Perny came in from her little domed den
in the glade behind Wizard Prang's cottage, and threw herself despondently
into her chair. The wizard perceived her over the top
of his glasses.
'I perceive you have been arguing with your computer
again.' 'It's selectively dumping my tantric notes,'
she grumbled. 'I don't think it's proper for computers to make value
judgments. They ought not to do it.' 'Judgment is a
big word, and ought is even bigger. Perhaps the machine is merely absent
minded.'
Wizard Prang got up and moved across the room, kissing her
lightly on the pout as he passed.
'Of course, absent mindedness is a terrible affliction.'
The wizard was shaking his head and his voice was laden
with compassion.
'I am so sorry for the embarrassment it causes to many
of my friends.'
It was as well that he had his back to her as he spoke.
Perny had clapped her hand over her mouth, and only an undetectably faint
fizzing noise had escaped. The wizard came back to his
chair carrying his brimming chalice and made himself comfortable.
'Mind you,' he said, 'it can result in discoveries and
serendipitous inventions. Did I ever tell you about Professor Porc?'
'No,' replied Perny. 'Was he full of beans?'
The wizard's withering look didn't quite work. He pulled
his Raymond Massey face, but he got the eyes wrong.
'Porc was Professor of Existentialism in the University
of London at Atopon College. No such place exists, of course, but only
academics are aware of that. He used to refer to the college building as
a value structure.' 'What about his students?' Perny
was intrigued. 'Professor Porc would wander into a
college, usually UCL or Kings, and give a lecture. Since he was too
absent minded to have made any prior announcement, nobody turned up. But
as he lectured on existentialism, this didn't seem to bother him.'
'Did no one ever come? And, if not, how was it known
that he undertook teaching duties at all?' 'It is
said,' the wizard was ruminative in recollection of the Russian
Academician who had told him this, 'that on one such occasion three
students came in and began taking notes. After half an hour of this,
five students left. Porc continued unruffled, simply making a mental
note that if two more students should come in, the place would be empty
and he could go home.'
A silence ensued as the wizard contentedly sipped his wine
and water.
'You were going to tell me about serendipitous
discoveries,' prompted Perny eventually. 'Was I?'
asked Wizard Prang absent mindedly. 'Professor Pork?'
'Ah. Yes, well, you see he was rather absent minded, and
he spent a lot of his time in Paris.' 'Forgetting he
was supposed to be in London, not noticing that he was in Paris, or
what?' 'No, no, no,' the wizard said testily. 'How
could you fail to notice that you were in Paris, with famous monuments
all around you?' He waved both arms, expansively: 'the Moulin Rouge, the
Folies Bergeres ...' 'Quite so,' Perny acknowledged
drily. 'People thought that the good Professor Porc
went to Paris whenever he could because the people there spelled his
name correctly, which was not the case in England. But this was not the
only reason. It was because of his invention of the principle of Ethical
Costing.'
Perny had to do a lot more prompting to get the full
explanation out of Wizard Prang. For instance, the key point that the
subways in the two countries are paid for by the public in different ways
was not highlighted at the outset. Perny knew perfectly well that in the
Paris Metro a journey of any distance costs the same as any other journey,
whereas a ticket is bought on the London Underground for a specific
journey distance. But what had this to do with the principle of Ethical
Costing? The wizard's explanations were still not models of clarity.
'You know how you go past the station at which you
intended to alight for a few stations, realize your mistake, get off the
train, cross the tracks, and return to the correct station?' he
patiently explained.
Perny did not know. She didn't know what he was talking
about.
'Why should anyone do that? Is it some sort of
superstition, like creeping up on something when it's not looking?'
Perny received no credit for the intelligent surmise.
'We were talking about absent mindedness,' the
exasperated wizard was forced to remind her. After all, if Wizard Prang
alighted at the correct station first go, it was a fluke.
Perny was trying to get the hang of this.
The wizard was explicit.
'The price of travel on the London Underground is
distance dependent, whereas the Paris Metro price is distance
invariant.' 'Right. Understood.'
'When Professor Porc overshot the station to which he had booked in
London, he incurred an extra charge equivalent to twice the distance
involved. In Paris this was not so.' 'For Heaven's
sake,' Perny expostulated, 'you don't have to pay for the mistake in any
case, nobody knows about it because you emerge from the system at the
place you are supposed to.'
Wizard Prang beamed at her.
'There you are, you see. You have stumbled on the
Principle of Ethical Costing, just as Professor Porc stumbled on it.
Nobody knows about it, you said.'
Perny tried hanging on to sanity, but it felt slippery.
'According to the rules by which the Underground does
its costing, there is an implicit extra cost implied by overshooting and
returning. No charge is made, because there is no opportunity to make
it, because all this extra travel is nondetectable. But, argued
Professor Porc, this by no means released him from the ethical
obligation to pay for it.' 'And you are telling me
that this crazy Prof solemnly handed over the cash for the extras when
he arrived?' 'I don't think you should use language
like that when Porc is simply obeying what he takes to be an ethical
imperative,' the wizard admonished her.
Remembering the confusion that had earlier resulted from
her failure to realize that these people apparently made this kind of
mistake all the time, Perny asked the wizard what he did.
'I do not have Porc's problem because I am (among other
things),' he muttered darkly, 'a cybernetician. As I have taught you, a
system's nature is subjective to the observer of the system. As a
traveller, I am not an observer of my actions, I am part of someone
else's observation. Indeed, I do not usually notice how much further I
have travelled than I intended: it is of no concern to me.'
'Well, who is the observer of the Underground?' Perny
wanted to suggest it might be Vulcan, but forbore to do so.
'The accountants, insofar as we speak of costing.'
'And they cannot see the behavior, which therefore does
not exist in the cost accounting model.' 'Exactly,'
the Wizard concurred. 'So you feel no ethical
obligation to pay extra?' 'No, but I did feel an
ethical obligation to check Porc's Principle with the Underground's
accountants.' 'And what did they say?'
'They would have none of it.'
Perny refilled Wizard Prang's chalice, and handed it to
him. She opened her dark beer.
'How is Professor Pork these days?' she asked a bit
later. 'Oh, I haven't seen him for years,' the wizard
replied. 'It's cheaper for him to spend most of his time in Paris.'
Wizard Prang and Perny shared a light repast, and then
went outside. The air was crisp, steaming the breath, but the sun shone:
it was the sort of day that delighted them both.
'We were talking about Ethical Costing,' Perny said, as
they strolled along the lane beside the big field of Ciler Wysg. 'It
seems odd to mix those concepts I mean morality and economics. Economics
has a basis in facts, but surely ethics relies on opinion, belief, or
something like that intangibles.' 'Facts are
fantasies that you trust,' the wizard commented. 'Economic fact makes a
good illustration. And the trust is mistaken.' 'If we
diminish the idea of “fact” like that, then I suppose we could say that
Christian ethics is supported by the 'facts' in the Bible.'
'There you go again,' the wizard teased her. 'Always
seeking a banal explanation when a mystical one will do. Fancy comparing
the fantasies that constitute economics with the mythological edifice
that is the Bible.' But Perny persisted. 'Seems to me
that mythology in your teaching is the most important “fact” of all.'
'We're not talking about facts such as “the Battle of
Hastings took place in 1066”. And we're not talking about facts such as
“early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”.
The first are useless data until placed in a hermeneutic context, and
the second are mainly positivistic fallacies. The fact about a
mythological explanation of affairs is its invariance.'
They turned a corner, and sat down on a wall. Perny always
sensed when the wizard needed a breather because of his feet finding it a
struggle to meet the ground.
'You didn't mind when I once exemplified invariance by
remarking that whatever you do, you always end up needing a drink.'
'Just so,' said Wizard Prang, unperturbed. 'Or in your
case we could say that however many cases and bags you are packing for a
trip, you invariantly need a little more space.' 'Tit
for tat,' Perny said. 'Now tell me what is invariant about mythological
explanations of affairs in the ethical, biblical context?'
'Haven't you read Genesis lately?' asked the wizard. 'Or
perhaps you've lost track of contemporary physics? The Big Bang theory
and Genesis offer almost identical mythologies about the creation of the
cosmos. They differ only in the order in which the sun and the moon were
created. Now there's invariance for you.' 'Are you
saying that modem physics is best described as a mythology?'
'Obviously.'
They continued their stroll, and Perny recounted to the
wizard a long and difficult argument that she had conducted with the Pious
Man about ethics, which he contended consisted of a series of rules laid
down by God, and imparted to humankind by revelation.
'The Pious Man always says the same thing,' Perny said,
'whether he calls on me with a tract or we meet down at the Black Lion
where he is sipping tonic water as an example to all.'
She laughed. 'That's his behavioral invariance at work,
I guess. But the real invariance seems to be that people want to put
their morality on a factual basis. So they delve into mythology first
and then try to quantify the results in an Ethical Cost Benefit
Analysis.' ‘How do you mean?' The wizard steered her
round, turning for home. ‘Well,' Perny replied,
'there are venial sins, and there are mortal sins. There are Indulgences
and there are Absolutions. Somehow Pork's principle of Ethical Costing
gets extended to Ethical Profit and Loss a bottom line morality.'
'A fair analysis,' Wizard Prang replied. And, after some
thought, he added in a harsh voice; 'The God of these people is like the
chairman of the local conservative party, in whose capable hands lies
the whole future of the next fund raising event.'
Perny absorbed this sad comparison in silence for a while.
They turned in at the gate.
'Tell me how I should approach this business of seeking
God, if he isn't the chairman of the party in the sky.'
Wizard Prang stopped dead on the pathway, and looked at
his apprentice in amazement.
'Shishya,' he eventually said gently, 'what on earth do
you think your whole training has been about?'
Perny squeezed his hand, and they walked on, and into the
cottage.
'Oh, I'm so sorry,' she said. 'I do know that. I
expressed myself badly.'
She made the wizard comfortable, and brought over her
beverage with his. He did not drink.
She said carefully: 'I hoped that you would put into
words something about our Path, our practice, our Tao, as an antidote to
the words that the Pious Man pours into our ears. We do not seek his
sort of God.'
Wizard Prang gazed into the fire.
'If a small chunk of uranium has locked in it the power
to blow a city to smithereens, what sort of power do you expect to
experience when God goes off?' 'Even to glance
furtively at God for a moment is to be battered to pieces. You must then
move fast to put together all the particles of you that are scattered to
the confines of the universe before you lose your identity for good.'
'Seeking God, which is all there is to do, is
nonetheless a reckless undertaking.' After a long
pause, Perny said: 'And so we have our yogic discipline to keep
ourselves in place.'
The wizard stroked her hair, where she sat in her usual
place, on the floor nearby.
'Until the time comes to know divinity within,' he
added. 'It must not be an external cosmological accident.'
'Did you know,' Perny eventually asked, 'that last
Thursday while I was away and speaking of cosmological accidents there
was a small earthquake that was felt in the village? Toby felt it. He
told me that whoever was dreaming him had had a nightmare.'
Wizard Prang shook himself, picked up his chalice, and
took a first draught of wine and water.
'Oh, really?' he said. 'Did you not
feel it then?' 'No,' said the wizard. 'I was on
another plane of consciousness.'
Perny was as usual impressed by the wizard's abilities,
and the ease with which he handled them.
'Were you really?' she asked admiringly.
'Yes,' he assured her. 'I was asleep.'
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