Vertigo

Shortly after coming back from Dorset last week I found myself going down with some debilitating virus, and ended up spending several days in bed. Since giving up work in 2014, losing a lot of weight, getting more daily exercise, and generally finding myself in a Good Place, I've become rather complacent about enjoying good health. I expect the annual over-60s' flu jabs [1] will have helped, too. So this bout of illness came as a bit of a surprise, and when I found it had "gone to my chest", as we say, I dragged myself off to see the doctor. Why? Because about a decade or so ago, I managed to catch pneumonia on a business trip to Munich, almost certainly just by sitting on a plane, breathing. I was walking around for weeks, feeling terrible, before deciding to get my GP to check me out. "My God," she said, listening to my chest, "You're really unwell... I mean, really unwell!" and put me on a massive course of antibiotics.

Doctors, I think, have to occupy a difficult area where science has to be carefully mediated for popular consumption, and not in a scripted, David Attenborough kind of way. Some are good at this, and some ... are not. My last serious medical adventure, as with so many older men, involved my prostate, and its determination to draw attention to itself by making me spend my latter life as essentially a perpetual quest for toilets or marginally acceptable toilet-substitutes (don't worry, I will try to stay this side of "too much information"). It amused me that my consultant, a learned surgeon at the, um, cutting edge of medical knowledge, would habitually refer to my "waterworks". I asked him at one stage, facetiously, whether "waterworks" was the technical term for "down there"? Fortunately, he saw the funny side, and we had an interesting conversation about the intersection in medical practice of communication, condescension, and infantilisation. I mean, I surely can't be the only one who wants to strangle any medic who refers to your "tummy" or "bottom", as if you were six? It's bad enough, at 65, becoming "Michael" to all and sundry, merely by virtue of having walked through the door of a medical institution.

But there's a broader problem here. Science  – in its broadest sense of "the systematic attempt to create and organize knowledge about the physical and natural world in the form of testable explanations and predictions, chiefly by means of observation and experiment" – is probably humanity's greatest achievement but is also one of our main problems. The trouble with "science" is that we have stumbled on a way of discovering knowledge about the nature of the universe, and our place in it, that is way beyond the capacity of most individuals to live with and absorb. We, as a species, were born and grew up in Plato's Cave, speculating about the shadows and reflections on the wall, and enjoying the profound and entertaining stories we made up about them. Then some incorrigible fidget found and opened a window, revealing that we were actually in a spaceship in an infinite void, with no up, down, sideways, or visible means of support. Aaaaargh!

In that instant, we outstripped our "natural" evolution. Evolution is a wonderful thing, but it takes time, lots and lots of time, to work its magic. I think most of us are still failing to adjust internally to some truly basic "knowledge", such as the fact that the sun does not go round the earth. Because, of course, to all practical, everyday purposes that is precisely what it does do, just as the world goes past your window as you sit idly contemplating it from your train compartment. I suppose it might seem different if you were perched precariously on the carriage roof. But have you ever stepped off a playground roundabout and felt the earth reeling? That's us, waiting for the centuries-long, science-induced dizzy spell to end. You can't just think it away.

This, I think, is why some people have such a problem with science, or perhaps more strictly scientism. The routine protestation that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy, Dawkins, is not so much a genuine debating posture as a defensive reflex to the vertigo induced by realising that, actually, the reverse is the case: that philosophy (i.e. science) has already revealed rather more about heaven and earth than most of us can handle. Entropy, heat death, the utter futility of everything sub specie aeternitatis... This stuff is pretty hard to come to terms with, especially if your worldview still trails clouds of glory from some imagined past or future realm of perfection and joy (see Wordsworth). Like kids on some glorious holiday, we don't want the world to end! We don't want to be engulfed by the death throes of our very own local star! Please stop going on about it!

It's rather like our various attitudes towards stage magic. Most of us get a childlike pleasure out of a convincing illusion, but are in no way persuaded that "magic" has been performed. It is simply entertaining to entertain the possibility of the impossible. It plugs in to some fundamental source of delight that, paradoxically, may even lie at the same root as the urge to discover real truths about the world. But, at the same time, to discover how the trick is done will not – again, for most of us – enhance that pleasure. The fun is in the fooling. However, there are two significant dissenting minorities.

First, there are those who have a latent wish that magic ought to exist, or even a conviction that it does exist, and this is something that an illusionist can play upon. Genially, usually, but at times cynically. I remember when Uri Geller first started his astounding spoon-bending act on TV shows back in the 1970s: there was a genuine sense abroad that here, at last, was evidence of paranormal powers. It was very much in tune with the spirit of the times: books about UFOs, crop circles, dowsing, divination, and the like had started to appear in ordinary High Street bookshops. I know, because I used to read them. Quite senior, rational people were prepared to let a little high-class irrationality into their lives, in the way they might also tolerate a joint being passed around at a dinner party. It was sophisticated to at least appear to be open-minded. But for others, rather less sophisticated, the cynical peddling of illusions as realities was a gateway into a maze of irrational beliefs and self-delusions that could never end well. In medical terms, we're talking about crystal healing, aromatherapy, and positive thinking as cures for cancer.

I do sometimes wonder about the prevalence of "magic" and "special powers" in the entertainment preferences of our younger generations. Entire genres of fiction, cinema, and gaming are based upon the assumption that mysterious powers exist, and that these can be channelled to awesome effect, whether by discipline (kung fu), by inheritance (Harry Potter), by mutation (the Marvel "universe"), or, in Star Wars, by the presence of midi-chlorians in the bloodstream (which has the added attraction of sounding almost rational). Are these just harmless metaphors for untapped human potential, or have advanced theoretical scientific notions such as "string theory" and "multiverses" met, mingled, and interbred – at some very fuzzy, permeable interface in the public mind – with equally implausible-sounding nonsense such as "chi" or homeopathy? In our fake-news, social-media world, where a few anti-vaccine idiots can put into reverse the fight against a disease like measles, telling the difference has never been more crucial, but is surely not made any easier by an exotic diet of movies in which human flight, telekinesis, and grotesque physical transformations are unremarkable "facts" of storytelling.

But there is a second minority to whom an illusion is not an entertainment, but a provocation, an implied question in urgent search of an answer. To such post-religious puritans, any vestige of hocus-pocus needs to be exposed to the antiseptic of sunlight. For them, to adapt the wonderfully OTT words attributed to Denis Diderot, men will never be free until the last stage magician is strangled with the entrails of the last homeopath [2]. Which is an act a lot of us would pay to see, it's true. But, in a world where a constant stream of knowledge generated by the few so rapidly outstrips the visceral understanding of the many, such intellectual savagery shows too little sympathy for the useful self-preserving fantasies of small, frightened people in a big, scary world. Especially when they get sick. Some of those old stories and remedies we came up with back in Plato's Cave still make a lot of sense, and the urge to lay bare the workings of the universe can have a heroically cruel senselessness about it. Such hyper-rational folk may make good scientists, but make very bad doctors.  Another Wordsworthian moment: "We murder to dissect".

But I'm feeling much better today, I do not have pneumonia, and it's a beautiful sunny day outside, and I need to get out for a walk. So here's a poem which I've shared before, but which seems very appropriate.

The Motion of the Earth

A day with sky so wide,
So stripped of cloud, so scrubbed, so vacuumed free
Of dust, that you can see
The earth-line as a curve, can watch the blue
Wrap over the edge, looping round and under,
Making you wonder
Whether the dark has anywhere left to hide.
But the world is slipping away; the polished sky
Gives nothing to grip on; clicked from the knuckle
The marble rolls along the gutter of time -
Earth, star and galaxy
Shifting their place in space.
Noon, sunset, clouds, the equably varying weather,
The diffused light, the illusion of blue,
Conceal each hour a different constellation.
All things are new
Over the sun, but we,
Our eyes on our shoes, go staring
At the asphalt, the gravel, the grass at the roadside, the door-
step, the doodles of snails, the crochet of mortar and lime,
Seeking the seeming familiar, though every stride
Takes us a thousand miles from where we were before.

Norman Nicholson

Southampton Sports Centre, June 2017

1. Curious, how the off-putting and pejorative popular term "jab" has come to be accepted terminology for an injection, even within the medical world. I'm fully expecting one day to hear, "the quack will see you now".
2. Usually, "men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest". I confess, if I were forced to get a tattoo, I'd be very tempted by that.