The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (18 page)

Voltaire ventured no answer.

They walked on in friendly silence for a few minutes and found themselves at the edge of a lake. Its shore was flat and easy underfoot, smoothed at places into, virtually, a path, and they began to walk along it.

‘After all’, God said, ‘there’s no reason why she
should
be liberally inclined, just because she belongs to a community that has suffered unspeakable pain through the illiberalism of others. She has as much right to be bloody-minded as anyone else.’

‘You mean she has little right,’ Voltaire said. ‘I realise that you originated racial prejudice, with all that nonsense about the Chosen People, but you shouldn’t allow your natural guilt to trip you over backwards. You would be exhibiting the most extreme and insulting racial prejudice if you made more
allowances
for Black Girls than for anyone else.’

‘
That
reproach’, God said mildly, after a moment’s thought, ‘is undeserved. I can say with certainty that my search for the Black Girl is not motivated by inverted race prejudice. I seek her for purely literary reasons. Her colour and, for the matter of that, if I may anticipate another reproach, her sex have
nothing
to do with it. About the
Pseudo
-Black-Girl, however, I did make a mistake. I ought to have reflected that prejudice is more likely to make its victims prejudiced in their turn than liberal. With forgetting that, you can justly reproach me. Indeed, you force me to ask myself whether it is possible that my thinking – mine, of all people’s – is still tainted by traces of the sentimental Christian fallacy that suffering ennobles.’

‘A sentimental fallacy’, Voltaire observed, ‘that has been invaluable to Christians. It has excused them from doing
anything
radical whatever to eliminate the eliminable causes of
suffering
. It has in fact licensed Christendom to be capitalist. A religion whose advice to the persecuted is “Rejoice, and be exceeding glad”
10
is doing everything in its power to perpetuate persecution: it forbids the persecuted to make objections, and allows the persecutor to explain that he’s merely giving the
persecuted
cause to rejoice. Similarly, a religion that announces “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”
11
perpetuates poverty. The poor are deterred from asking for their share of the wealth by the belief that, if they got it, they would forfeit their share in heaven. The rich can argue that, in keeping the wealth to themselves, they are generously keeping to themselves most of the risk of going to hell – or, as they usually express it, most of the risk of the ulcers that accompany the responsibilities undertaken by the well-paid. It really isn’t surprising, my dear God, that you were, as you complained earlier, converted into an instrument of the sort of justice that consists of defending
property
rights. Such justice offers the poor great opportunities to get their characters ennobled. They can do it either through suffering poverty or through suffering imprisonment should they try to relieve their poverty by appropriating some property.’

‘Now you make me notice it,’ God rejoined, ‘that remark attributed to me in my second person, “ye have the poor with you always”,
12
is, for sheer silly heartlessness, not to mention abject resignation to the ills of the status quo, a good
companion-piece
to the advice attributed to Marie Antoinette that, if the poor had no bread, they should eat cake. The person who uttered it obviously had no concept of the poor as individuals. Indeed, he reminds me of those conservationists who think it doesn’t matter how many individual animals you slaughter
provided
the species they belong to isn’t in short supply. My New Testament alter ego obviously considered “the poor” simply as a very common species. The notion that ye have an individual poor person with you always is too absurd for even him to have
voiced, given the palpable fact that, if you do nothing to remedy the poor individual’s poverty, you’ll lose him to starvation within a week.’

‘Bravo,’ cried Voltaire, patting God’s arm (which he was still leaning on) in approbation. ‘You’ve sloughed off Christian
capitalism
’s callousness towards the poor. You’ll soon rid yourself of the sentimentality that’s designed to offset it, namely the belief that to be poor is in itself a qualification for entering heaven. Not’, he added kindly, ‘that you are the only liberal whose liberalism is tainted with that superstition. The entire left wing is rotten with it.’

‘But surely—’ God began.

‘—with’, Voltaire allowed, ‘the substitution of “the
revolution
” for “the millennium” and of an earthly paradise for one in the sky. Socialism, by its own account, arises out of the contradictions of capitalism, and, when it does, it brings the contradictions of capitalist religion with it, though de-
supernaturalised
.’

‘But—’ God attempted again.

‘Consider’, Voltaire invited, ‘the rôle of the term “the workers” in left-wing discourse. “The workers” are simply what Christians call “the elect”, “the saved”, “God’s people” or “the blessed”. Moreover, “the workers” are exclusively those who, through economic or other necessity, work at
boring
, fatiguing and distasteful jobs. I say nothing of the insult this use of the word implies to those of us whose vocation calls us to work passionately and exhaustingly, and sometimes in defiance of bodily frailty, at interesting and enlivening tasks. I remark only that the physical fatigue and mental monotony of the jobs done by “the workers” blunt the mind, sensibility,
individuality
, energy and spirit. Consider, then, what socialism does when it holds that blessed are “the workers”. It edges itself into enunciating a beatitude every bit as silly as any in the Christian canon: “Blessed are the mindless, the insensitive, the
de-individualised
, the apathetic and the dispirited, for they shall inherit and govern the kingdom of heaven-on-earth.” There is scarcely a left-winger on earth who does not interpret “
working-classness
” as a mark of infallible and absolute virtue, and who does not suppose that a person who has been denied his fair chance of education, leisure and self-development is thereby instantly
qualified to govern a country.’

‘Yet you must admit—’

‘I admit’, Voltaire said, ‘that socialists are preferable to Christians in that they don’t resign themselves and do propose to alter the status quo radically. Thanks, however, to the
superstition
they have inherited from the Christians, their alteration is in the wrong direction. Since they still believe that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven, what socialists propose to do is abolish the rich. What they should do, and would do if they
were
socialists instead of superstitionists, is abolish the poor. Their perversity is such that they proclaim socialism a
working-class
movement and devote themselves to demanding higher and higher pay for the old personality-destroying jobs, with the result that more and more workers are, in the name of socialism, bribed into destroying more and more of their personalities by doing them. Meanwhile, the true mission of socialism goes unchampioned. Rather than a working-class movement,
socialism
should proclaim itself a movement for wiping the working class off the face of the earth, for transferring all the dulling jobs to machines, which can be worn down and then replaced without pain, and for inviting the entire population to become members of the educated and leisured class.’

While Voltaire was saying this, the lightly marked path which he and God were following brought them to a pretty, yellow willow-tree which, like an up-ended tassel, was weeping its shade over the lake’s edge and the path beside it.

Squatting in the shade on the path, three men were taking it in turns to throw dice (from an elongated, slightly waisted
cardboard
cup bound in spiral strips of shiny crimson paper) onto a wide flat flake of slate which they had placed in the middle of the path.

Reaching the dicers, God moved to go round them, but
Voltaire
, by a pressure on God’s arm, indicated that he wanted to pause.

He finished what he was saying about socialism and then, leaning forward over one of the sitting men, watched the fall of the dice in silence.

Before and after each throw, one of the men entered some figures in a notebook.

After eleven throws, Voltaire said:

‘I take it, gentlemen, that you are engaged in a game of chance. But, to my slight chagrin, I can’t, from watching, make out the object of the game.’

‘Game nothing,’ one of the dicers replied without looking round. ‘This is science. Don’t disturb.’

‘O,’ God said, with a sigh of resigned comprehension; and, pulling on Voltaire’s sleeve, he steered him round the dicers and along the path.

‘Science never looked like that in my day,’ Voltaire remarked in a puzzled manner.

‘No,’ said God, hurrying Voltaire on, ‘but in your day it hadn’t been so successful in getting rid of me. Now, you see, scientists are convinced that science has expelled me from the universe, so they’re trying to cajole it into squeezing me back in again.’

‘By throwing dice?’

‘You may remember’, God said, ‘that during the renaissance a great many otherwise intelligent and even brilliant men went barmy on the subject of numbers, usually in connexion with some secret of “perfect” proportion or with the supposed
harmony
of the spheres. The dice are the 20th-century equivalent. Indeed, I daresay both barminesses have the same motivation. The dicers make a guess about how the dice will fall. If they score more correct guesses than they can expect to according to their concept of the “laws” of chance, they insist that the result is “significant”. What they claim it is significant
of
they call an extra-sensory perception. They are convinced that it is more scientific and neutral of them to call the means of perception “extra-sensory” than to call the phenomenon perceived “
supernatural
”. However, since humans perceive natural phenomena through their ordinary perceptions, it is presumably
supernatural
phenomena that they perceive through “extra-sensory” perceptions, so it comes to the same thing in the end. Likewise, the force whose existence the dicers believe they are
demonstrating
, though depersonalised – indeed, reduced to a mere cipher – comes in the end to none other than your old friend me.’

‘But doesn’t it occur to them’, Voltaire asked, ‘that, rather than drag in you or extra-sensory perception, there is a much more economical and likely explanation of the phenomena they
record, namely that they have miscalculated how the laws of chance work?’

‘If they started with an open mind’, God agreed, ‘they would conclude that what is shewn by the results of their experiments is their obvious need to revise their formulation of chance.
However
, what they start from is the fixed premiss that they have got their mathematics right, because it is only on that premiss that they can detect my designing hand interfering in the fall of their dice, and that is what they are determined to do.’

‘Humans are such inveterate
mammals
,’ Voltaire com mented. ‘They are never happy until they have put a
construction
on the universe that makes it a mirror of their own infancy, with a parental hand always in the offing to protect or chastise.’

‘Even if you give them straight statistics’, God said, ‘they misinterpret them into something personal to them. Whenever there is an air crash, their newspapers offer the reassurance that a passenger has only a one in, say, 137 million chance of crashing. But that reassurance isn’t reassuring enough. They cannot bear the impersonality of mathematics. They feel
insulted
by the idea that chance is quite unaware of the fact that the one it might light on in the 137 million is the, to himself,
all-important
one, the centre from which he sees the universe. So their journalists re-write the statistical information quite
unjustifiably
, in a way that, without saying so, brings in me. They imply that the statistics are my guarantee that I will protect each human being through 137 million defiances of gravity and that I become liable to punish him for his contumely only on his
137-million
-and-first take-off.’

‘They would rather’, Voltaire said, ‘accept a personalised vindictiveness than an impersonal chance of survival. It’s more flattering, and more parental. Even in my day, when
bombardments
were so much less heavy than they have since become, you could always recognise an old soldier by his conviction that he could be killed only by a cannon-ball that had his number on it.’

‘Exactly,’ said God: ‘
his
number. People are forever
personalising
numbers.’

Their passage along the shore had now brought God and Voltaire to a point from which they saw, a few yards ahead of them, a man standing immobile at the edge, gazing, with a
yearning expression, towards the middle of the lake.

‘Luckily’, Voltaire whispered to God, ‘everyone here is already dead. Otherwise I should fear he was contemplating suicide and that the responsibility of rescue might fall to us. And, perpetually clement though the climate here is, I really do not feel up to a dip.’

As, however, the sound of Voltaire’s and God’s approach reached him, the watcher by the lake abandoned his watching and ran interceptingly towards them, demanding with
excitement
:

‘What news?’

‘I’d hoped’, Voltaire answered, ‘that in the Elysian Fields one would be immune to the disagreeable surprises which on earth are called news.’

‘What of the experiments?’ the watcher by the lake insisted. ‘You must have passed them on your way. Have they proved ESP yet?’