Black Mischief

Language, Life, Logic, Luck (Second Edition)

David Berlinski

• Publisher: West 26th street Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780786753956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

From the Preface to the Second Edition: "This book will not take the casual reader to the cutting edge of research. Nor is it meant to. What I am after in Black Mischief is the moment in which various lines in an intellectual field of force collect themselves into a kind of dense knot…A number of otherwise sympathetic reviewers have suggested that my aim in Black Mischief was somehow to show the persistence of certain outmoded Newtonian forms of thought in economics, or psychology, or biology, or wherever. Not so. My intention has been to explore a tangle of connected concepts.” Black Mischief is the cogent and absorbing story of an unusually fertile period in the contemporary science. Irreverent, witty, skeptical, and always informative, it is an anecdotal potpourri of scientific thought and the people who shaped it. Berlinski takes a protean look at the science establishment – as well as the personalities behind the scenes – in such fields as behavioral psychology, linguistics, and economics, and in so doing enlightens and entertains us beyond measure.

PART I

True Confessions

I have never been particularly eager to know how it is that the universe was formed, or how a magnet works, or why, for that matter, water flows downhill. I am comfortable with the thesis that objects unsupported fall toward the center of the earth because they have an affinity for the ground, and believe it superior to that offered by Newton. There it is – a certain implacable lack of physical curiosity. My interest in science is science: I am by nature a second-story man.

The great scientific culture of the western world – our scientific culture – achieved its first and most spectacular success in mathematical physics; for many years, it was assumed by scientists elsewhere that it was after physics that the other disciplines were intended by divine grace to gallop. This lent to the sciences as a whole an engagingly cinematic cast, with theoretical physics receding rapidly into the distance, pursued by any number of steaming subjects, their sides heaving and their flanks wet. Physicists still see the world in such vibrant Technicolor terms. I like the setting but not the shot, and incline toward a more up-to-date biological image, with science cast as one of those ominous protozoan-like blobs that Japanese fishermen were forever dredging into their nets in movies of the mid-1960s. With no apparent organizing center, and lacking even a head, the thing would divide, and then divide again: physics, chemistry, biology, economics, psychology, sociology, at which point screams commenced.

Every language, it is sometimes said, creates a special world. The universe of the fish-smelling, raven-haired Eskimo, much occupied with sorting snow into very many grades and shades (smooth snow, shiny snow, sad snow . . .), is inaccessible to me. In the contemplation of this circumstance, I experience no sense of loss. What holds for language holds for life as well. Without too much by way of intellectual discombobulation, I can imagine myself living as a Frenchman, or even as a bat, and worried thus about my liver or my ears. A style of the imagination in which the concepts of accuracy, inference, theory, experiment, data, computation, and evidence did not figure conspicuously, I would regard as pretty much one with the Eskimo.

And not only me. Were one to collect in a very large box all of humanity’s scientists, from the first Babylonian, peering out at the night sky, to the youngest and brightest of contemporary physicists, talking credulously of the Big Boom in the brisk, inescapable present, the majority would yet be alive, and squirming, no doubt, to get out. This is one of those curious, hopelessly irrelevant facts forever washing over us like so many sandy waves. Indeed, the sheer volume of current scientific work is often taken as evidence for the vibrancy of scientific culture – on the assumption, evidently, that in order to measure the height of the Tower of Babel, it is necessary to count the number of languages spoken at its base. At first cut, it is true, there do appear to be any number of alternatives to the scientific system of belief. I have seen a volume on the shelves of my local bookstore in which the author undertakes the resuscitation of alchemy. There are other texts that treat of Palmistry (don’t look), and ESP (don’t listen), Tarot Cards, Witchcraft, Telekinesis, Astrology, Sun Worship, Astral Planes, Sun Signs, Faith Healing, Herbal Medicine, Nostradamus, Life After Death, Reincarnation, and the Bermuda Triangle – this in addition to the usual stuff on Getting Well and Feeling Better, Losing a Lover (or Loving a Loser), Couples, Stages of Life, Dressing for Success, Power Lifting, and Power Lunches. It is very disappointing to realize that each is in some sense a pseudo-science; even astrology, for which I have a tender, wanton sense of sympathy, is cast nowadays in computer-drawn horoscopes to ensure what a book jacket describes as “incredible accuracy.” An acquaintance once urged upon me the thesis that his spiritual adviser was capable of levitation. “Here’s proof,” he felt compelled to add, thrusting a grimy photograph into my unenthusiastic hands. There in black and white, I could see rather a pudgy Oriental caught by the camera as he endeavored to hop from a sitting position, a thin wedge of light visible beneath his plump posterior.

Except for mathematics, a queer, remote outsider, dressed forever in earmuffs and muffler, even in high summer, the various sciences are involved in the search for purely a physical explanation of the flux and fleen of things. Like the pursuit of the Yeti, it is an activity with notoriously slippery standards of success. Certain elementary particles, physicists report, simply have no mass and exist in a state of anorexigenic purity. The neutrino is an example. Or used to be. That charming and old-fashioned high-school electron, trustfully circling the interior of an atom, has somehow been replaced by a vaseline-like smear of probability. Where it is, no one knows. Even space and time have long been merged into an inseparable viscous medium, something like Jell-O perhaps, or an unpleasantly undulating farina. Within molecular biology – I am passing from the cosmic to the comic side of things – ideological affairs are as they used to be in physics, but molecular biologists find it impossible to account for even the lowly bacterial cell without invoking items such as information, complexity, order and organization. These are concepts of stirring confusion and, in any case, not obviously physical in their cast.

For the hedonist or the haberdasher, the world is a world of matter. What you see is what you get. Now it is possible, I suppose, that a scientist might reject materialism in his spiritual life while accepting it in practice. On receiving word of his Nobel award, Abdus Salam (the Great Abdus) thought first piously to praise Allah instead of thanking the Swedish Academy. This suggests a world view in which the laws of matter run so far and no further: Beyond is the realm of Spirit or the fearful Norse God of the Woods, clumping ever onward, solitary and remote. For the rest of us, a world of matter is the world that matters. What else is there?

The superiority of physics to subjects such as interpersonal communications or whole-body massage rests ultimately on the assumption that in explaining how the material world works physicists are in a position to explain everything else as well. Such is atomism, an ancient Democritean doctrine that has simply forgotten to disappear. The physicist thus tends to think of Nature as pretty much like an elevator: In going down, at some point one should finally hit bottom with a little lurch. This is the arena of the elementary particles, of which there are a great many. For all I know, looking at these things from the outside, the elementary particles, like the real line, might simply be infinitely divisible, with new particles popping up precisely in proportion to the funding available to investigate them. This is an awful thought. But even if physicists discover that in the end everything is made of quarks or strings or translucent space-time curves, no one believes any longer that the principles that govern the elementary particles (all is flux or everything is fire as appropriate as any, as far as I can tell) will ever explain completely the origins of life (luck) or the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (carelessness) or the fact that most men are born to suffer (fate).

From the dog’s point of view, the world, I suppose, resembles largely a malign kennel deliberately arranged to thwart his pleasure – one damn rule after another: Do not urinate on the sidewalk, do not drink from the toilet, fetch, sit. No wonder the poor beasts slink so much and are so sneaky. Who am I to scoff? Experiencing turbulence at 39,000 feet, the cocktail nuts chattering in my anxious lap, I find it difficult to suppress the thought that Wotan is angry; my ordinary sophistication notwithstanding, I manage surreptitiously to offer Him a few words by way of propitiation (down big Fellah, down). Such are the ineradicable promptings of what paleontologists refer to as the reptilian brain – a customer who manages to shove his way forward in my life with absolutely embarrassing urgency. When left to my own devices, I imagine the whole of the observable world taking shape in terms of fantastic desires, inhuman spirits, strange forces, with everything intentional, filled with marvelous or miraculous purpose, even the wheeling stars in the staring sky spelling out a systematic but incomprehensible message. At some level of analysis (Genesis, perhaps), this vision, I suspect, is true. It is, of course, not the level scouted by The National Enquirer – Tough Priest Exorcises Vicious Demon from Pet Pig.

Science, at its most successful, sets a stern face against the ancient doggish desire to interpret physical events in terms of the categories of intention and belief. It is thus that mechanism has come to replace animism in contemporary thought. This is a historical development in which the physicist or biologist takes inordinate and preposterous pride, rather like some mournful movie monster admiring for an altogether perishable moment the steel plate stapled to his own skull (so nice, so sturdy). In a narrow sense, a mechanical explanation is one couched within the terms of Newtonian mechanics – a scheme that is unable to encompass electromagnetism or thermodynamics, and that appears false at the margins of our experience in that bizarre limit where things are very large, or very small, or very fast, or very far. Curiously enough, in the concept of a machine, mechanism has itself outlived mechanics – satisfying evidence that in science, unlike life, nothing is ever given up for good or lost forever.

Getting Rich

A lecture at the University of Washington having been arranged, I took the night train from San Francisco to Seattle. I ate in the dining car, still plush in the mid-sixties, with heavy napery, curiously dense silverware cut from stainless steel, and pleasant moon-faced waiters, who rocked in the aisle and seemed able to pour steaming coffee from a variety of improbable angles. Afterward I retired to the coffin of a sleeperette. At the station I had picked up a paperback with the appealing title How to Make a Million Dollars. The author was, I seem to remember, a Canadian orthodontist, whose self-satisfied face peeped from the back cover, a sly smile across the lips. I’ve been poor, the face seemed to say, and I’ve been rich, and, my friends, believe me, rich is better. The author’s secret for financial success seemed absurdly simple. One bought when things were cheap and sold when they were dear; or vice versa in the case of an operation called short-selling, which at the time I confused with stopping short, and thereafter imagined as the fiduciary equivalent of a rear-end collision. Investing in commodities, one might make a fortune in days, even hours, occasionally minutes. There were options, puts, calls, annuities, convertible debentures – convertibles of some sort, a kind of Cadillac of securities – preferred offerings, hedges, warrants, hot tips – financial instruments of such melting pliability and outrageous availability that a man who failed to make pots and pots of money after giving his investments only the briefest attention need actually have approached the matter determined to lose, and was probably in search of some form of public abasement, like a madman or a monk.

At the department of philosophy’s scruffy third-floor office, two desks, several green metal chairs, a wooden pigeonhole for letters, and a hissing radiator had entered into an inhospitable conspiracy. Waiting for me in an embarrassed circle were the chairman, whose bald head rose conically from a turtleneck sweater like some majestic growth, a shaggy specialist in Oriental philosophy with a full beard, hairy ears, and the shambling air of a man consecrated to a language he cannot master, and two or three younger men dressed in chino slacks, heavy woolen work shirts, and boxlike boots. The secretary, who sat at her desk, hands chipmunked over her typewriter, had flaming pink ears, which functioned anatomically as a plaintive beacon calling in sailors – any sailors – from the sea. The chairman, our leader, suggested lunch at a Chinese restaurant. “Cheap,” he said.

We drove for what seemed an hour and then parked in a narrow alley filled with the smell of grease and noodles. Inside the restaurant there was linoleum on the floor, and Formica-covered tables, with their inevitable neat arrangement of hexagonal bottles containing soy sauce, vinegar, and some blindingly hot red liquid that my host sloshed onto his plate, when it arrived, with a gusto suggesting a peculiar, rapt, incendiary passion. In the corner of the room stood a black-bordered fish tank in whose murky gloom swam several plaintive carp, eyeing the waiter and the fish net with an air of resignation and foreboding. Everyone ate rapidly, with the rather revolting heads-down posture that the Chinese adopt when alone, clicking their chopsticks as if they were castanets. Only the Orientalist demanded and then used a fork.

Afterward, the bill came. This prompted an inspired financial exercise. “Let’s see now,” said the chairman, suddenly alert, drawing a thin stream of air over his pursed lips to signify concentration, “there are five of us but I only had half the shrimp, so my total should be four eighteenths.” The Orientalist excused himself to retire to the lavatory, and did not emerge until we were all in the street. I reached reluctantly for my wallet. “Absolutely not,” said the chairman grandly, holding his hand up to stop me. “You’re our guest. Why don’t you just take care of the tip?”

The doctor was right. Rich is better.

The Dismal Science

Economics, it is often said, is the dismal science, but given the rivals already in the field – Black Studies (Did you know that Galileo was one thirty-second part black?), Ethnomusicology (Kurdish people are capable of whistling through their noses), or the Sociology of Couples and Significant Others – this last the speciality of a sociologist I once knew named Pepper – the judgment is close. Still, there must be something to the description; I find myself wandering intellectually whenever I look at an economics text. Since the publication of Gerard Debreu’s Theory of Value in 1959, economics has become ever more mathematical, with results that are inscrutable even to economists. Great mathematicians such as Steven Smale now flaunt their skills defiantly at the economists by describing economic theory in terms of truly monstrous technicality. Literary economics – the description retains a touch of the derisive – seems to me, at least, to have become a branch of theology, supply-side economics, in particular, now cast in terms appropriate to the doctrine of the ubiquity of the Body of Christ. In any event, economists are as unhappy with economics as everyone else and begin their books with an excuse – things could be worse – and end them with an apology – life is complex.

Like a submarine sandwich, economics is double-layered. On the top, below the mayonnaise, there is macroeconomics, a subject in which various individual economic quantities (income, wages, taxes) are aggregated; on the bottom, above the provolone, there is microeconomics; here the individual and the firm hold sway. Theoretically, macroeconomics is designed to surge upward from microeconomics in the same elusive and bewildering sense that thermodynamics is often said to pop with a fizz and a smile from the surface of statistical mechanics. In fact, the great theoreticians of industrial life – Keynes, for example – treated income, wages, and taxes as if they marked the point at which economic analysis began. Microeconomics they looked at from above, with only the vaguest of interest. The formidable task of integrating micro- and macroeconomics is now very much the province of the econometricians, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• PART V