The Norm Chronicles (21 page)

And there are other problems with defining life’s prospects by the average. Some averages are ridiculous. Probably no one has the average number of feet. In fact, not even Norm can be average in every respect without running into a few logical absurdities. For example, he cannot be the average age all his life.

He is also unlikely to be the average weight for a man and the average weight for a 31-year-old unless by luck these turn out to be the same.
Different categories have different averages, and we all occupy many categories. Some averages are mutually incompatible. In other words, Norm cannot really be the average man, but can only ever be the average for some subset of men, sometimes a small subset, and by choosing one subset he ceases to be average for others. Very often the true average cannot exist as a man, or woman, at all. This points to a difficulty about all risk. It often describes the dangers that apply to someone who isn’t there.

All this would be a terrible thing to say to Norm, so let’s not break it to him. In any event, even if the average is theoretically imperfect and a bad fit for the complexity of life, it might work well enough to give Norm a practical steer as he decides what to do. We will see.

What indisputably does exist is variation around the average. Most people are not average, we all deviate from the norm/Norm, and these random deviations from Quetelet’s
homme moyen
contain more of the real grit of life. They also change every individual’s expectation of risk.

One of the best examples of bucking the kind of average that seems bound to determine life is the story of the American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma at the height of a brilliant career with two young children, told that it was incurable and that the median
*
survival time after discovery was eight months. We might say that the risk – the average risk – of abdominal mesothelioma is death in eight months.

But this is not everyone’s fate. It is the point by which half of all people who have it have died. And for those who haven’t died by then, it is not the mid-point either. Gould lived for another 20 years and eventually died from an unrelated cancer. Averages of any kind, as Gould wrote in an essay describing this brush with mortality, are not immutable entities but an abstraction, and the true reality is ‘in our actual world of shadings, variation and continua’.
†

There are shadings, variation and continua for all risks as for all averages. On average, men are taller than women. But then there is the Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone, at about 5’3”, and his former wife Slavica, at 6’2”. There are, similarly, plenty of people out there who are Bernie Eccle-stones of risk.

In fact, the average is sometimes misleading, not just about the odd individual but for the majority. About two-thirds of people in the UK have less than the average income (average in the sense of the mean). If we arranged the world’s population in line, according to wealth, the average (mean) person would be about three-quarters of the way along the line.

Even MicroMorts and MicroLives cannot escape the problem of being averages. The average 10-MicroMort risk from sky-diving arises mainly from the deaths of obsessive sky-divers who do increasingly risky things. That is, the deaths are nearly all among experienced jumpers. The novice charity-supporting tandem parachuter may be taking just as much risk by simply getting drunk and walking home (but they probably wouldn’t get the sponsorship).

Quetelet, no fool, knew all about this. He was every bit as sensitive to variations around the average. As he sat labouring over those reams of 19th-century data, the huge variation in human experience would have been obvious. The Body Mass Index, or BMI, by which we judge whether people are over or underweight, as well as normal, is also known as the Quetelet index.

So Quetelet stood between two ideas: one was the great scope of human variability; the other was the peculiar manner in which this variety seemed to contain an essence. As we will see in
Chapter 14
, on chance, the essence, the average, can be scarily predictable, but only at the right scale. This is the scale of whole populations, boiled down and their essence extracted. The problem is simply that this is not the scale on which individuals in all their variability live. Except for Norm. For the rest of us, when it comes to risk, none of us can attain the same state of Brahman-like self-knowledge as our hero.

Norm is a quintessence, even if sometimes a logically absurd one. Not everyone can say that. In fact, no one can say that. But is this enough for even Norm to be able to navigate safely through a world of hazards, using average numbers? Or does it mean that risk is never really his risk, or anyone else’s, and even he is a fool to think otherwise?

14
CHANCE

T
ALL, CHISELLED AND GORGEOUS
under long, dark hair, Kelvin Kevlin’s older brother Kevin shared the same love of chance. Except that for Kevin, Professor of Social Cognition at the Sorbonne and pop-up thinking-crumpet TV pundit, now visiting Oxford to deliver the celebrated Ronald McDonald public lectures, chance smiled on him.

He had a certain reputation for show-off controversy confirmed by his recent book
God/I
, and it was this that drew the crowds. At the first lecture a mathematician had been restrained from ‘punching the F…reudian lights out’ of a psychologist. At the second, a Nobel laureate theoretical physicist working on string theory spat from the gallery while someone tore the dust-cover from the upright piano and banged out some Wagner.

At the third and last, the crowd bustled. The talk, entitled: ‘I Am Not a Piano Key’, was billed as an assault on reason. Rumour had it the professor would urge supporters to smash their cars into the walls of Balliol College to prove they were alive, even if it meant death. Kevin, who spoke with fierce urgency and tended to jump straight into his lectures, pushed a strand of hair behind the ear, where a gold stud twinkled, and stepped up to the lectern.

‘Reason is an excellent thing,’ he said, scanning the faces, ‘there’s no disputing that. But reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the
rational side of human nature. The whole human life must include all the impulses, the will and the passions. It is not about extracting square roots.’

Was it madness, genius or fraud that danced in those eyes? He leaned on the lectern and glared at a front row of gigawatts of cerebral power.

‘What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has learned – and some things it will never learn – while human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously. Even if it goes wrong … it lives,’ and he thumped his chest.

‘Some of you look at me with pity; you think that an enlightened man cannot consciously desire anything bad for him. But
I
can. I might deliberately want what is bad for me, what is stupid, very stupid – simply in order to have the right to desire what is stupid and screw the obligation to desire only what is sensible. For this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, preserves for us what is most precious and most important – this is our personality, our individuality.’

Some in the crowd cheered, or jeered, it was hard to tell. The Professor barely paused. Up in the gallery above the podium, the shouting was louder. A fight? Kevin thrust on.

‘Give me every earthly blessing, a sea of happiness with nothing but bubbles of bliss on the surface, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, I say “risk it all!” simply to introduce a fatal fantastic element, simply in order to prove to ourselves that we are still people and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of physics threaten to control so completely that soon we will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.’

By now, his hands were a conductor’s, flicking, sweeping the air, his blue eyes enraged, his hair skipping, his voice rising.

‘And that is not all: for not even the laws of physics can stop the play of chance that gives us limitless possibility and may even break the piano, that gives us freedom even to choose unreason. And even if we really were nothing but piano keys, even if this were proved by science and mathematics, even then we would not be reasonable but would do something stupid out of simple ingratitude, contrive destruction and chaos, only to make our point and convince ourselves that we are human and not a piano key!’

The gallery was heaving. A small scrum of young men moved towards the railing, clearing the crowd and pushing or pulling something heavy.

‘If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated – chaos and darkness and curses – then people would go mad on purpose just to be rid of reason and make the point! For the whole of life is nothing but proving to ourselves every minute that we are human and not a piano key!’

In the gallery they bent down and lifted one end of the heavy thing. Its dark rectangular side appeared, poised, over the railing directly above the Professor’s head. There were shouts, a panic in the front rows of the standing crowd, a scramble, as the upright piano jutted further over the railing, some awkwardness as it caught, was heaved again, tilted, and then, to gasps and screams, reached its tipping point.

The professor did not look up. He ignored the noise. He poured out his argument. Reason fought against reason, climbing over itself into a hymn of hysterical praise to human impulse as the slow turn of the piano hastened, its great weight released into a drop, and its dark mass fell.

For a moment after the crash there was silence, except for the hum of piano wire and a fluttering of the Professor’s written notes in a haze of dust over a mound of splintered wood and the bones of the dark thing’s metal frame. Then, with the diabolical aura of the all-time lucky bastard, Professor Kevin swept back his hair, placed a foot on the debris, leaned at the retreated, gawping audience – and screamed with laughter.

A day later he was accused by a group of Oxford academics of shameless plagiarism of Dostoevsky, an accusation he mocked on the grounds that if it was shameless it was hardly plagiarism, as plagiarism tries to hide its tracks whereas his was so blatant it could only be a tribute.
*
Also accused by the police of incitement to criminal behaviour, he argued on the basis of the definitive critical appraisal of Dostoevsky’s
Notes from
the Underground
– a rant against rational egotism – that the argument therein was in fact parody and no incitement was intended or for that matter understood, since no one did in fact smash into the walls of Balliol. He was let off with a caution. He refused to assist the police inquiry into his attempted murder by a group of medical students in the Balliol First XV, an accusation later reduced to a charge of criminal damage, although the suspicion persisted that the whole incident had been contrived. A day later he resigned, without reason, he said.

NONE OF US KNOWS
what will happen tomorrow, let alone years hence, and many don’t want to. Like Professor Kevin. In a fine family tradition he prefers life instinctive and messy. Choices are not calculable anyway, so why try?

Others – like Prudence – want control over their future and take every care to get it, if they can.

Key to both Kevin’s hopes and Pru’s fears is chance. He loves its power to throw up the unexpected. She hates it for the same reason. Chance is the rogue that threatens either to wreck their best-laid plans or, as if by magic, pull a rabbit from the hat. (Norm, standing between them, thinks he can play the odds – to bet whether rabbit or wreckage is more likely.)

But what is chance? Philosophers have wrestled with the problem for centuries, from declaring chance all-powerful to wondering if it exists.

We’re going to put the question in an unusual way with a dark edge of practicality, by asking: why does the piano miss Kevin? It wasn’t meant to. He was all but a dead man. By what means did he survive?

Kevin himself answers by linking chance with free will as two expressions of the glorious muddle in life that makes us humans and not machines. He sets this against an idea of reason that he seems to equate with soulless determinism. For while strict necessity of cause and effect implies only one possible future, chance and free will in their different ways can turn away from this necessity.
*
In Kevin’s eyes, then, the piano
misses him because all of life, material and human, must have a ‘fantastical element’ that breaks the chain of strict causality. This is the way he thinks life ought to be – and the way it ought to be lived – even if he betrays a doubt or two about whether that’s how it truly is.

The dictionary is not so dramatic, defining chance mainly as a prosaic possibility: what chance of rain? In everyday use we often go further and give chance an improbable twist, saying that to ‘take your chances’, for example, is to be something like a gambler, a risk-taker who knows the odds are against success, but what the heck? If you wanted a story about chance, someone might tell an improbable tale about an unintended event on which the whole plot hinged, a strange coincidence or turn-up, the more fantastic the better.

And if chance brings calamity, when star-crossed Shakespearian lovers die for want of knowing that one of them is only feigning death, or for the jealousy set off by a dropped handkerchief, we call it tragedy, in which fate is fantastically cruel and chance is about the small but fatal detail.

In all these other, fantastical uses, chance is a synonym for outrageous luck or bad luck, a long shot or a fluke. But none goes as far as implying, like Kevin, that chance is capable of breaking the chain of causality. They only say that chance means a chain we didn’t expect. So the piano misses Kevin because of accident, as it turns in the air past his gorgeous black hair, owing to the way it was tipped from the balcony as the frame snagged, just when death seemed a cert. The cause was in some small detail of the angles, masses and forces, and his own antics at the lectern.

One response to life’s uncertainty is to argue that there are deep invisible causes for everything, unlikely or not. In the words of St Augustine: ‘We say that those causes that are said to be by chance are not non-existent but are hidden, and we attribute them to the will of the true God.’ The piano misses Kevin because God looks kindly on him. Though why, we’ll never know.