You may imagine my elation as I cycled home. I was filled with joy - there was plenty of that - but also with an immense relief that I had at last found out how God works through mankind: and in such a manner; and on such an enormous scale. The problem of evil, if not also solved, is at least placed in a far better perspective. It is still painful. It will always be painful. It is no longer damning. The greater work continues.
   I knew that this problem had much occupied Donald MacKinnon: to explain how the existence of misery, evil and pain can be reconciled with the goodness of God.
   This is the problem of Job. I remember being told as a child how Job provided the answer by holding to his faith in his God despite all his losses and trials: the deaths of all his children; the theft of all his cattle; the slaughter of most of his servants, his own disfigurement - all without complaint.
   He did nothing of the kind. His book is one long angry bawl of resentment at being singled out by God for such treatment, which he cannot believe, and cannot be persuaded to believe, he deserves.
   And he is right. God has allowed his angel, Satan, to do whatever he likes to Job, in order to prove that Job's faith will not fail. This test Job fails badly. His belief that his treatment is unfair does not change, nor does his belief that there is a standard of goodness to which God should adhere. It is here that Job is steadfast.
   A modern explanation which its author claims is both ancient and revolutionary - also seems to me no explanation at all.

'God exists, therefore there is justice. But it is divine justice - justice from the perspective of one who knows all, sees all, and considers all: the universe as a whole, an time as a whole, which is to say, eternity.'¹ 1 From The Ethics of Responsibility, Sacks, 2005; Job 28, 23-24. Dr Sacks might better have used the earlier lines of Job’s friend, Eliphaz:“Evil does not grow in the soil, nor does trouble grow out of the ground. No indeed! Man brings trouble to himself, as surely as sparks fly up from the fire.” My US Command Desert Storm Bible, sponsored by the American Bible Society, notes the last may be: “as birds fly up to the sky.”

   This is certainly ancient: 'Shit happens' is less modern - and some may think it vulgar - but in encouraging us to be stoic in the face of misfortune it does not claim to 'explain' why God allows the destruction of innocents. To test the faith of survivors? What light-weight thinking this is. What - or, better, whose - faith was tested when the millions of American Indians were being destroyed by infection, starvation, and massacres; by the enslavement and murder by the Belgians of millions of Congolese; of the Armenians by Turks; the Ukrainians by Germans; Russians by Russians; Chinese by the Japanese or the Chinese by themselves?
   Job might be comforted to know that the list of these 'tests' is endless: and it continues to grow. There must be a better explanation than that it fits, somehow, God's greater plan. Or perhaps we really need none at all that invokes neither eternity nor any knowledge whatsoever of God's reasoning. Perhaps it is just the defining characteristic of the human race: so that every single self-identifying group of people will attempt - with just the same inborn unthinking arrogance of other cuckoos - to displace all the rest; and, if not restrained in any way, will increasingly subjugate, enslave, abuse and finally murder them all. The Nazis, we know now, drew up a secret list for all the other nations of Europe. Each one was to be used for a time; then made more and more subordinate; enslaved; and, in the end, destroyed. ² 2 Lecture by Professor Robert Gellately, Florida State University, at Oxford, 25 May 2005.
   One reason that I was so happy - for at least the first ten minutes - was that I need no longer to appear to be on the side of this foolish blather that God is responsible for genocide and gulags: or, if so, that this can be explained with human reasoning. Nor need I let others continue to think that I required the support of other God-crazed obsessives: like the hundreds of nabiim, the 'prophets of God' of earliest record, who were occasionally rounded up and massacred when they became too much of a nuisance; or like the poor little blighters whose parents were ordered to stab them to death for daring to speak about angels; or - but now just a little more respectably - like the travellers who wrestled alone with an angel - or with God; or the warriors who led men into battle with the Cross before; or, even, much more recently, those who met Jesus, knew him at once, followed him as energetic clerics all their lives. ,³,4 3 I Kings 18.4 and 18.40; Zechariah 13, 3-4: both are cited - with others - in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes, 1976, a most valuable book. 4 One of my own favourite fellow obsessives is St Francis of Assissi, who was requested to rebuild a dilapidated church by a crucifix hanging within it. The modern example is that of Bishop Hugh Montefiore, who converted to Christianity after Christ appeared to him in his school bedroom. My only point is to suggest how difficult it will always be to communicate the force of truth such insights convey, not least when the circumstances are so banal. It takes most unusual characters to achieve the unusual.
   Some of these are clearly honest but obviously deluded. Some are very obviously dishonest, but careless of the damage they do; many are obviously crazy; some are very dangerous and need restraint. I knew that some of my own friends thought I must fit into at least one of these categories. I had never wanted to depend on such testimony myself.
   Now, instead, I could identify a slow but persistent process in history, acting not just through individuals, but through entire cultures. Unnoticed by religions - except when they may attempt to stop it - it is ever widening in scope, ever strengthening in influence. It is constantly recruiting more followers, even in religions themselves.
   The process is called science. Essential to science is mathematics. Mathematics provides science with visions of ever greater force and with practical methods of ever greater value. But suffusing all of mathematics - and therefore all the sciences - being essential to the progress of them all, is democracy. Democracy allows everyone to enter the debates of mathematics or the sciences to argue their case. Getting others to agree is never easy, but any functioning democracy must encourage serious, interest in the arguments of others, generosity in giving them a hearing, tolerance and receptivity towards unorthodox ideas. And all of this requires what we may freely call love.
   Democracy - one of my dearest friends once pointed out in order to correct this defect in my understanding - is not a state that a society may or may not reach. It is rather a direction in which a society either moves or does not move. ⁵ 5 Ugo Pampallona: I remember!
   And, now, together with all of God's other madmen and some madwomen, I may bear witness that this impulse to love other men does not come from human-kind. Although some women are just as bad, and can be worse, it certainly cannot come from such multitudes of emotionally unstable, thick-headed, bloody-minded, testosterone-deficient, rapacious, murderous men. It comes instead from an impulse which most remarkably prompts us to forgive our enemies, be generous to strangers, and even - when this may be necessary - to remember to be gentle with our friends.⁶ 6 For Ari, now and then.
   And if all these instructions are already in our genetic code - and I am ready to believe they are - this begs not one but at least three question: what put them there; why have they not saved more lives; and perhaps not finally, what is it that may cause them to act in opposition to our clearly very powerful impulse to take all the cake for ourselves?
   These thoughts had already formed as I left Philip to collect my bike. I was exploring them as pedalled down St Giles, and had almost reached the Taylorian as the lights turned red. I had forgotten to take the short cut down Little Clarendon Street and had to stop. If mathematics, if the sciences - and if, around them, democracy - are all still evolving, then God's influence over humanity is gradually evolving too: as life is. But now - as in that slow, slow, slow process of organic evolution - its progress may now be also traced through history, through all its gradual and sudden, systematic and revolutionary adaptations, it is no longer necessary to suppose that all of our possible spiritual knowledge was given to mankind, like a package, all at once, long ago, so that it is all that we have to guide us now is like a fossil record: unchanging, unchangeable, and clearly incomplete.
   Theology can also be a living science.
   And this, I realised, humming a little hum of thanksgiving of my own, is what I had tried so hard to understand - and what he had tirelessly tried to make me understand - is what Donald MacKinnon's endlessly reiterated argument was all about. A theology can only be an honest theology when it is constantly adapting and learning, questioning, critically sharing and exchanging insights, theories, and knowledge. In other words: it is only an honest theology when it does not stop.
   Democracy is of course dangerously liable to fault. Extend the majority's powers to decide beyond their competence: they must make mistakes. Limit access to knowledge and power to a few: they must make mistakes, usually will seek to enrich themselves and their friends, and deny responsibility for failure at all. The British call this Acton's Curse, but Acton was not the first to notice it; nor could he be the last:⁷ 7 After Lord Acton, 1834-1902: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Acton was a leading British Roman Catholic and historian who also opposed the doctrine of papal infallibility.

"The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratic council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor."⁸ 8 In a letter: 13 November, 1815.

   So wrote John Adams, the American second President, to Thomas Jefferson, in 1805. Jefferson and his friends had already written a far better treatise on government than ever I can: perhaps better than any other will. I should stay within my limits of competence.
   I think that I had always known, peripherally, that the original aim of teaching all the free Athenian boys and men what we now call 'mathematical argument' was not to equip them all to do mathematics. There was almost none to do at the time in any case.
    Its real aim was to equip both plebeian and patrician with relatively simple, easily remembered forms of argument, effective argument, so that they would all have more confidence in the value of debate; they could all be better understood by others; they could criticise and understand others better; and, finally, although this did not always work, so that they were less likely to follow fools, hot-heads, or charlatans. Its purpose was to help democracy to survive and prosper. It should be doing the same today.
   If all of this was so obvious to me - and I was a simple soldier engineer, just one remove from my brothers-in-arms, the more famous woodentops - why was it not obvious to everyone? I had always fondly imagined that the teachers of other disciplines - of history and philosophy, even religions - must be explaining these connections. Was it then possible that some great conspiracy - an earlier, stronger, even richer Opus Dei, for example, clearly no friend of democracy - was keeping them all mute?. Democracies have never lacked the most resourceful enemies. But, as John Adams remarks, democracy is also far too dangerous to be given free rein. To some, it is too dangerous even on a tight rein. It must always be curbed.
   Philip's far simpler explanation for this state of affairs had hit me like train. The reason why teachers do not teach that the original function of mathematical arguments was to improve democracy is not because they are all entangled in some conspiracy

IT'S BECAUSE THEY DO NOT KNOW!

   The effect, I have already said, was not so much like a bolt of lightning. It was more like one of those scenes in the movies, courtesy of special effects, in which a whole field of huge odd-shaped megaliths, all lying as if tumbled by an earthquake, begin to lift, turn, rotate, move - and finally slide together to form a vast, new, and obviously rational structure. My job was to discover what it meant. But that I already knew!
   The lights changed to green and my happiness continued as I pedalled past the Randolph Hotel, the Ashmolean Museum, then along Beaumont Street and Worcester Street. It was only as I was about to swoop under the decrepit old railway bridge across the Botley Road that I felt the ominous soft mental tic of contradiction: something was wrong: very, very wrong.
   I reached home a few minutes later. For the time being this was Mag's apartment, but she would not be back until later. By this time the flaw in my beautiful idea had become by so big, so obvious, so unmistakable that all my euphoria had vanished. Even as I wound the chain for my bike (for the bike thieves Oxford used to be world-class; they have now moved on to more profitable forms of commerce) around the railings beneath her flat, I was shaking my head at my stupidity: at my eagerness to believe anything to fill the void.
   Mathematics teaches democracy? Which nations taught mathematics most intensively, powerfully, and - so far as they were able - universally, from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century: being also encouraged by their philosophers - just as I had been so tempted to believe - that this would form the basis of a new world order? I was remembering now one of these who declared: "I have not destroyed democracy. I have simplified it."
   Guess who? You don't know your history, if you do not know the answer in three
   Throughout this crucial period in European history the mathematicians of Germany, Russia, and France led the way in a great new wave of enthusiasm for teaching mathematics to their young generations - and they were determined that they should be taught mathematics properly.
   Click! went my bicycle lock. And what happened next? What happened next was the most devastating attack on democracy in Europe which destroyed with two decades all the progress of the previous hundred years. By this time this began about two or three generations being taught mathematics properly. But if mathematics automatically teaches democratic attitudes and behaviour, then - according to my wonderful new theory, I could feel it already falling to dust - exactly the opposite should have happened. The wonderful new theory was dead. It was still-born. I had failed again.
   Of course other countries took part. The main exceptions were the British and American mathematicians who, with others of their tradition, bumbled on more or less as they nearly always had. They liked to show the value of an argument by its consequence. This is called an a fortiori proof. The alternative is first to prove the argument is true according to the most rigorous application of logic - this is called proof a priori - and then start looking where to use it.
   Most mathematicians naturally use both methods, from time to time. The essential difference is then the different response to failure. The a fortiori guys will shrug - perhaps ruefully, but not much surprised - and then will go on tinkering with their theory until it fits reality a little better. That is all they really expect: a reasonably good fit. They will not insist - but the a priori guys will - that their theory must be true, and attack reality to make it fit their theory!
   The second approach is obviously more suited to mathematics that is so pure and abstract that there is no actual application to reality at all - or any known aspects of reality - which it needs to fit. The pure mathematician can thus become a kind of mystic whose mind is able - and privileged - to explore rarefied and fantastic worlds of thought entirely beyond the comprehension of all the earth-bound plebs and clodhoppers whose labours they require to support them.
   This attitude become intellectually fashionable throughout much of Europe, and to a very surprising degree it remains so. At my first European mathematics education conference, when I dared to disagree with the chairman - a most distinguished and notoriously short-tempered Belgian geometer - he had only to declare, with the grandest condescension: "So, you are still teaching mathematics in the English way!" to produce knowing nods from his supporters. The English way, they all knew, was intellectually very careless, logically untidy, sloppy, open to error - and, finally, but perhaps most serious of all, very likely to encourage challenges to authority at all levels. Their way had none of these faults.
   From the late nineteenth century the mathematicians and the mathematical educators of France, Germany, and Russia were attempting to elevate mathematics to a level of infallible logical perfection - and then to teach it like this, to everyone. Their aim was adamantine, enduring, logical perfection. They wanted - no, they demanded - a system of thought which allowed no mistakes, could solve all problems, and which solutions would always be infallibly correct. And they thought they had achieved it.
   In 1900 at the Mathematical Congress in Paris Henri Poincaré, the most famous mathematician in Europe, brother of the President of France, asked his audience: "Can we yet say that we have achieved rigour?" Answering his own question triumphantly, he concluded: "I believe we can say that we have!"
   The shock of this bold declaration, unnoticed by the millions of the public body, yet ran through Europe's nervous system exciting all its individual synapses - its thinkers, philosophers, scientists, and quasi-scientists, all connected by a fine-spun web of information, with the same idea: 'To be as perfect as mathematics is perfect, a science must have perfect rigour!
   And as I ran (yes: I ran) up the stairs to the apartment and just as the point of my key scrunched through the wards of yet another lock, in Mags' front door; and as the key turned, and the door opened - I knew.
   That that was what went wrong! Whilst the America's navy and merchants - and American missionaries as well - were reaching across the Pacific to Japan and China, and whilst the British were struggling with equally pragmatic difficulties in attempting to control and exploit their vast empire, Europe was dominated intellectually from within mainly by the French, German and Russian mathematicians.
   They had no new physical frontiers. They had no physical empire. But they aimed even higher. They aimed to raise mathematics - and then in turn all the mathematical sciences - to a level of perfection never before attained, not even by religions. They would produce a system of thinking and of exploration through thought which would united mankind. It was a noble idea. It was a venture. It would turn into a nightmare.
   They would offered new generations the possibility of an entirely new kind of science. It would demand from them new and unprecedented levels of rigor and precision, courage and daring - but, they promised, would release new genius; it would make possible achievements that no-one had dared think possible before.
   This new idea, this fresh belief, and this over-whelming confidence in science - in almost any science that should boast of its axioms and its logic and its rigor - was taught to millions of new, hopeful, patriotic generations. They were the new engineers, technicians, the managers of new industries and services. ⁹ 9 It must not be imagined that this was a purely European obsession. In 1903?? Bertrand Russell published his Principles of Mathematics to prove that all mathematics can be derived from logic. G.H.Hardy is credited with attempting to bully British mathematicians to use the same standards of rigor as in Europe. Few took any notice, and British and American politics also remained highly pragmatical. By their example, authority, and also by the production of a simply astonishing torrent of discoveries and inventions which demonstrated their increasing mastery of the physical world, they brought hundreds of millions to much the same belief: science could achieve anything.
   And then, when the First World War swept away the authority of the old, new leaders arose who were now able to conjure out of this mystic the promise of new political ideas. They too were able to declare that they had created a new science: a political science. They promised both young people and the veterans of that appalling, destructive, ignoble - above all, that useless war, that under the direction of this new science they and their children would see the world transformed; the future generations would be an entirely new race of human beings: better, stronger, cleverer, wiser, infinitely more worthy than the genetically, mentally and morally stunted, the old, tired, degenerate generations, which they would replace.
   All these - according to their new science, inevitably - were just the dross and detritus of history, the scum of miscegenation; mere human germs and parasites that crept into the bodies of once vigorous nations to suck their blood and destroy their health.
    They would all have to be disposed. Preferably, at the end of their useful lives, but, naturally, if numbers exceeded the need for labour - then sooner. Science could now be used to calculate such things. Average individual energy input and its cost could be measured against average individual energy output: the values optimised over average life-times under different conditions. Such details could now be calculated with precision by economists, dieticians, doctors, engineers, industrial managers, project managers, etc.
    Slaves have been worked to death throughout history. How savagely ironic that only in the two cultures declaring themselves champions of the working class was calculated, and demonstrated, that a man's useful life at hard labour, in temperatures from above blood-heat in the mines to sub-zero in a Siberia winter can be sustained for several years on just 300 grams of bread a day.
I had my theory back again. It was now even stronger. The totalitarian regimes which sprang up in Europe within a single lifetime, apparently from nowhere but the minds of Marx and Trotsky, Lenin and Hitler, depended on their leadership only because they had the intuition to write as if they were the discoverers of a new science.
   Hitler, vain, silly, bombastic, lazy - and extremely brave - never understood why he should be so successful. People really did behave towards him as if mesmerised, and he believed that he somehow embodied Germany's ancient spirit and soul. But even in his case thousands of his supporters wearing his Hakenkreuz were able to understand his furious denunciations of the past, his anger at the present and his mad visions of the future into the semblance of a scientific creed. They did so because this was what they wanted.
   Revealed in the language and idiom used by both regimes are the levels of society to which they were addressed and in which they were to find the readiest acceptance. A new technically proficient class had been trained even amongst the military. All were habituated to the language of scientific achievements, to which now there seemed to be no practical limits. Combining this with the infallible political science of their leaders, they could see no obstacle which they would not overcome. Meanwhile the millions they would lead, wherever they were directed, they were also being made ready in hundreds of thousands of classrooms and tens of thousands of schools. Universal education - especially in mathematics - produced identically universal responses. As the purest of emotions they all learnt the patriotic mystique of the homeland. They all learn as well to expect their orders with the confidence and in the language of science.
   Both Stalin and Hitler declared their ultimate scientific aim to be the creation of New Man. For Hitler and his myrmidons the new Germans would have the purest Aryan body and mind. For Stalin, with his henchmen. it would be the new Soviet man and woman. In both countries many men and women of the highest intelligence gave themselves up to fulfil this aim. National Socialists propagandised the 'diamond-hard logic' of Hitler's writing and ranting. The Soviet machine spoke of 'reforging' those people who did not meet the proper social or dialectical norms.
   It was all so obviously right! The language of science was used everywhere, because the people on whom both regimes depended most crucially had been trained from an early age to listen to and respect that language. Now they had only to be educated to recognise deeper political meaning, to sense and respond to their synonyms. This was the aim of propaganda. It was they who extended the language of the new science.
   Axioms were of course the Party's fundamental beliefs. Logic became the Leader's thinking. Theory, his announcements. Rigor was a merciless application of both. Failure was unthinkable. Effort would be unending. Sacrifice, logical necessity. Boy Scouts became Hitlerjugend. The Soviet answer was Komsomol; in East Germany they would become the Jungepioneere, the Young Pioneers.
   None of these youngsters were trained to think or to work a fortior : to test ideas on reality - let alone to make their own ideas - to see whether they would fit and changing them if they did not. They were all trained to work a priori. They were given the ideas that their Leader's theory produced. Since the Leader's theory came from his knowledge of a perfect science, these ideas could only be infallible. If reality did not fit them, they were trained to attack it - to attack reality - until it did. The cost, the energy, the sacrifice: all of this - and the camps, the terror, the purges, penal battalions, mass deportations, mass exterminations: all were rigour!
   I knew now what was needed.
   First, mathematics teaching must be turned around. It is still being taught to the great majority as a series of laws and rules which must be accepted and obeyed without question. This was why those early democracies had failed. This is why most modern democracies are failing again. This is Plan A
   Second, would be to explain why mathematics is not the outcome of man's own nature, but of God's love. This - as the French say - would have to be Plan D.
   Neither should now take very long. Did I not now know exactly what to do?
   I had promised to spend the evening with Dali. To my surprise, and of course also to my pleasure, we were able to spend the evening alone, and we were thus able to advance even further our exploration of theory of the integral calculus.
   When I returned to Oxford however, naturally pleased by our success and happily relaxed, I found Mags unusually subdued. She was cheerful enough, but I felt an undertow of anxiety. I eyed her covertly whilst setting the table for breakfast. Was this, I wondered, the beginning of jealousy?
   I hoped not. We had always made a point of honour - of survival value too - in telling each other our thoughts without any restraint and even almost at once.
   Now I hesitated. Mags had only shown real impatience with me once before, and that was after I had spent much of a previous evening at her dining table writing a letter to Ari, had walked to post it, quite pointlessly, before midnight - pointless, since English postmen do not work at night - and had then begun another in the morning whilst we were having breakfast.
   On that occasion the explosion has been brief (weak German pun), but sufficient.
    "Basta!" quoth, Mags; although rare I think 'quoth' is proper here, especially by someone who has just banged the table so hard that my pen jumped and the milk was spilt. "Enough!" it means; and - very much aware that my future as her lodger was entirely dependent on her good-will - I duly put my letter aside and ate my cornflakes like a good boy.
   When we met at lunch as usual in her classroom, her good-humour seemed restored. I was soon to learn that this was wrong. I drove her car back to Oxford, and on the way we began one of those fractious contentions which never seem to have any proper beginning, or end, and which may often dissolve in the middle without any proper conclusion.
   In this case, however, just as I manoeuvred our car - her car - into the garage beneath her apartment, I made what I thought was a particular clever riposte to her argument, whatever that was, when to my great consternation she burst into tears.
   I switched the engine off, and sat bewildered beside the best and dearest friend of my life whilst she sobbed, sniffed and gulped through her storm of grief. It took some time for her to tell me what this was about.
   She had been told the day before that she would be recalled to Germany. "And - don't you see? - this means that everything - everything," she waved her hand unsteadily, and sobbed again, "must end." She meant our friendship,
   It would not. I had no idea at all of my future. My life was in the greatest muddle it had ever been. I was living out of a suitcase again. I had no home. But I had work. I was seeing Alexander regularly. I had found Ari again. I had Dali to help me with the integral calculus. And I was damned if I would let Mags leave my life. She was far too important to me. And I - I had just then learnt - was far too important to her.
   We talked the situation over late into the night. As a German school-teacher, Mags, as is typical, was a federal civil servant. Her career and future were about as secure as any could be, whilst mine, as a British teacher, as is typical, was not much better than a hired labourer. I had no permanent employment and my contract was secure for only another year. There was no question of her abandoning her career and staying in Oxford with me. She had to go back. We could not be sure of my salary alone.
   About a year later, I did a brave thing. By now Mags had moved to a little town called Metzingen, near Ulm and was teaching in its high school. About the only thing that Metzingen was famous for was as the birthplace of the fashion house Boss. Apart from the swarms of foreigners who came from all over Europe to buy from the Boss factory shops all through the weekends, it was otherwise a quietly prosperous, quietly ordered, quietly clean, quietly quiet German kleinbürgerlische Stadt, a mainly middle-class town.
   Since she had left I had abandoned the book on learning mathematics, and had been working non-stop on this new connection which Philip Stewart had unwittingly revealed to me: that nobody knew. This was indeed the response that I received, without exception everywhere - except from the classical scholars of the period. They tended to say, at once, or after only short reflection, 'Well, of course, that's not just the effect of teaching simple logical arguments, the sort you call mathematical, it was actually the aim. The purpose was to stop their debates being dominated by windbags, by the lawyers and sophists.' And one added, with a snort: "Just like today!"
   To visit her regularly, without feeling too much guilt at leaving Alexander behind, and whilst I was also trying to see Ari regularly, her circumstances being far more circumscribed - I asked Mags to find me any opportunity to talk about education at conferences anywhere near her in Germany. I would at least be able to feel that I was working.
   She had found a meeting of the German working party on mathematics teaching development, the Arbeitskreis für mathematische Bildung. The place was Ingolstadt in Bavaria, a beautiful fortified city on the Danube. She collected me in her car from Stuttgart airport - the same little orange-yellow Saab in which she had told me everything would end - and we drove south-west for several hours.
   We arrived at the university in the late afternoon. It was already dusk and an icy wind was whirling thin flurries of snow about in the yellow lamp-light. The meeting was in a large room in the corner of a massive building of red-brick looking more like an arsenal than a university, but the members had worked through most of their agenda, and were feeling justifiably pleased with themselves and ready to relax.
   I was introduced to his cheerful colleagues by a smiling chairman. He knew virtually nothing about me except that I was English, I taught mathematics, and I was from Oxford. I am sorry to admit that it was probably the last that had convinced him it was safe to allow me to speak without further investigation.
   I had already decided that if I wanted to get and keep their attention I had better go at once for the throat.
   "Gentlemen," I said. "Good afternoon. I have come here today to tell you -- that if your predecessors -- in the 19th century -- had taught mathematics -- correctly connected with democracy -- Germany would not have lost its democracy twice -- first to the Kaiser -- then to Adolf Hitler."
   Some had blinked, and the first smiles had begun to disappear, with that awful word: 'correctly.' But by the time that I finished my sentence, delivered slowly, in English, with intervals so that no-one could be left behind, the smiles had all vanished. Their chairman had sat down. There was a stony silence. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped to match the cold outside.
   No-one stirred. I had actually begun to think: 'They are definitely going to throw me out!' when a tall, thin, well-dressed man turned thoughtfully to the others, raised a bony admonitory finger, waggled it, and said: "One of our philosophers - the Russian-German Alexander Wittenberg - said something like this in the sixties. I never understood what he meant. It seems that this Englishman may understand. I think we should listen to what he has to say."
   Plan A had begun.

1   From The Ethics of Responsibility, Sacks, 2005; Job 28, 23-24. Dr Sacks might better have used the earlier lines of Job’s friend, Eliphaz:“Evil does not grow in the soil, nor does trouble grow out of the ground. No indeed! Man brings trouble to himself, as surely as sparks fly up from the fire.” My US Command Desert Storm Bible, sponsored by the American Bible Society, notes the last may be: “as birds fly up to the sky.”
2   Lecture by Professor Robert Gellately, Florida State University, at Oxford, 25 May 2005.
3   I Kings 18.4 and 18.40; Zechariah 13, 3-4: both are cited - with others - in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes, 1976, a most valuable book.
4   One of my own favourite fellow obsessives is St Francis of Assissi, who was requested to rebuild a dilapidated church by a crucifix hanging within it. The modern example is that of Bishop Hugh Montefiore, who converted to Christianity after Christ appeared to him in his school bedroom. My only point is to suggest how difficult it will always be to communicate the force of truth such insights convey, not least when the circumstances are so banal. It takes most unusual characters to achieve the unusual.
5   Ugo Pampallona: I remember!
6   For Ari, now and then.
7   After Lord Acton, 1834-1902: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Acton was a leading British Roman Catholic and historian who also opposed the doctrine of papal infallibility.
8   In a letter: 13 November, 1815.
9   It must not be imagined that this was a purely European obsession. In 1903?? Bertrand Russell published his Principles of Mathematics to prove that all mathematics can be derived from logic. G.H.Hardy is credited with attempting to bully British mathematicians to use the same standards of rigor as in Europe. Few took any notice, and British and American politics also remained highly pragmatical.

30/05/05

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