Homage to Gaia (66 page)

The last we saw of Hideo and Ann was in November 1997. We travelled from Tokyo to Ueda City with Fred Myers to pay our respects to a dear friend, Hideo, now comatose from a stroke. In the clinical Western ambience of the small hospital, it was unbearably sad to see his small figure curled in a bed like a child. That fine mind, trapped in a damaged brain, could no longer express the laughter, fun, and deep thought that we had known. Hideo died in February 1999.

The 1990s have been the most fulfilling years of my life: the sustained joy of my second marriage, recognition by the international scientific community through the award of three major environmental prizes, one literary prize, the Nonino, eight honorary degrees and, most of all, a visit to Buckingham Palace to receive the honour of CBE from the Queen. I used to think that my work as an independent went
unnoticed; that I was like an amateur runner who broke records running round his village green but was never invited to do so in the stadium. I was wrong. For those who would like to do their science as lone individuals, even from their own home, I think I can say it is worthwhile, and it really does work.

As we enter the 21
^st
century, Sandy and I have a sense that we have paid and received our dues. We feel that the rest of our years together should be free of the tasks that we have disliked, but felt the need to do for duty's sake. Prominent among these for me is lecturing and attending meetings and, for us both, answering letters comes next. Instead, we plan to walk the 630-mile path around the southwest coast of England, from Poole in Dorset, via Land's End in Cornwall, to Minehead in Somerset. It involves a total climb of over 91,000 feet, more than three times the height of Mount Everest. This is no epic quest: for mankind it is a pointless and useless endeavour; for us it is a thrilling challenge and a joy to plan. We pore over the Ordnance Survey's Landranger maps that show in the most intricate detail every step of the path we will take. We do practice walks on the most difficult section, the north coasts of Devon and Cornwall, which are only twenty or so miles from Coombe Mill. Soon we shall be taking our long walk. We wonder what the next decade has in store for us.

13

Epilogue

‘Why do you want to go to church?’ asked Cousin Lily. ‘Because I want to hear the bells,’ I said. This happened one Sunday morning in April 1926, when I was at my cousin’s cottage at Hagbourne in Berkshire. ‘Well, off you go,’ said Lily, ‘and mind you keep still.’ The footpath went straight by a field of young wheat, bright in the morning sunlight, and the air was sparkling fresh and full of birdsong. Then, suddenly, across the fields came that evocative sound of bells ringing their changes. Nearby, still worse indoors it is poor music, but heard coming from afar on a sunny Sunday morning, it is magical. I now know why John Betjeman chose to name his book,
Summoned
by
Bells
; I certainly was.

The track wandered on and under an iron railway bridge that carried the single-track line to Oxford, and there ahead was the village church. All I can remember is going in, sitting at a pew, and listening to the bells. Soon the pews filled and the service began. I do not remember how, as a small boy, I sat and stood through the long morning service, but I do recall the warm welcome afterwards. Who was I and where had I come from? Like the sunshine of the day, the smiles and approval of the congregation left me with a warm glow and let me wander back, as boys do, to Sunday dinner at Lily’s cottage.

Things that happen in the period before puberty seem to set the course of one’s life. This small event, in spite of my true calling, science, left me with affection for the Anglican Church, which remained until the 1970s when modernizers and the evangelists began to change it. To me, their campaign confirmed Aldous Huxley’s prediction in
Brave
New
World.
They wanted a church led by an
arch community songster, not an archbishop. They have all but succeeded in replacing the wondrous words of the Book of Common Prayer and the old Bible with something that fits their own limited understanding. What hubris, what vandalism.

Not long afterwards, back in Brixton, I repeated this Sunday morning trek to church. This time to a strange Byzantine-looking Roman Catholic Church at Tulse Hill, a few hundred yards from where we lived. The experience here was very different. No sooner was I in the pew than a verger came up, took me by the collar to the door, and said, ‘Go away and don’t come back, you don’t belong here.’ Catholics in those days were a somewhat beleaguered minority and knew each other; I suspect that the verger knew that I was not part of it and feared that I might be there to make mischief. My mother and my grandparents were strongly anti-Catholic; it was a tribal feeling common amongst working-class Londoners then. I suppose it goes back to the treason of Guy Fawkes and all that. My peer group of schoolboys linked Catholics with cruelty, torture, and the Inquisition. Guy Fawkes Day, the burning of the effigy, was to us the most important day of the year after Christmas. Luther’s ancient schism had been tribalized, and the endless civil war of Catholic Ireland confirmed it.

Round about the age of seven I was, for a brief time, aware of sex and was strongly attracted to a girl in the first class of my primary school called Molly Percival, who was, I think, Catholic. I wonder if she is still around. This experience was brief, but it must have stayed in my unconscious thoughts for later, in adolescence, I found Catholic girls unusually attractive. This kind of vague religiosity did not fit in with my family’s staunch agnosticism. The merciless slaughter of the First World War deeply affected my mother, as it did many English women. She saw a whole generation of young men pitilessly forced into the murderous abattoir of the trenches, and she was not about to have her son grow up in an environment where he would ripen ready to die in the next European war. During WWI, my mother’s job had been that of secretary to the Clerk of Middlesex County Council, and part of her duties was to attend the hearings of conscientious objectors. She soon noted that only the Quakers were treated with any respect. This experience led her to enrol me at the Society of Friends Sunday school, which was just opposite to where we lived in Brixton. The Meeting House was a spacious, semi-detached Victorian house, situated in a pleasant garden and run by the Street family, some of whom had been active as conscientious objectors during WWI. The
Streets unhesitatingly accepted my mother’s reasoning and were glad to take me on.

As a small boy, I doubt if I would have put up with the Sunday school of any other church for more than a few weeks. However, the Quakers were something quite different from other churches. Austere they may have been in their adult meetings, but with us children they seemed to compensate by offering enthralling entertainment. I shall not forget the wonderful stories, only rarely religious, that John Street told us, and which kept us rapt, and quiet. Nor shall I forget the open, unfettered discussions that we enjoyed on the lawn in summertime; as much about cosmology as religion, discussions that started me on the course towards a lifelong agnosticism.

Among the many devices the Streets used to keep their young flock entertained were film shows on Saturday afternoons. I do not mean the incredibly dull magic-lantern projections that most churches offered the inmates of their Sunday schools: dim amateur photographs of Jerusalem taken by the vicar on his holiday there. We had sixteen-millimetre films that were entirely secular, such as Felix the Cat and other cartoons, and we loved them and laughed until it hurt. These were the days of the old liberal philosophy of the Enlightenment, and no one I met as a boy questioned the idea of a benign humanism. The good of mankind was what truly mattered, and this was my religious apprenticeship at the Brixton Meeting House. God, if he existed, was no threatening figure, merely something somewhat vague overseeing the Universe. There was, of course, that personal God, who spoke to the Friends themselves—the still small voice within. Conscience, not the thunder from above, was what really mattered to them. It was easy with such a beginning to move into a comfortable agnosticism as science began to fill the empty files of my mind.

I lost touch with the Brixton Meeting House when we moved to Orpington in 1933. My mother, freed from the chores of sustaining a failing art shop, now had time to join the Quakers in Orpington. After a while, she became a Friend herself. For some of the time I went with her, but the serious although worthy air of the Kent meeting was somehow like a soft drink after the sparkling wine of the Street family in Brixton. So, until 1939, when I went to Manchester, I moved into my father’s world, a communion with nature. I spent my Sundays walking or bicycling on the small roads and footpaths of the glorious countryside of Kent. The house that Darwin had lived
in at Farnborough was only a mile or so from my home in Orpington, and often I walked past it on my rambles. I never thought of it then, but in 1997 when I talked with the eminent biologist, William Hamilton, he told me that his childhood had been enlivened by walks from his home in Sevenoaks, Kent, and we discovered that we had trodden the same paths. I wondered if Darwin had included them in his walks, and were we both treading his footsteps in our different ways.

I am a scientist and an agnostic but I am too much an animal to want to live exclusively in the intellectual world of modern science. So many people I respected for their intelligence and wisdom were religious that I could not help feeling curious about their faith. Over the years, I have occasionally attended religious services: these included Quaker meetings, services in all kinds of Christian churches, in synagogues, and in the temples of Asian religions. Good sermons have moved me, so have the glorious words of the Prayer Book, but never have I acquired faith. At times, I dearly wished to receive a ‘religious experience’, but always my world, even at its most beautiful, has been down to Earth. By middle age I came to recognize that heaven and hell were here and now and all around me. Once on my way to breakfast at a prominent Las Vegas hotel I walked past the gamblers who had sat and played their cards all night and such a grey misery marred their faces that I felt privileged to have seen Hell without being trapped in it. On mountains especially, there have been moments in Heaven and a longer spell has filled the last twelve years.

We long to love, to be loved, and to belong to some human group. Science may soon offer a complete explanation of these longings, but I suspect that we will still hanker after the transcendental. When romantic love transports me, I get no comfort from the knowledge that my passion is consequent upon the circulation in my blood of a simple steroid, testosterone. A pure almost spiritual joy comes from a discovery of science, or from a well-turned theory, but its quality differs from the passionate arousal of a love letter or a commitment to a tribal cause. The pleasures of science are in the mind, but poetry and music move our hearts as well. No matter how hard we try to make science popular, we will not wholly succeed: it is not merely strange and unnatural, it can never be other than provisional. Its truth and respectability depend on its honest assertion that it can never be certain about anything. This may be why great music does not bless
science with praise. We turn to science fiction, such as that of the television series
Star
Trek,
for science in a palatable form. It presents something that derives from science, but which is certain and can appeal like a faith.

GK Chesterton’s comment that ‘Those that give up their faith in God do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything’ is much quoted by those who speak for the Christian religion. It sounds good, but does not pass serious test. It is true of cultist beliefs, but ignores the atheists, who are just as strong in their faith in nothing as are Christians in their faith in God. Moreover, atheists are sure that their faith comes from the true fount of knowledge, science. I am neither atheist nor have a religious faith; I put trust, not faith, in science.

Perhaps science is unpopular and popular science is shoddy because the public needs certainty. They expect certainty also from their leaders, and they expect it from their churches. Consider political leaders. Whatever doubts we had about John Kennedy as a man, there is no question that his charisma moved us, and all of us felt keenly his death. I regard Charles de Gaulle as a spiteful man who denied my country the chance to join Europe at its formation, and as an equal partner; he forced us to wait until we were no more than a feeble supplicant. But I acknowledge his eminence as a strong and much needed leader of the French. If only we had had, at the time he rejected us, a leader of comparable quality; instead, we had Anthony Eden and then Harold Wilson.

When I speak of science, I am not thinking of technology. I am thinking of the vast accumulation of knowledge and understanding about life and the universe. It is our most precious possession, but except to its devotees, most of it is no more exciting than a library of books in a foreign language. Science and technology are not synonymous, but science inspires creative feats of technology that move us, just as do works of art: the seemly perfection of a bridge span, the grace of an aeroplane like Concorde, or the views of the planets from space. We see these with a thrill like that delivered by the sight of a cathedral or a painting by Vermeer.

As in a fictional murder mystery, the facts, revealed by the patient, honest, and cumulative investigation of Nature, tell us about our origins. They provide a convincing account of our evolution, that of the Earth, and of the cosmos. By comparison, as a source of factual knowledge, the texts of the religions are, at best, inspired poetry and,
at worst, the befuddled imaginings of primitive peoples. Science has rightly taken away from the religions their authority to serve as a source of knowledge on life and the universe, but there is more to religion than its pseudo-science. It provides moral guidance and offers certainty.

As a scientist I know that I can never be certain about anything but I acknowledge that almost all of us desire certainty, and we seem to seek a certainty that is transcendental. Modern science can never give us this. It is too cold and too rational, and often seems to go against common sense. We are not evolved to act rationally; we operate most effectively by unconscious action and by intuition. Even in science when we make a discovery, most often we find that the kernel of it stole in by intuition, as an intruder in the night. The rational part comes later as the explanation. It is our nature to need something certain to follow and to lay down our lives for, something to inspire us to build cathedrals, where we can praise it in glorious music or art. Science so far has failed miserably to inspire in this way.

Lewis Wolpert recognized in his book,
The
Unnatural
Nature
of
Science,
just how unnatural science is. The detached, specialist, and unemotional science that brought the triumphs of particle physics and of molecular, neo-Darwinist biology is far from the strong internal drives that move us, and this is why it seems unnatural. Crick and Watson must have felt awe as the structure of the double helix of DNA emerged in their minds, but the science itself came from a long line of painstakingly professional investigation, an investigation where the too human wishes to guess, to take short cuts, were all suppressed by the overarching discipline of science. Our feelings and our urges may have a scientific explanation, but science has little influence in our hearts where these emotions operate.