to an ethic of innovation effectively debars newcomers, whatever their potential talents, from becoming the Mozart of the new millennium.

I don’t know how else to resolve what I like to call the "German virus problem." Between 1685 (the birth of Bach and Handel) and 1828 (the death of Schubert), the small world of German-speaking people gave us the full life spans of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, to mention just a few. Where are their counterparts today? Who, in the vastly larger domain of the entire world, with musical training available to so many million more people, would you choose among late-twentieth-century composers to rank with these men?

I can’t believe that a musical virus, now extinct, was then loose in the German-speaking world. Nor can we deny that many more people of equal or greater potential talent must now be alive and active somewhere on this planet. What are they doing? Are they writing in styles so arcane that only a rarefied avant-garde of professionals has any access? Are they performing jazz, or (God help us) rock, or some other genre instead? I do suspect that these people exist, but are victims of the right wall and our unforgiving ethic of innovation.

I don’t have any solutions to propose. I don’t think that we should find these folks and let them master an old style to write Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony or compose Mozart’s opera on the tragedy of King Lear. I do understand why such an activity might be deemed unappealing. Nonetheless, I do think that we should face the problem and rethink some knee-jerk notions about novelty above all, and future accessibility for anything.

Finally, what major lesson can we learn from the general model of Full House—the focus on variation as an ultimate reality, and the relegation of means and extremes to a realm of Platonic abstraction (sometimes useful, but always less than the whole)? I like to think of myself as a tough-minded intellectual, a foe of all fuzziness from alien abductions to past-life regressions. I hate to think that an intellectual position, hopefully well worked out in the pages of this book, might end up as a shill for one of the great fuzzinesses of our age
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so—called "political correctness" as a doctrine that celebrates all indigenous practice, and therefore permits no distinctions, judgments, or analyses.