ANCIENT AND MODERN

About the evolution/intelligent design debate I am, perforce, agnostic: I simply don’t know enough about biology to have an opinion worth venturing.  If I have a quarrel with evolution, it is about the implicit mind set to which it has given rise: namely, that newest is always best.  In its extreme form, this becomes the view that whatever is old must automatically be wrong.  ‘Dated’ becomes a term of opprobrium: even for an artistic work that is a period piece.  I stress that this is not a consciously-held view: when confronted with its full-ranging implications, many perceive resultant absurdities.  It has simply been absorbed, along with the various chemicals in the environment, as part of the process of modern living. 

            In some ways, of course, newest is best.  Cancer treatment is more successful now than it was in the 1950s.  DVDs are more versatile than videotapes; the reduction in the size of compressors has enabled more cars to have air conditioning.  And so on.

            But it does not thereby follow that the people I meet now must be nicer, or more intelligent, than those I knew a decade ago; or that a restaurant meal of next week must taste better than one eaten twenty years ago with magical company in a magical setting.  Most recent is best need not apply to a sunset from the past, or to the love given by an animal; or to the experience of waking up in the morning as an eighty-year-old, rather than as an adolescent.  Aristotle’s science may be outdated, but the same cannot be said of his theory of catharsis.  No one has yet come up with a better explanation for why we enjoy watching tragedy. 

            Darwin’s theory, insofar as I understand it, was about adaptation and change, rather than about necessary improvement.  Evolution could even imply deterioration.  Tim Butcher, for example, in Blood River, has pointed out that in 1958 it was possible to travel the entire length of the Congo in relative safety.  By 2005, this had become problematic; and suicidally dangerous even if one managed to do so.

            We may say that Shaw is a better dramatist than Shakespeare: if we cite such criteria as superior delineation of character, profounder social analysis, better plot structure, or more felicitous use of language.  But it does not follow that Shaw must have been better than Shakespeare simply because he was born later. 

            The Porter scene in Macbeth provides a rare note of levity in a sombre play.  Most of those who have thought about it agree the necessity of the scene: to allow the actors time to change their clothes.  Coleridge, however, observed that the reference to knocking at hell gate would parallel the actual experience of the dead Duncan in the after life.  Dramatically, that reinforces the play’s point about the consequences of our actions in this life; and it seems to me a true perception on Coleridge’s part, and still  valid even though Coleridge was born in the Eighteenth Century; just as the theorem about the square of the hypotenuse still holds good (more or less) even though Pythagoras lived a long time ago.   Time certainly has not invalidated the ancient discovery that 2+2 = 4.

 

I had a friend doing postgraduate research on the flight patterns of the mosquito, with a view to helping restrict malaria in Africa.  Tradition ascribed malaria to bad air.  Clearly, when it comes to new discoveries, modern knowledge has the edge over tradition.

            However, when it comes to reinterpreting existing data – ancient documents for example – the issue is much less clear cut, and the testimony of tradition is abandoned at one’s peril.  Tradition ascribed the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer to Homer.  The Higher Criticism of the Nineteenth cited collective Greek effort.  Twentieth-century scholarship tended to reassign ‘Homer’ to Homer.  “The assured results of modern scholarship” turned out to be neither modern nor assured.

            A small personal example will further illustrate what I mean.  Recently, I was involved with a production of Grease.  The girl playing Sandy mimed a telephone call.  The director was keeping to a 50s setting, and a couple of us were old enough to point out that a 50s Sandy would have dialled the number, given that touch-type phones had not yet been invented.   No credit to us, other than existence, but those of us actually alive in the 50s innately had a clearer sense of the period – the testimony of tradition, if you like – than was possible for a girl born in the late 1990s, for whom the decade was an act of imaginative reconstruction.

            A particularly interesting example of tradition and modern research relates to testimony about the Titanic.  Thomas Andrews – who built her, and went down with the ship – calculated the hull must have suffered a three-hundred-foot long gash.  Some eyewitness survivors said that Titanic had split in half; some said that she sank in one piece.  Others recollected hearing underwater explosions and surmised that the boilers had exploded.

            Discovery of the actual wreck on the sea bed called much of this data into question.  Rather than a gash, there was a series of holes.  Titanic was in two parts, the bow section well preserved, the stern section much more mangled.  The boilers – exceptionally well-built – that had broken free were found to be intact.  Eyewitness testimony seemed faulty.

            Painstaking analysis of recovered samples, however, revealed a more complex story.  The rivets were not of the same quality as the plate metal.  On impact, the rivets had sheered off and the metal plates shifted apart, opening up a narrow line along the side of the ship.   Three hundred feet in length?

            Titanic was found to have a piece of extra-tough steel running along the bottom of the hull, in keeping with nautical design of the time.  As the ship foundered, tensions tore it apart; until the line of steel pulled the hull together again, only giving way finally on the journey to the bottom. Those who saw Titanic split in half, and those who saw Titanic go down in one piece – we must remember that the lights had gone out – were thus both correct in their differing perceptions.

            The refrigerators were located in the rear of the ship.  As Titanic went underwater, the gas in them exploded: accounting for the sounds heard by survivors, and for the damage to the stern. 

            To end with a platitude, the Titanic research is a perfect symbiosis: an excellent example of how past and present, ancient and modern, are both needed for a proper understanding of our human experience.