Yet Douglas Adams had many other strings to his bow. He was enthusiastic about technology and its potential to make the world better, presenting a number of radio and television series on the subject. He was a committed conservationist. His book, Last Chance to See, co-written with zoologist, Mark Carwardine, as they travel the world in search of endangered species, remains a classic.
Adams was also a guitarist and music aficionado. Pink Floyd’s final studio album, The Division Bell, was named at the suggestion of Adams to his friend, guitarist David Gilmour. Not to mention Adams’s early work co-writing sketches with Graham Chapman for the final series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If anyone can be considered the seventh Python, it is surely Douglas Adams.
Because of his perception as a comedy writer, the contribution of Adams to a number of disciplines of philosophy is perhaps neglected. Not that Adams ever wrote a philosophical treatise, or couched his work in purely philosophical terms. Yet many a true word is spoken in jest. While H2G2 contains any number of circular arguments presented for comic effect, there are also ideas featured in the books and radio scripts which cast a serious eye upon the human world.
Science
fiction has always been about taking contemporary issues and ideas and removing
them to a place sufficiently distant in space or in time to be able to explore
them with greater objectivity. H2G2 is no different than any other work of
science fiction in this regard. In the sections that follow, we will look at five
disciplines of philosophy, including economics and politics, to examine what
Douglas Adams had to say.
Political
Philosophy
The president’s job – and if someone sufficiently vain or stupid is picked he won’t realize this – is not to wield power, but draw attention away from it.
As quoted above, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is referring to a Galactic President. More specifically it refers to Zaphod Beeblebrox, former galactic president, and one of the principal characters in all variations of H2G2.
However, it is hardly a great stretch of the imagination to see this as a satire on the President of the United States. The initial radio series and the first two of the five books were released during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. At the end of 1980, the USA elected Ronald Regan to become its 40th President. The age of the stupid had begun.
There is a tradition in Russia that the leader of the country must alternative between hairy and balding men. If the previous president or king was hirsute and bearded, the next leader must be balding and beardless. They take this very seriously. Something similar might be argued for America in line with Adams’s comments on presidents. Republicans tend to elect stupid leaders; the Democrats vain leaders.
The analogy doesn’t always hold, but considering Ronald Regan and George W Bush on one side, Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama on the other side, it is good enough. The forty fifth President brought stupidity, ignorance, and basic bigotry to it apotheosis (or is it its nadir? – neither words he would understand). Obama was probably the most accomplished President since Lyndon Johnson, but had more in common with John F Kennedy, in that he was adept at giving speeches which were big on gravitas, but light on actual substance. The writer and presenter Sandi Toksvig described Obama as sounding like the pre-printed messages in Hallmark greeting cards. It’s hard to argue with this assessment.
Of course Great Britain is hardly in a position judge. Not when David Cameron and Boris Johnson have both been Prime Minster in recent years. Men who remind us that the best education money can buy cannot instil intelligence in people who didn’t have any to begin with (or, with which to begin, as their private education would argue, incorrectly).
The UK has also seen Tony Blair as Prime Minister; a man who could give Narcissus lessons in vanity. Vain leaders are arguably more dangerous than stupid ones. And when a vain leader joins forces with a stupid one, disaster is bound to follow. I’m sure the people of Iraq would have something to say on the subject.
Democracy is a good idea in principle, but was hijacked a long time ago. Increasingly politicians the world over fail to represent their constituents and instead represent only themselves and the narrow interests they serve in order to reap the financial benefits for which their treachery is rewarded. American politics is predicated on raising funds to run a campaign, which is open to corruption from the very start. Britain is different, but still guilty of prioritising rich interests over those of the most in need. Untendered government contracts worth billions of pounds can be given to Tory party donors, but the same people will let the children of the poorest members of society go hungry with apparent relish. Or watch with barely concealed glee as they drown in dinghies crossing the English Channel. All while claiming to be followers of the Christian faith.
Douglas Adams summed this all up in typically succinct fashion:
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
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Shoe shops! In every road, on every street corner, in every city shopping precinct, shoe shop after shoe shop!
Adams’s main contribution to economics is The Shoe Event Horizon. Although, I think he might have been depressed at how one of his most beloved tech companies, Apple, has become as ruthless as any conglomerate to which his imagination gave birth.
The Shoe Event Horizon appeared in episode five of the second series of the original radio incarnation. It reappears in the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It works like this. The commercial centres of a planet are flooded with shoes shops. Hundred of them. Thousands. Then fashion is introduced into the mix. The types of shoes that are sold are upgraded each season. Moreover, the shoes sold are of such poor quality that they fall apart almost at once. Hence they need to be constantly replaced due to changing fashions and inferior manufacturing, increasing public dependence on the shoe companies (all owned by the same company), until the financial situation reaches a point of critical mass:
The shoe event horizon. The whole economy overbalances. Shoe shops outnumber every other kind of shop. It becomes economically impossible to build anything other than shoe shops.
The Shoe Event Horizon takes its name from the event horizon of a black hole. This is the point around a black hole at which gravity becomes so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. The Shoe Event Horizon is reached at the point in a target planet’s economy where it is impossible to build anything other than shoe shops. A comic idea, to be sure, but one which has real world analogues in western capitalist societies, as well as emerging economies in the developing world.
One of the things the Shoe Event Horizon foretold is something that has come to be known as Planned Obsolescence. This is the very idea that products for sale are deliberately designed to break after a specific length of time, forcing consumers to spend money on replacements at regular intervals. Anyone who has ever bought jeans or shoes from a supermarket knows they are often so badly made that they develop holes and broken stitching in a few months. The Dolmansaxlil Galactic Shoe Corporation would be proud.
The worst culprits though are the tech companies. Their products are often designed to fail after a certain time. Either that or newer operating software is not available for older products, preventing applications from updating so that they can no longer be accessed.
All this serves to drive up profits for the tech companies, depleting the world’s resources, and killing off the competition in the process. Not to mention the dubious working conditions for the people who manufacture the products in Chinese sweat shops, as well as the wars they help to perpetuate in countries where raw materials like bauxite and cobalt are mined.
Ironically it is Apple, of whom Douglas Adams was a big fan, being one of the first people in the UK to own an Apple Mackintosh computer, who have become the exemplar (if exemplar is the right word: spoilers – it isn’t) of Planned Obsolescence and, by extension, The Shoe Event Horizon. One day it might become economically impossible to build anything other than Apple stores.
The Shoe Event Horizon is ultimately a satire on capitalism itself. Those who lionise Capitalism speak in reverent tones about things like market forces and Adam Smith’s invisible hand guiding the market. Capitalism is the antidote to the evils of Communism, so we are told. In reality they are two sides of the same coin. In Communism, the state owns the means of production. With Capitalism, the means of production instead owns the state. Both moving inexorably towards one and the same destination, just one moving clockwise and the other anticlockwise. One political party or one corporation, the end is the same.
Socialism is lumped in with Communism as a great evil to be avoided, but the truth is that Capitalism is just as socialist as Communism. It’s just that with Capitalism, socialism is only extended to the very rich. Banking, farming, the arms industry, oil companies, and the tech industry all receive hand outs and bails outs and pay as little tax as possible. National infrastructure is placed under more strain by them than by the average citizen. Yet little is contributed to the general upkeep of roads and environmental protections and the like. When socialism is spoken about as being undesirable, this is equivocation, with the end of the statement left unspoken. Socialism is undesirable for individuals and the poor. There is always money available for wars and bail outs. Not so much for libraries or to pay nurses anything other than lip service. Clapping NHS workers is cheaper than bothering to fund its services properly. Or repeating slogans like Support the Troops and Help for Heroes, when ex service men and women are left to beg on the streets once their usefulness has ended.
Yet as the Shoe Event Horizon reminds us, this kind of naked profiteering is unsustainable. Capitalism treats society like a Jenga tower, pulling out more and more blocks from the bottom and placing them on top until the entire structure becomes unstable. In this it is not so different from the Soviet structure, which was not so much defeated by the west as it collapsed in on itself after years of corruption and neglect. All top heavy structures topple over eventually.
If all the people who make things and grow things and do the actual work died tomorrow, the very richest would die of neglect within a few weeks. If the owners and operators of all the world’s corporations suddenly expired, it would be some time before anyone noticed. As another famous science fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut, famously wrote: So it goes.
Teleology
The Answer to Everything...
Yes...!
Life, the Universe and Everything...
Yes...!
Is...
Yes...!
IS...
Yes...!!!
Forty two.
Teleology is the study of the end of things: The purpose or point of things. And what could be more important than to work out the purpose of the universe?
Yet in a certain sense, the question is meaningless. It is also self-serving and self-deluding, given that what we really want to know when we ask about the purpose of the universe is, what is my place in the universe? Or rather, give me an answer to the question that highlights my importance within the function of the universe. Our quest for a meaningful meaning to the universe is rarely objective , but often subjective in even formulating the question.
For instance, when people say that they say, I believe in a God (see below), what they are really saying is, I believe that I am important. I believe any teleological explanation for the existence of the universe must place me at its absolute centre. That I, one small part of one ordinary planet, orbiting one ordinary star in one ordinary galaxy in what is, in all likelihood, one ordinary universe, am somehow still special. That I am the centre of a universe in which no centre exists. Or, in the inverse, but equally valid cosmological view, a universe in which every point is as central as any other. Either way, the universe is as devolved and decentralised as it is possible to be.
Yet the question, as we say, is meaningless. After all, why should the universe have any point, other than the one from which it began its existence at the big bang? What if the meaning of life is that life is meaningless? Which may be a depressing answer, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true. After all, the trans Atlantic slave trade and the holocaust are depressing, but they still took place (no matter what idiots think).
Conversely, maybe the question has an extremely simple answer. Something like, the purpose of the universe is to expand and create. That is what the universe does at face value at least. From some form of singularity, an unfathomable amount of energy was thrown out to create an expanding universe. Out of that energy, matter was created, stars and galaxies were formed, giving rise to habitable planets on which sentient beings arose to look into the night sky and ask from where all of this creation came.
From this we might derive a similar drive for human existence. The meaning of life is to expand one’s awareness and to create, either through basic biological reproduction, or by outpourings of artistic expression. Or both.
This is some lefty, liberal hippy shit, to be sure, but few other ideas sit so well in the habitable zone between finding an answer to life, the universe, and everything that speaks to the human condition, while retaining something of the reality of the universe. Rather than interpreting the wishes of an irrational, contradictory god that exists largely in our heads and tells us what we want to hear, at least the existence and actions of the universe play out above our heads in nightly repertoire. If only someone would bother to turn off the lights.
What does any of this have to do with Douglas Adams? A good question. Nothing, except that Adams appreciated the meaningless of searching for a meaning to life. Perhaps the most famous section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is that of Deep Thought. Deep Thought is a giant supercomputer built by an ancient civilisation to come up with an answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything. He mulls it over for seven and a half million years and finally announces that the answer is forty two. An even bigger computer, the Earth, then has to be built to figure out what the actual question is for the answer to make any kind of sense.
This is cyclical nonsense done for comic effect, as with much of Adams’s writing (see, below), but the answer Deep Thought gives is as meaningful and valid as any teleological explanation humans have developed for the purpose of the universe.
In many ways Deep Thought is a grand skit upon the function of religion, particularly the various Christian schisms. Speculative questions are developed to the try to fit the answer to a question (How many roads must a man walk down? Forty two.). They are no less nonsensical than the attempts to try and resolve the various contradictions and absurdities found in the Bible.
Deep Thought and Forty Two reinforce the universal truth that if one asks a stupid question, one will get a stupid answer. That absurd axioms can only lead to further absurdities. Humanity is not the be all and end of the universe and any ideology attempting to place human beings at its centre, let alone select human minorities, are doomed to failure and are right to be ridiculed. As such, forty two is as valid an answer to the absurd question of life, the universe, and everything as anything else. Other valid answers include: the square root of minus one, mauve, a slice of lemon (wrapped around a large gold brick), the dodecahedron, or a liquid which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
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| "It was a tough assignment." |
Theology and Metaphysics
"I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist, and so therefore you don't. QED."
Perhaps the most famous proposition in all of philosophy is Rene Descartes’s statement: Je pense donc je suis. This is usually presented in Latin (Descartes originally wrote it in French): Cogito Ergo Sum. However, we know it from its English translation: I think, therefore I am.
Reading Descartes’s rationale in reaching this conclusion is still impressive nearly four hundred years after it was first developed. What can I really know? Descartes asks. I know that my senses do not faithfully reproduce the sensations of my surroundings. Sometimes they deceive me and make me see things that are not really there. One thinks of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, when the ghost of Marley asked him why he doubts the evidence of his eyes:
"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"
Moreover, how can I know that what my senses tell me about the world around me are in any way accurate? This might all be a grand illusion. I might be a brain in a jar hooked up to some artificial reality. I might be living in the Matrix or some other form of virtual reality. This might be a simulation. Descartes of course did not quite think in these terms.
The only thing that I can say with any confidence is that as I am able to think and ask such questions as, how do I know that I exist, I must, on some level, exist. Everything that I see and experience around me may well be part of one grand delusion, but there is some part of me that is able to think, which is evidence for some form of existence, whatever form that existence might take.
Er, excuse me, who am I?
Hello?
Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life?
What do I mean by who am I?
Calm down, get a grip now … oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It’s a sort of … yawning, tingling sensation in my … my … well I suppose I’d better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let’s call it my stomach.
It is a brilliant piece of reasoning, which makes what follows it all the more depressing. In my Penguin Classics copy of Discourse on the Method and the Meditations, Descartes turns his attention to the existence of God. Apropos of nothing, Descartes argues that God must exist. He has already successfully argued that the senses deceive us into believing the existence of things that are not there. We hallucinate and daydream and fully dream when we close our eyes at night and slip into unconsciousness. Yet this rationale does not translate into Descartes’s thinking for things that remain entirely invisible and unknowable to us.
Whether you believe or do not believe in God (I am very much in the later camp), is irrelevant in this matter. God is in many ways a collective hallucination for people who believe in such things, but one which is no more verifiable than whether human existence is one big computer simulation. If we are unable to confirm the evidence of our eyes, how can we say anything about the thoughts in our head? Which is what beliefs are: Desires for how we wish the universe to act and to be like, but without any empirical evidence to support those wishes. The same often applies for political beliefs or support for one particular sports team.
To be fair to Descartes, he was living at a time of great religious persecution, where to even suggest that the existence of God might be a matter for doubt could have landed him in serious trouble with the religious authority of his day. As such, he had to make an argument for the existence for God, even if he did so in such a haphazard fashion that it is difficult to take seriously. Yet it is also an example of how theology does not conform to the rigours of the scientific method found in other branches of philosophy and the sciences.
Douglas Adams references such lack of rigour in interviews he gave in his lifetime. He notes his education at Brentwood School, where scientific and philosophical concepts were taught with careful attention, using reason to elucidate the journey from first principles to a consistent and provable theory. Yet, as a Church of England school, when the focus turned to religious education, those same rigorous methods were nowhere to be found. Here reasoning seemed to rest on the simple axiom of: just because. Like Descartes justification for the existence of God, Adams’s teachers built theological arguments on castles made of sand (or Jenga blocks) and apropos of nothing.
This mindset is then parodied in the Hitchhiker’s Guide rationale for the non-existence of God. God cannot exist, because the existence of the Babel Fish proves he exists and proof denies faith, which is all that religion and the belief in God are based upon. It is a paradox (see below), but one which pokes fun at the idea that it is impossible to prove a negative. You can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but you can prove that he does exist, which for religion would be almost as bad. If God were real and the Bible was literally true, many people in religious authority would be in a lot of trouble.
We cannot prove the non-existence of God, but we can show that his existence solves nothing metaphysical. The philosopher Bertrand Russell learned this lesson early in his young life, turning him from a believer into a lifelong atheist. God is invoked as the creator of the universe; the prime mover that gave movement to the universe and set the planets and stars in motion. But then the question becomes, but who created God? Theology tells us that God just is. But if God can just be then we can equally argue that the universe just is. There is nothing special about the existence of a God’s role in the universe that cannot equally be said for a universe that arose all by itself. A godless universe doesn’t solve anything, but it also doesn’t complicate the vexed question of the origin of the universe. Indeed, it simplifies matters considerably.
Douglas Adams described himself as a radical atheist. A Dawkinsist, as he often called himself, in reference to his friend, the biologist, Richard Dawkins. Adams famously said of religion and the supernatural, “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
Yet he could also write books that feature UFOs, ghosts, time travelling college rooms, séances, and electronic monks. Adams recognised that fiction operates under different rules to non-fiction. It is possible to consider the mythical and the mystical when writing escapist tales. Which is where they should remain. Such things have no place in considering real world solutions for real world phenomena.
Paradoxes
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
Paradoxes. Many philosophers have paradoxes associated with them. Mathematical paradoxes, like Zeno’s Paradox. Logical paradoxes, like Russell’s Paradox. The Socratic paradox that all I know is that I know nothing. Or Epimenides, a Cretan philosopher, who said that all Cretans are liars. The paradox is often used by philosophers to test the limits of knowledge or logic, or to examine the general limitations of language to convey useful and internally consistent information.
Douglas Adams’s work is littered with paradoxical ideas and aphorisms. We have already seen in the previous section the idea that proof that God exists is ultimately a logical proof for his non-existence. There are many other examples.
One such example is the story of the Improbability Drive. This is a space propulsion drive that uses improbability as its powering force. The drive itself is invented by a student who recognises that such a machine is virtually impossible, so he works out just how improbable it is and inputs that number into a computer. He then creates the drive out of thin air and is killed by his contemporaries for being a smart arse.
The tale of the Improbability Drive can in part be seen as a satire on the study of cosmogony, the study of the beginning of the universe, as well as theology. In any explanation for the beginning of the universe, there is the problem of infinite regress. As we saw in the previous section (see above), for anything that creates the universe, whether it be God or the Big Bang, there is then the question of what created the creator. One solution is that our universe is one of innumerable universes sitting on a manifold called a brane. But then what created the brane?
This is an old philosophical chestnut that has been incorporated into many an apocryphal tale. The classic one is found in Stephen Hawkins’s A Brief History of Time. An old lady attends a cosmological lecture by a philosopher about the nature of the solar system and the universe at large. At the end of the lecture she objects, saying that everyone knows that the Earth in fact sits on the back of a turtle. The philosopher smugly asks her what does the turtle then rest upon. The woman replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”
An improbable invention that is created by calculating how improbable is its existence is one very clever way around the idea of infinite regress. Perhaps one day science or philosophy will develop a theory quite so deft to explain the existence of the universe.
In the third Hitchhiker book, Life, the Universe and Everything, Arthur Dent learns how to fly by teaching himself to the throw himself at the ground and miss. The paradox is that one cannot do it voluntarily. The trick is to distract oneself at the crucial moment so that one is unaware the ground is looming up below. The idea that one can perform the impossible, even miraculous, by simple virtue of being unaware of what one is doing is highly paradoxical. It serves as a plot device in the third and fourth books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.
Another paradox, that is never explained, is how Zaphod Beeblebrox is great grandfather to his own great grandfather. That is to say that he is from a long line of Zaphod Beeblebroxes, of which he is the first and his great grandfather is the fourth. All we are told is that it involved a contraceptive and a time machine.
This, of course, is a variation on the Grandfather Paradox, where a person goes back in time and kills their own grandfather before he can sire a son and so the grandson is never born to go back in time and kill their grandfather. But then the grandfather isn’t killed, the grandson is born and can go back in time to kill their grandfather. At this point we encounter our old friend, infinite regress.
Although one of the ways out of the Grandfather Paradox is to introduce the idea of parallel worlds. That as soon as one goes back in time and changes anything, one creates a different version of reality that exits in parallel with the original universe. The grandfather is killed in the new version of reality, but continues to exist in the first reality and no paradox is required. Indeed, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics holds true, both universes already exist and killing one’s grandfather would simply move one from one universe into the other.
Another broadly paradoxical idea that plays into this is the idea of an artificial universe. A writer for the Hitchhiker’s Guide has set up an artificial universe in his office so that he can research stories in the galaxy, but still go to parties near the guide’s offices at night. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, this is used to protect Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Beeblebrox is be executed by being placed in the Total Perspective Vortex, a device which shows its victim the entire, infinite enormity of the universe and their place in it, frying their brain in the process. However, when Beeblebrox is subjected to the Vortex, he has entered the artificial universe and not left it.
This alternate universe, it turns out, has been set up for the sole purpose of protecting Beeblebrox from the Total Perspective Vortex. So when he is shown the sheer scale of the universe, he realises that he is the most important object in it (which in the alternative universe, he is). Not a good idea for a man of Zaphod’s already massive ego. He in all other respects continues to interact with the real universe and its inhabitants. Only when he has successfully survived his exposure to the Vortex is the universe turned off and he can get on with his real mission.
The real mission is to find the man who rules the galaxy. He is a lonely old man who doubts everything; even his own existence. The galactic government keep him out of the way and cut off from news or information of any sort to ask him hypothetical questions which are then used to govern the universe, solving the problem of people wanting to be politicians being kept away from the business of actual decision making (see above). A paradox is solved in the process.
There are many other paradoxical examples in Adams’s work. Ships that hang in the air the way that bricks don’t. The man who proclaims nothing is true, but is later found to be lying (shades of Epimenides’s Cretan). The golden age of the galaxy where everyone was rich and no one was poor; at least no one worth speaking of.
Adams’s work is filled with logical inconsistencies from
which his comedy arises. But beneath the surface there is to be found much
depth. For my money, he was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th
century.
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| Douglas Adams |
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