Odd Jobs (149 page)

But the mystery abides. The abundant icons and crucifixes preserved in our museums would baffle anyone who knew nothing of Christianity. What future anthropologist could guess that the baby in the Virgin’s lap and the gaunt man on the cross were the same divine person? Twenty thousand years is ten times the span of the Christian era: time enough for art to have a number of uses—as household decoration, tribal insignia, shorthand narrative, surrogate prey, invoked totem. Perhaps we are
asking the wrong questions in these secret places. The abiding mystery is not what art is for but what force it is that seizes the artist and makes him exceed the strict requirements of the market. This excess, strangely, is what we value. Call it virtuosity, inspiration, dedication, the cave artists had it.

W
HEN
I
RECENTLY VISITED
the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science, I felt much as when touring an old-fashioned factory: dazzled by the ingenuity of men, and somewhat dwarfed and dehumanized by men’s works. But the old-fashioned mechanical factory at least produced a recognizable product, and the actions of its noisy machines were analogous to human actions and somewhat transparent to visual analysis. A computer center offers no such transparency to the layman: inscrutably the wheels spin, the screens flicker, the unseen electricity darts like lightning along its microscopic forked paths, and the product is labelled, again inscrutably, information.

A delicate opacity, as of a very finespun veil, is for the layman the computer’s essence. When my word processor malfunctions, there is no part-by-part repair, no soldering or fine-fingered tinkering as with a machine of old, but, rather, the replacement of an entire sealed unit, in a few minutes of the repairperson’s time, which is worth, a computerized bill later assures me, one hundred twenty dollars an hour. Today’s highschool student, instead of laboriously performing a multiplication, extracting a square root, or resorting to a trigonometric table, presses a few keys of his hand calculator and copies down the answer that within nanoseconds is spelled out for him in numbers ingeniously formed of segments of a subdivided rectangle. The answer is achieved by methods radically different from the mathematics one is taught in elementary school—the little machine proceeds, in fact, in less time than we need to add six and seven, by a succession of narrowing approximations, as the
algorithm submits numbers, broken into binary strings of zeroes and ones—offs and ons—to a loop again and again, until two results are identical to a specified number of decimals and thus the answer is reached.

The computer does not think as we do, though in its shining face and user-friendly dialogue it offers itself as anthropomorphic, as a relatively efficient and emotionally undemanding colleague. Our brains, we are told, are made up of long strings of electrical connection, just like
its
brain, and the gap between our intelligence and its is bound to narrow to the point where, and not far in the future, any difference will be in the computer’s favor. Already, computers outthink us in every realm that is purely logical; what remains ours is the animal confusion—the primordial mud, as it were—of feeling, intention, and common sense. Common sense is nothing, after all, but accumulated experience, and computers, let us hope, will always be spared the bloody, painful, and inconclusive mess of human experience. Let them be, like the spoiled children of men who have fought their way up from the bottom, exempted from any need for common sense, and let their first and only emotion be bliss, the bliss we glimpse in Bach fugues, in elegant mathematical proofs, and in certain immortal games of chess.

I am here at your celebration, I believe, as a token humanist—a laborer on the arts-and-humanities side of the gulf that, we were assured decades ago by C. P. Snow, divides the realms of knowledge. The gulf is real. Just a few days ago, perhaps you saw, as I did, the item in the Boston
Globe
which revealed that twenty-one percent of adult Americans, according to a telephone poll, think the sun goes around the earth instead of the other way around, and seven more percent answered that they were undecided. Of the seventy-two percent who answered that the earth
does
orbit the sun, seventeen percent said that it takes one day, two percent one month, and nine percent could not guess at any time span. Lest we laugh too hard at such ignorance, let me confess that, though I myself follow in the newspaper such dramatic scientific revelations as the existence of gigantic bubbles of vacuity in the universe and of intricate coupling attachments on the surface of the AIDS virus, I have no more first-hand evidence of such truths than medieval men did of the widely publicized details of Heaven and Hell. Most science is over our heads, and we take it on faith. We are no smarter than medieval men, and science tells us that our brains are no bigger than those of Cro-Magnon men and women, of cave people; the contemporary assertions
that our world is round and not flat, that it is a planet among others, that our sun is a star among others, in a galaxy among billions of others, that the entire unthinkably vast universe was compressed fifteen billion or so years ago into a point smaller than a pinhead, that for aeons before men appeared on this planet mountains have been rising and sinking and oceans and continents shifting about and extraordinary animal species arising and going extinct, that intricate creatures exist too small for us to see, that lightning and thought are both forms of electricity, that life is combustion, that the heavy elements we are made of all came out of exploding stars, that atomic bombs release energy inherent in all matter—all these assertions we incorporate into our belief system as trustingly as Cro-Magnon man accepted, from his shamans and wizards, such facts as the deity of the moon, the efficacy of cannibalism, and the practical link between real animals and pictures of them painted on cave walls. Scientists are the shamans and wizards, the wonderworkers and myth-givers of today.

So, in the context of our ignorance and wonder, what do we humanists make of the computer? What is our mythic image of it? We feel that it is silent and quick, like a thief. It is not quite to be trusted, since computer error and computer viruses crop up. We notice that the computer plays games with children. Though not as thoroughly domesticated as the radio and telephone, it has undergone a disarming regression in size, having been cozily shrunk since the days of ENIAC from roomfuls of vacuum tubes and wires to models that sit in the lap and fit in the hand. Computers, we know, store information and make it retrievable: somewhere, somehow, they hold our bank balances and those of all the other depositors, right to the penny; they make it possible to check our credit rating in an electronic twinkling; they aid and abet the police in keeping track of traffic tickets and once-elusive scofflaws. Indeed, their capacity for the marshalling of data seriously threatens our privacy, and conjures up the possibility of an omniscient totalitarian state where every citizen is numbered and every hour of his or her activity is coded and filed. Some corporations, we read in the newspaper, oppressively clock their employees’ every fingerstroke.

And yet totalitarianism is not really the computer’s style. Freedom is the computer’s style. In a recent novel from mainland China, written by a veteran of that country’s prison camps, I read these sentences: “Technology did not stop at the borders of our guarded country. It broke relentlessly
through the steel bars of ideology. It held the world together in its net with invisible electronic waves, looping back inside pieces that had been sundered from the rest.” The author is speaking of radios, but the language seems flavored with computerese, and the message—technology overwhelms ideology—is the reverse of that of
Nineteen Eighty-four
and those other dystopian visions wherein information-processing reinforces tyranny. The electronic revolution seems to expand the scale of interrelations beyond the limits at which tyranny can be enforced.

In regard to the iron curtain that exists between the humanities and the sciences, the computer is a skillful double agent. The production and the analysis of texts have been greatly facilitated by the word processor: for instance, programs for the making of indices and concordances have taken much of the laboriousness out of these necessary scholarly tasks. In my own professional field, not only does word processing make the generation of perfectly typed pages almost too easy, but computer-setting has lightened the finicky labor of proofs. Where once the game was to avoid resetting too many lead lines on the Linotype machine, now the digitized text accepts alterations in an electronic shudder that miraculously travels, hyphenations and all, the length of a perfectly justified paragraph.

In sum, the computer makes things light; the lead and paper of my craft are dissolved into electronic weightlessness, ponderous catalogues are reduced to a single magnetized disc, and in computer graphics a visual simulacrum of the world can be conjured onto a screen and experimented upon. Our human lightening of the world is an ancient progressive tendency, with an element of loss. Man, beginning as an animal among animals, hunted and hunting, once shouldered the full dark fatality of nature. Taming other beasts to his use, taming wild plants to a settled agriculture, inventing devices to multiply his own strength and speed, he has gradually put an angelic distance between himself and matter. It is human to regret this leavetaking; our aesthetic sense has earthy roots. Computer-set type, for instance, is faintly ugly and soulless, compared with the minuscule irregularities and tiny sharp bite that metal type pressed into the paper. In turn, manuscript inked onto parchment had an organic vitality and color that type only could weakly ape. But we cannot go back, though we can look back; we must swim, like angels, in our weightless element, and grow into the freedom that we have invented.

T
HE
F
LAMINGO
’
S
S
MILE:
Reflections in Natural History
, by Stephen Jay Gould. 476 pp. Norton, 1985.

“Evolution,” writes Stephen Jay Gould in introducing his latest collection of essays, “is one of the half-dozen shattering ideas that science has developed to overturn past hopes and assumptions, and to enlighten our current thoughts.” Shattering, indeed. The non-scientist’s relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from disease, to give us a faster ride and a softer life, and at the same time we shrink from what it has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos. Not that threats to our safety and significance were absent from the pre-scientific world, or that arguments against a God-bestowed human grandeur were lacking before Darwin. But our century’s revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know. Giacometti’s eroded, wire-thin figures body forth the new humanism, and Beckett’s minimal monologuists provide its feeble, hopeless voice. Yet still we beg of science, “Talk to us,” and honor with sales and celebrity those practicing scientists willing to condescend to the general reader and to entertain us with the astonishing facts and even to share our atavistic awe and dread as the facts inexorably unfold. In recent years, the astronomer Carl Sagan has been the most conspicuous of American popularizers, but his relentless televised mooning after the stars, his tub-thumping for extraterrestrial life, and his willingness to extend his hyperactive speculative faculty into fields well beyond his own all give his information a certain gleam of vulgarity. Gould, his contemporary (and fellow alumnus of the New York City public schools), has contrived to write accessibly and amusingly of the natural sciences with no sacrifice of seriousness; he is the worthy successor, as naturalist and essayist, to Loren Eiseley. Gould is a less poetic writer than Eiseley, and hews closer to developments within paleontology and evolutionary theory; one suspects that he would consider “romantic” many of Eiseley’s later, more brooding and personal
essays, as well as the cheerful microbiological ruminations of Dr. Lewis Thomas, whom Gould must have in mind when he writes, “Siphonophores do not convey the message—a favorite theme of unthinking romanticism—that nature is but one gigantic whole, all its parts intimately connected and interacting in some higher, ineffable harmony.”

For over ten years now, Gould has been writing a monthly column, “This View of Life,” for the magazine
Natural History. The Flamingo’s Smile
is his fourth collection of (with some few other essays) these varied, vivacious columns. The other three collections are
Ever Since Darwin
(1977),
The Panda’s Thumb
(1980), and
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
(1983). All have contained roughly thirty essays apiece, tidily grouped for consecutive reading; however, as the author points out, each collection has been longer than the last. He is not only writing more lengthily but, my faint impression is, more felicitously. Some of his earlier essays had a slangy, self-assertive tone and a tinge of the sensational—e.g., the one in
Hen’s Teeth
speculating that the priest and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin assisted Charles Dawson in perpetrating the Piltdown hoax, paleontology’s most notorious fraud. The tone of
The Flamingo’s Smile
seems to be a mellowed one, more appreciative than assertive. A number of its essays sympathetically explicate what now seem to be preposterous scientific theories and patiently explain how learned and honorable men could hold them. One extended piece, the hundredth column Gould has composed for
Natural History
, is fondly devoted to his pet object of research and field work, the Bahamian land snail
Cerion
(“I love
Cerion
with all my heart and intellect”). And a number of crusading excursions into human history attempt to rescue from the mistreatment of their own times such dwellers on the social margins as Saartjie Baartman, a southern-African woman put on public display in early-nineteenth-century Europe as “the Hottentot Venus”; Carrie Buck, a Virginia woman whose legal sterilization in the 1920s was upheld in a decision by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, famously pronouncing, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”; and Ernest Everett Just, a brilliant black biologist who died in 1941, at the age of fifty-eight, after a career frustrated by racism in the highest academic levels. Gould has written much of this book while battling cancer, and, his preface states, “I write these essays primarily to aid my own quest to learn and understand as much as possible about nature in the short time allotted.” To “the plodding regularity of these essays” he credits some of his will to live: “Who can surpass me in the good fortune they supply; every month
is a new adventure—in learning and expression. I could only say with the most fierce resolution: ‘Not yet Lord, not yet.’ I could not dent the richness in a hundred lifetimes, but I simply must have a look at a few more of those pretty pebbles.”