RECALL
There are quite a number of ways to be recalled to
duty. It may be by a trumpet-call. Or the mail. It may be a whisper
in the dark.
We were walking home from church one morning, and
we were making unusually slow progress because little Elle needed to
investigate every animal, vegetable or mineral curiosity she encountered.
Just now she was following on a large snail, elegantly mantled in brown
and white stripes, and making even slower progress towards the road.
We were going uphill towards the edge of town, some yards short of the
little cinema which used to specialize in earthy European comedies and
early Hollywood horror flicks.
I rather liked the look of these: good, clean, masculine
entertainment, but a prominent French lady minister - one of her president's
close friends - had recently told the world that at least one in four
Englishmen are open homosexuals, heterosexually impotent, incapable
of threat to daughters or wives. It seemed to me that my interests would
be best served locally if I encouraged this belief.
Ari was waiting for Elle to abandon her fascinating
gastropod or, more kindly, to rescue it from its doom on the road. She
was wearing her long blue-black coat, a neat black purse on a long thin
leather loop was slung over her shoulder, and on her feet were the low
black leather slip-ons that she favoured. They were rather like dancing
shoes and they suited her. I was entranced by the curve of her cheek
and by her trick of sweeping back a wing of hair, this time to watch
her daughter. It was her only sign of impatience, although we were still
half a mile from home and lunch would be waiting.
"Ari," I asked; I suppose it was only to
see her look in my direction, "what is it would you like most in
the world?"
I did not expect her to reply that I was what she
wanted most in the world. This would now have been unlikely. I thought
we were both happy with the way by which we had managed to reduce the
surrounding levels of anxiety. Our code-word for this was Vernunftigkeit.
Roughly speaking, in our context, this meant acting sensibly, at all
times and in all weathers. By strict restraint of any open show of affection
we had reduced her family's fears - especially, I hope, her husband's:
I bore him no animosity, could see his goodness and admire his patience
- that I might snatch her away.
This had never been my aim. If he had not been able
to see that he was a good man, of course then I would have done so in
an instant. I would not have been prevented. Nor would I have accepted
being prevented from seeing her. But here was a mother of two young
girls, with an almost perfect husband, a fine home, a settled career,
twenty years of shared life. To cause a rupture here, whatever happiness
it might win for me would be brief. I knew that. Even better that this
I had immediate experience of the pain it would cost her and her family
- and that, inevitably, I would have to give her up again.
One might as well try to take her heart from her
body and try to plant it in another. And were there material considerations
as well? I had just lost my own home. I was living in the one bedroom
flat that I had bought - at its market-price - from Mags. Materially
I was not an enticing prospect.
The compensation was that I was accepted - or I was
almost accepted - as another member of her family, lost but found: a
cousin, possibly an uncle. When both of her parents were occupied, the
little one and I would journey together around the village. Most often
we end up in the Schlosspark, to sit in the sun beside the moat to feed
the ducks. When her legs grew tired, or just to move a little faster,
I would lift her up onto my shoulders, just as I did with my own son
- they were almost exactly the same age - and she would sit there, clasping
my brow, pulling my hair, and correcting with infinite childish patience
and pleasure my vocabulary and my grammar.
"Oh," Ari replied, absently -
She was watching Elle pick up the snail, turn it around,
and set it down again on a path towards the wall, sternly explaining
its duties as she did so: "Your family will be waiting for you
at home, and you should not go off like this alone, especially across
a busy road!"
- "I wish I could explain the world better to
my children."
She had been teaching now for nearly twenty years
and we would meet young men and women who had been her pupils. By now
I had been introduced to everyone in the inner town who mattered: to
the butcher and wife; the baker and husband; the pretty young pharmacist
by the Schloss; to the mayor and the pastor, and to his churchwarden,
Herr Morgen. Several other teachers and neighbours were also well informed
who I was, and had been, so that I was no longer examined quite so curiously
as at first, when the words being whispered in every interested ear
were: "Ihrer Englischer Soldat - der Offizier - ist wieder da!"
Herr Morgen was my treasure. He had known Ari as a
child, and he spoke the low, very low country German of his district,
almost entirely untroubled by such subtleties as distinctions of gender,
of declensions, tense, and so on, and so slowly and clearly that it
was almost exactly like listening to a strong English country accent.
The result was a wonderfully comprehensible slow rumble which I understood
almost perfectly as he showed us around his church. It was an even more
a sign of his regard for Ari that he gave no sign of noticing that in
the more shaded corners and from time to time she and her guest were
holding hands.
We paused before the memorial of one of the richest
and most powerful of the church's early mediaeval prince-bishops. His
wife was there , by his side, but it was he, now four hundred years
dead, who was determined to impress with his power. Very little of his
face could be seen, and every part of his body was covered by armour,
exquisitely reproduced in every detail by some forgotten genius with
a chisel and maul, and the whole made even more imposing by the great
scrolled boss of his codpiece protruding from under his corselette of
chain-mail like a heavy little cannon. Potency on display.
We had both seen this before, but a nasty dig with
her elbow stopped a repetition of the comment I had made before, it
would only have improved my reputation. "Hmm," I was about
to remark, "Hätte ich nur die Nummer von seines Telefons"
Occasionally inquisitive heads would still turn to
look as they passed us in the narrow streets outside, but no-one was
hostile. Only one aged aunt, when we visited her, had querulously asked:
"But happened to the slim young man with the curly hair?"
"Well," replied the slim young man with
rather less curly hair - and far too eagerly. "I can do that."
Impetuosity was always my failing sin. What I should have said, was:
'I have always tried, and I have always failed.'
I was sure when I reached Cambridge that it was nearly
in my grasp. I knew the hardest empirical truth about spirituality:
that the experience of God's presence and nature is not an invention,
not always. I was sure that given some objective, scholarly acceptance,
some equally scholarly sympathy and help - and, of course, enough time
- that I should soon be able to detect and describe its practical effect
on history.
Shielded by Professor MacKinnon from the many 'killers'
he had warned me I would find infesting its darker corners, I was introduced
by him to all the theologians, philosophers and scientists whom he pronounced
'sound'.
This, I was to learn, was high praise. Most of these
people had given themselves a name. They called themselves the Epiphany
Philosophers, and from them I received ample acceptance, understanding,
and sympathy. What they could not arrange for me, apparently, was time.
One after the other, they finally gave their advice. It was always essentially
the same: 'Wait.' As I had told Cecil King, soldiers do not like to
wait. It makes them nervous: the enemy may be just the other side of
the wire. To wait, in war, is to give advantage away.
Two of them: Dorothy Emmet, the philosopher - who,
Donald informed me in his private growl, was 'very sound' - and her
particular friend, Margaret Masterman, at once insisted that I write
a full account of my experience for their group's official journal:
Theoria to Theory. They published it within the year.
Margaret Masterman, I discovered subsequently, was
the wife of the University's Professor of Moral Philosophy. She seemed
to be involved in half a dozen major projects all at once, but her great
passion was in developing languages for computer. At that time the possibility
of humans ever conversing intelligently with machines seemed even more
improbable than of humans talking intelligently with apes, and when
she announced this achievement to me - very grandly, for she had a way
of announcing almost anything as if she had just discovered a new continent:
"You need have no fear now of being forgotten! We have placed a
copy of your account in the Library of the British Museum! In years
to come scholars go to read there just what a real spiritual experience
is like!" - she must have found me surprisingly ungrateful.
True it is that not everyone can persuade the British
Museum what to place on its miles of shelf. But in her bluff, jolly
style she was also implying that anyone might learn from it but me.
I wrote a short lament at about this time to Lord David Harlech. He
owned a television channel, which is a wonderful thing in itself. He
was also famously cultured and well-connected, and I thought he might
be eventually a better bet than Cambridge. He asked to keep his copy.
I lost mine; and some years later he was killed in a collision in his
car. My poem described the misfortune of a traveller who finds a great
jewel, wondrously carved, in the desert wastes. After more years of
travel he finds his way finally to a school of philosophers and offers
it to them. They take it from him - and send him on his way.
I was deeply confused by their prevarication. These
immensely clever people confirmed that what I had brought them was what
I thought it was. They handed me about like a parcel. But then: nothing.
They had nothing to suggest except: 'Wait'.
It seemed another confirmation of a discovery I had
made in Geoffrey Keble. Almost his last words to me had been, "For
Heavens' sake, don't let yourself become one of those dreadful charismatics!"
At first I understood this only very vaguely. I had
been sent to Geoffrey by Dame Ruth Railton and had found a very patient,
kind, and nearly saintly man. It was he who told me of the priests he
had known who had slowly lost their sense of vocation and the agonies
of conscience they had to feel as they are obliged to continue to pretend
that it existed still. He too had accepted my story. He too had told
me how much it uplifted his spirit and refreshed his faith. Standing
on the step of his house to wave goodbye for the last time: "All
will be well," were his words, "And all manner of things shall
be well!"
But then he too had offered nothing more - except
that he did not like charismatics. What had they done - what might they
do - that is so alarming?
Mostly, of course, they are just charlatans. So are
many priests. This is not unusual. Certainty is what the mass of people
yearn for: certainty of access to God
Anyone is a charlatan who offers this as a paid service.
Priests call on history to prove the worth of their wares. Charismatics
hustle. With only a lifetime to use, they have no choice. But after
thousands of years of history, of temples and idols created, temples
and idols destroyed, temples and idols rebuilt; after centuries of schisms
and wars, of jihad and crusades and pogroms, heretics and witch-hunts;
even world wars - all to discover, always in part, which of the religions
of mankind is most favoured by God - after all this enormous effort,
treasure, misery and bloodshed, very few of any of the established faiths
wish to think there may be a shorter, simpler route to God.
Charismatics tend to say that they know such a route.
And not all are to be despised. One of them said: "All you have
to do is turn." Another explained: "God is closer to you that
your neck-vein."
But history says - and says with very great dismal
horrid certainty - that not even arguments as simple as these can bring
peace to mankind. The grim truth is that arguments - for most people
- are completely unimportant. One might produce an argument for the
existence of a direct route to God even simpler and more easily tested,
one might demonstrate daily that it is as a path to God as straight
and broad as Brooklyn Bridge - and most people will simply look away.
It is not what they want.
Arguments are important to people like my Epiphany
friends - who, of course, I did like. They are life and death, fame,
tenure publication, for thousands of philosophers: professional, freelance,
and amateur, whose quacking, gabbling, fretting, fighting, endless taking
off and circling and setting down again seems to them to fills the whole
universe with their importance. But the masses?
The masses are unimpressed. All that impresses the
masses are numbers: preferably they should be big numbers (although
there is a curious twist to this tale which you may have seen at once),
and this is not least the case because this is what they best understand
about themselves: that they are numerous.
Only scientists are really convinced by arguments,
but scientists, despite their personal and their collective power, are
only an insignificant fraction of mankind. The majority of people are
convinced of the truth of a belief by the size of the number who hold
that belief to be true. The usual, but not the only test of its truth,
is that the more people who think, believe, and act as they, a majority,
do, the more likely it is that their thought, belief, or act, is correct
This curious arithmetic may be applied to a very wide
variety of questions of veracity. People may first count themselves
important in being one of many: of the approximately one point six billion
people called Christian, for example, whilst being also as of more importance
- in this case the lesser number, whilst still considerable denoting
a rather more exclusive class - that any of the approximately two point
three billion people called Muslim.
These numbers are invented, but the point to be made
is that truth is sensed by human minds as emotion - not, as perhaps
by machines, as a point by point connection by logical rules of axioms
to a conclusion. For the greater number of people - far greater than
those who call themselves 'scientists', but even here there is some
overlap - truth is what is wanted to be believed. In this kind of emotional
calculus numbers matter in assuring people either that their belief
is correct because a lot more people also believe, or, but not at all
paradoxically, that there belief is correct because fewer people believe
it.
Much the same kind of arithmetic is used to claim
the special importance of almost any group whose historical identity
can be followed through any impressive number of generations: as by,
for example, the Jews inevitably; but also the Copts of Egypt; the Nestorians
of Iraq; the Dogon of the Upper Niger; even Freemasons.
Aristocracies also used to be convinced by this persuasion;
and somewhat comically still are, despite the fact that over three hundred
years after the English cut of their king's head and two hundred after
the French decapitated theirs and a century and a half since the Germans
replaced monarchs by parliaments, there are now more many more titles
in Europe than ever before.
That large numbers are required to describe either
the largest or oldest of these groups is invariably taken as the evidence
that they must be God's work. Who else can demonstrate power throughout
history on such a scale? Some like to substitute a country's GNP, or
its natural resources, or its numbers of PhDs, as evidence of God's
special regard for that country. The essential fact is the same. Large
numbers impress - and before we scoff at such simplicity, notice that
virtually the same kind of evidence is used to support the theory of
natural evolution: that the larger number of descendants with a particular
characteristic proves the survival value of that characteristic, whatever
it may be, even if what it actually does to confer its advantage has
not been discovered.
I am quite sure there is a simpler and more direct
route to God than orthodox religions offer or can provide. I never thought
this to be of first importance, for at present I do not believe that
anyone can control it. It may not be impossible always. If a series
of apparent accidents may forward material evolution, spiritual evolution
may be forwarded in much the same way. No spectacular epiphany may be
needed to recognize that this. We may only need to recognize spiritual
reality other than only as an afterlife
At Cambridge I tried not to show my disappointment
that my new friends were actually as stubbornly obtuse and just as much
attached to their own agenda as my old friends had been. These were
all very eminent people and I was still quite shy. It would have been
possible for me to tell them that I was not impressed by their efforts,
but this would have achieved very little and would have hurt my champion
most of all.
Professor MacKinnon would invite me to meet him fairly
frequently at his Divinity School, usually on a Friday afternoon, when
he would offer me tea and a plate of biscuits together with a wonderful
unstoppable lecture on whatever topic was occupying his thoughts at
the time. He very rarely invited me to say anything: which was all right;
I had very little to say. Once when he learnt his college was serving
strawberries and cream, he took me there. I was then still quite slim.
Either because of this or the fact that his others students were always
hungry, he always insisted that I eat his share of biscuits as well
and two helpings of the strawberries and all the cream. It was a surprise
to learn that to many of his theological colleagues this deeply kind,
learned, and patient man was a kind of Vandal, Goth, or Hun.
As Cambridge Emeritus Professor of Divinity, there
was Donald Mackenzie MacKinnon had no-one to fear. He might have enjoyed
a life of blameless, saintly, and anodyne serenity. Instead he was a
holy terror. The MacKenzie and MacKinnon bloodlines were almost certainly
originally Viking - and it was perhaps with this in mind that he had
entitled one of his own best-known works: Stripping the Altars.
No Viking, or Vandal or Hun ever stripped Christian
altars as bare of their treasures, ornaments and hangings, smashed their
reliquaries and tore up their texts as Donald stripped Christendom's
altars to bare wood and stone, wrecked their ornaments, tore up whole
libraries of holy works and dumped them too into the flames.
He was quietly fierce but, as he grew older, increasingly
determined. He challenged all pretentious arguments. He attacked entrenched
ideas, threatened the spreading borders of verbosity, battered even
the walls of citadels.
His weapon was as simple and as devastating as it
was extraordinary. God, he insisted, had not sacrificed Himself only
to demonstrate His ability to resurrect Himself. Of course God can resurrect
Himself. This pantomime made no sense. It had no point.
God, MacKinnon insisted, had made Himself a man; had
then allowed Himself to be crucified as a man; to die so horribly, so
meanly, so apparently pointlessly as a man, being abandoned by this
time by everyone of his followers, for one reason only. It was to demonstrate
His contempt for all the stupidity, cruelty, partiality and selfishness
of all the cultures of the world. Cultures were humanity's attempts
to define, contain and control Him. This is what God rejected on the
Cross.
God is not in history, or of history, or for history.
God just is. Even the breathy twaddle of post-modernists, deconstructors
of all sense and meaning, can be called upon in this instance to make
his meaning clearer: for the God who is in, of, and for history, is
also very obviously a social construct. And this social construct, said
Donald, is not God.
The consequence of this conclusion, of course, is
exactly the same as that which brought Mohammed fourteen hundred years
ago to destroy the idols of Mecca and to strip the altars of their shrines
of treasures and to distribute them to the poor. MacKinnon insisted
that a true attempt at theology can never stop. It must always be prepared
to strip itself, to admit its poverty, to declare its ignorance, confess
its mistakes, and start again.
This was too much for most to follow. Even his own
pupils began to call him brilliant but obscure. His connection with
the Epiphanies was only that they were dedicated to the then becoming
a highly fashionable idea of reconciling science and religion. He thought
this important too. But science, his view, should be a part of theology.
It could never, should never, pretend to be its antithesis. This was
hubris too.
In retrospect the most remarkable coincidence is that
it was this man whom I met first, and that he suited so exactly my own
intuition. A thousand others at that critical time might have been disastrously
discouraging. I would never say that like was drawn to like - he was
much more clever - but he certainly understood how close to God's fire
I had been, and how carefully I needed to be protected, and he protected
me. I love him for this.
Equally we both understood that unless everyone involved
is prepared to admit their awesome probability that our knowledge of
reality may still be insignificant attempts to 'return to the fundamentals'
of religions and to marry them somehow with the 'fundamentals of physics'
- crudity sometimes has its place - is like nothing so much as pissing
straight into the wind.
Later, in Oxford, Alan Bullock, famous for his acclaimed
biographies of Hitler and Stalin, was also to tell me that be believed
that Europe could only be saved from resurgent fascism by this same
reconciliation. Unfortunately I arrived in Cambridge as many of its
scientists were getting alarmed by the moral vacuum that science was
leaving behind as it shredded traditional religious belief, and when
some philosophers - alas, very few with any real scientific grease and
grit under their nails - were beginning to glimpse fresh hope for faith
in the gaps in understanding science was beginning to find in itself.
During most of my time at Cambridge, Dorothy Emmet
and Margaret, two immensely talented, energetic, clever women, having
got from me the description of the 'real spiritual experience' that
they both wanted - and which they both certainly treated as important
- then appeared more fascinated by the apparently psychic powers of
the Israeli Uri Geller. It was here, they hoped, where modern science
falters to explain, that God would show His presence to the world. This
was pitiful nonsense of course: even rather pathetic. Who was I to tell
them that Science advances precisely because and even where it finds
faults in itself. Its servants are not so weak-spirited to stop, to
throw up their hands, and declare: 'Haha! Because we cannot understand,
this has to be God's work!' Piffle.
Even so, the basic problem was the same for them and
for me. It was to find some evidence for the effect on the world of
the force that we all agreed to call 'God'. We also agreed that this
force should be called supernatural: not in the sense of being weird,
spooky, or unpredictable: rather that it must be an overriding force
of nature.
And at precisely at this point, we parted company.
They believed God would display an unmistakably supernatural action
in the physical world which physical laws could not explain - and that
therefore they must join forces with scientists investigating the physical
world, and looking for - well, for what exactly?
This was never clear. They hadn't really a clue of
what it was they were looking for. How would they recognize it as it?
They were really almost exactly like Pooh and Piglet on the Hunt for
the Heffalump. What was perfectly clear was that scientists looking
for new research grants in virtually any field that might be remotely
associated with their search for this Great Nebulosity could milk many
equally hopeful but misguided foundations by collaborating. My friends
were their useful fools.
Truth to tell: I had not much idea either. I too was
still looking for an argument: a supremely clever, subtle, and even
possibly a scientific argument, one which would strike to the very heart
of the same Great Nebulosity and condense it to a perfect description
of a greater reality than even science has envisaged. That such arguments,
as I was finally to realize, would always be useless in the larger world
had not then occurred to me. I did believe, however, that the effects
that I wanted to find and describe were far more likely to be in human
behaviour than in any exceptions to physical laws.
And this, therefore, was where I had been looking
for, fruitlessly, for years and years, right up to that moment on that
bright spring morning as we waited for little Elle to decide the fate
of her snail. Up to this moment I had found precisely nothing. Except
that I had learnt why men, women, sometimes even children, will kill,
torture, oppress and abuse other people and their children with so much
passionate conviction that they are obeying God's plan. To admit otherwise:
that they do not know the plan of God - is unbearable.
This was not the evidence that I wanted. I wanted
to show that God does not just inspire odd, mad eccentrics like me,
but multitudes of people, generations of people, even total strangers
and once warring states, to act more generously and tolerantly towards
others. But of course human personalities are bipolar. This is the other
extreme, the other pole. There is here, too, the same correlation of
fear of uncertainty and violence: the greater the fear that their faith
contains mistakes, the greater the violence that people are willing
to use to prove that it has none.
As always, too soon, before my coach could turn back
into a pumpkin and its coachmen into mice - which could an even more
striking transformation at 30,000 feet above the English Channel - I
was teaching in England again. There were already strains appearing
in my love affair that I was blind to. I wanted to think, even if it
was going nowhere, that it was stable. With that mixture of charity
and ruthlessness that is so often the despair of we more fragile males,
one of my confidants later told me this was my main mistake. Sabines
do not see strength in restraint.
But I was determined now to return to my duty. If
those po-faced savants could not solve this problem - and if they would
also not help me to do it - then, damn them and the prince-bishop's
codpiece, all arrogance and vanity: I would do it alone.
I had then been teaching mathematics for over fifteen
years. For the reasons I have explained [Ed; not yet] I was still in
the same school and still teaching in exactly the way I had been taught.
I was conscientious and I worked hard. My examples of what my pupils
had learn I chose with care, gave clear instructions on how to solve
them, then tirelessly demonstrated how these methods might be varied
to solve different problems. I marked all their work just as carefully,
every error was underlined and corrected. I needed a new red ink pen
every month. I tested religiously. I did everything I was supposed to
do.
And yet here in my classroom repeatedly appeared a
surprise - at least to me. Every year a fraction of my pupils always
failed.
The majority usually did well, even very well. I could
have been content with this. The fact that in every year almost the
same fraction always failed I might have ignored. It was expected. This
slow disintegration of every class - especially in mathematics - is
not regarded as unusual. Most schools expect it. After four or five
years a class can only very rarely still be taught mathematics together.
Usually the pupils need to be divided into at least an upper and a lower
stream. Some schools end up with four, five, and even six different
'sets' - the lowest being apparently unable by then to follow even the
simplest instructions.
Virtually all education systems accept this annual
attrition. Mathematics is supposed to be hard. It is explained by something
called 'mathematical aptitude'. Some children have lots of this aptitude.
Some have less. Some have none at all.
One day, without warning, one of my best pupils ran
over this belief like a dumper truck. He also destroyed my belief that
I knew how to teach.
I had just finished one of my endless demonstrations.
Examples filled the board behind me. I had then set the class an exercise
to work through; called for them to be silent. I had just settled behind
my desk and was enjoying a few moments' repose.
"I've finished." a voice said beside me.
I examined its source with an entirely insincere appearance of pleasure.
A neat exercise book was placed in front of me. The owner, a smartly
dressed twelve year old, placed a peremptory finger on his neatly numbered
solutions: "There they all are."
And, yes, indeed. There they all were. Well, well. And all correct.
Clearly lots of aptitude. I ticked them off, one by one. At the same
time I was wondering what else I could give this little blighter to
do. Then I had an interesting idea.
"I know!" I told him, with what was intended to be infectious
enthusiasm. "They are all right. That's very good. Now, why don't
you go back to your desk, and write down exactly what you think your
brain is doing to get all these correct!"
It seemed a brilliant notion; and given that this
young Einstein would be working on it, the result might be revealing.
Far more revealing was to see his smile disappear like a chalk under
a wet cloth. He literally recoiled: he jumped as if I had poked him.
"No fear!!" he blurted: and normally he
was polite: "If I try to do that, I'll start getting everything
wrong!"
I stared at him: at first with astonishment, then
dawning delight. He glowered back at me with no pleasure at all. I liked
this boy. I think his name was Robert. He was smart, clever, polite;
usually, I think, he liked me. Now he was frozen with horror by what
I had asked him to do.
Once Newton was asked how he had succeeded in understanding
gravity. It is said he replied: "By keeping it continually in the
forefront of my mind."
With respect to the Great Geometer, as Blake portrayed
him, the forefront of a mind may be continually aware that a problem
remains unsolved, but I suggest that it is in the background of the
mind, behind all consciousness, that most activity takes place. It was
once believed that all the mind's activity would be understood eventually
in purely logical steps. No longer. Some thinking is certainly logical.
Logic is very useful, but the process of finding solutions to problems
when none is known before is definitely a far more rickety affair. How
is it that after days or weeks of knowing in the forefront of one's
mind that a problem exists - in my case after years - insight can suddenly
strike like summer lightning from the back of the mind: so that one
knows: 'That is the solution'?
First there is a known inability to achieve some aim.
Thinking about it consciously one collects together some background;
some history; and even some knowledge of what has failed; and perhaps
some vague idea of what may fit the bill - but it is best for this to
be a very crude: too much detail can get badly in the way -.
And then? Wait! The mind begins the process in the background of making
endless attempts to create a new, coherent pattern, as if trying millions
of ways to fit a jigsaw together of millions of neurones and their billions
of synapses, all fickle and mobile, constantly changing their connections
with others and varying the strengths of signals between them. Then,
suddenly: Snap!
Of course my suggestion was unfair. I had not the
least idea what he might have done. But his reply was a true revelation.
He had just solved my mystery. He had told me why there was always a
fraction in the class that failed..
Whilst he picked up his book but continued to stand
mutinously by me, I looked at the rest of the class. They were a good
class and they were all working more or less silently. Occasionally
someone would whisper to another, but as a whole they were all working
- as I had told them - silently.
'He's doing them all automatically!' And so are they!
This was appalling, disastrous. Within a few more years, of course most
would begin to fail. But most would also have to learn to be continually
dishonest to cover up the fact that they - and their friends - simply
do not understand what they are doing. Tests would never discover this.
When I continued to sit silently, offering no further
suggestion Robert snatched up his book and marched back to his place.
He has always been clever at maths It was in his reports. He had been
first in his class all through primary school. But suddenly I knew what
made him so clever. This 'natural aptitude' is mainly just the ability
to copy, almost without fault, all the actions that I showed the class.
It has nothing necessarily to do with understanding. For ten years I
had not only been looking in the wrong direction, I had been asking
the wrong questions thousands of times a year.
Whenever I asked a pupil or class: "Do you understand
that?" what the majority of children believed that I meant was:
"Do you understand what to do?'
This is all that the majority of young children ever understand understanding
to mean. Understanding for them is not why to do something, but only
what to do. From the earliest age all children begin to learn like this.
Using their innate abilities and responses, combined with memory, they
learn how to bring themselves rewards or, alternatively, to avoid pain.
The little blighter - he was now back at his desk,
still stiff with hurt - had just shown me what was wrong with my teaching.
By inference, I now knew what was wrong with almost everyone's teaching.
Being satisfied with my pupils' ability to copy my actions; never properly
investigating what they knew of reasons; by mainly rewarding their accuracy
in imitating - and also learning the prime value of successful deceit
- I was simply driving most of them into a mental cul-de-sac as well
as a moral jungle.
Mathematical proofs can be presented as demonstrations.
That is not what they really are. Authority can be demonstrated. Power
can be demonstrated. Mathematical proofs are arguments. They are not
commands to be uncritically, thoughtlessly, impersonally obeyed - and
for this obedience to be rewarded by authority figures like me. That
would be the source of Alan Bullock's 'resurgent fascism'.
And I was helping it to happen
11/05/05
