Fiction

Chapter 10 - Edmund

Edmund is the most cynical person Bertram knows. 

He's intelligent and often taciturn in mixed company and doesn't suffer fools gladly, unless he's engaged in one of his hypothetical diatribes or privately amusing some woman.  Given an appropriate audience he's witty and amusing:  prone to mock those not smart enough to understand his sarcasm or not quick enough to respond in kind. 

In the absence of another with similar background to enjoy his bon mot, Bertram suspects Edmund himself can be sufficient audience. He's overheard Edmund responding ambiguously, entirely for his own entertainment, to the banalities of someone less knowledgeable.  This will usually be a pretty woman, him gazing into her eyes with furrowed brow, resting on her every word and nodding sagely at each point, or perhaps contributing enigmatically, as she rabbits-on about transcendence or astrology or homeopathic remedies or the healing power of crystals, all of which he finds very amusing.

Like Byron he's 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' and like Byron he's very popular with women. 

In other words, he can be a real bastard. 

He's a man of whom one should be cautious, particularly when he's around Samantha who, despite her being nine years his senior, is charmed by his air of mystery and wit.  But Bertram prefers his company to that of Ross, his other son-in-law, in spite of all.  Not that he dislikes Ross, it's just that he and Edmond have the common ground of children the same age who are close friends.  And Edmund is more intellectually challenging.

As Edmund is Anne's husband and Alexandra's father Bertram arranged to meet Edmund at his sailing club yesterday to discuss the future of the family, after he, Bertram, and Miranda are no more. 

As Friday is approaching perhaps it was the last time they will ever get a chance to speak one on one, and he should at least do the fatherly thing and ask for an assurance that Anne and Alexandra will be cared for after he is gone - as if they can't look after themselves. Maybe it's Edmund he should be worried for?

They took seats on the veranda, looking out over the harbour, the white hulls of the yachts bobbing in the small swell, the seagulls carving the clear air under the brilliant blue sky.  As if making small-talk, Edmund opened the conversation with the news that his fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Alexandra, liked an old movie by Alfred Hitchcock called 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'.  "It's nice that he's so proud of his child," thought Bertram, but wondered why Edmund wanted to share this piece of trivia with him. 

"Is it a good film?" 

"1956 suspense thriller starring James Stewart and Doris Day, takes place in Morocco and London, remake of an earlier one, 1934, also by Hitchcock."

"Is it apropos of anything?"

"Apart from the appropriateness of the title to us both, the '56 film features a hit song that is material to the plot:  Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)."

"Oh, I see.  The theme for today?"

"It's nothing new of course.  Are you familiar with the The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám?"

"Of course. It was essential reading if you wanted to be taken seriously when I was a student. It's a collection of verses translated from the original Persian and written, what, about a thousand years ago?"

"Yes, a little over, around the turn of the eleventh century. So, you will also know that it has a fatalistic theme and several verses argue that all history is predetermined, for example:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

A little later, this:

With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead,
And then of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed:
Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read."

"Yes, both quite famous.  And it's my recollection that the thrust of the poems, or at least their translation into English, is that life is transient, and has no special meaning beyond its enjoyment:  A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou.  I've heard you argue something similar."

"The futility of trying to make a difference in a predetermined Universe, or when rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it," confirmed Edmund. "Even then it was an old idea. The Greek Philosopher Epicurus had made a similar argument for inevitability and for the pursuit of happiness and contemplation around 300 BC."

"And yet we obviously do change the future.  With my assured death only three days away I'm free to do whatever I want. I can commit any crime I like without judicial penalty. As we know, some in my situation do go on a killing spree.  If I decided to kill you now, I could irreparably change the future for our family and in due course that would change the history of the entire world."

"Oh, I don't argue with that!  Only with the presumption that you have any choice in the matter.  I'm reasonably sure the probability that you could go against your nature in these particular circumstances is minute. I'm confident that given your conciliatory and civilised nature and these pleasant circumstances, despite no impediment whatsoever, you have no intention of killing me." 

Then he'd continued: 

"But you might be inclined to kill me if I goad you to do it in some way, like telling you how sexually compliant I find Sam after she's been restrained and how she likes to be debased.  Your lovely young wife really is something special.  A true masochist.  Shall I go into sordid, sensual and oh-so-erotic details?  Shall I tell you how she cries out for me, but keeps coming back for more?"

Bertram recalls his building sense of horror and loss and betrayal, culminating in a spontaneous surge of rage against Edmund the instant he said: "coming back for more". 

Their small table was upturned as if by an unseen force.  His hand is still sore.  Their drinks lifted in slow motion before his eyes, their contents forming globules in the air, before the glasses turned downwards and resumed their normal speed to be smashed on the floor.  The dark beer spread bloodlike across the red hardwood timber; the pool hideously decorated with glinting shards of glass.  Masochistic horror.

But Edmund had fully anticipated all this.  He calmly rose and righted the table, pointing out how easily he had initiated Bertram's rage, just as he was now going in to buy two more drinks:

"Same again?"

Bertram had had time to compose himself, and for the adrenaline to subside, before Edmund returned with fresh drinks. He was again sitting in a relaxed manner looking out over the bay, contemplating life.  After he accepted the offered drink:

"Cheers!"

He asked Edmund if he thought we are ever fully responsible for what we do?  Or do we always react to the world as we are bound to, and potentially predictably given our nature and past and present circumstances, as Edmund had not long ago demonstrated?

Edmund had been equivocal.  He proposed that the future is either written as Omar Khayyám argues: 'With Earth's first Clay' or there is some random element that destroys this predictability.  He talked about information theory, and the impossibility of a 'noise' free transmission, and quantum mechanics, that makes our decisions fundamentally unpredictable.  The concept of noise comes from old analogue radio signals or telephone messages which always have a little crackle or hiss that can't be fully eliminated.  This static is random data that is distinguished from the useful, meaningful, data.

There is no denying that the future is as it seems: entirely contingent on what we do this instant.  But if what we do is entirely determined by the past and that by the previous pasts, then we have no say in the matter.  The question is, is there room for a component of randomness or 'noise' in the signal from the past that could allow different and unpredictable outcomes from the same starting conditions?

Bertram is not entirely across information theory or quantum mechanics but he knows Edmund is not just making it up; others seem to agree with him.

He'd surprised himself.  His actions had been more instinctive than deliberate and by 'playing him' Edmund had made his point. 

But en passant he noticed that Edmund didn't take any pains to claim that he had just made up his allegations about Samantha. 

"Oh well," he'd thought, "only three days left and then she can do what she likes".

After his adrenalin surge, he was now relaxed again and enjoying this perfect day on the edge of the harbour.  Two very attractive girls in bikinis were putting their kayaks in the water from the beach in the adjacent park, where little children were laughing and running between the abundant beds of flowers under the tall palm trees.  Across the bay at the chandler's someone was playing a Mozart aria that he could just make out: Die Zauberflöte.  He was relishing these last days of his life.

He realised one reason he had no desire for retribution was that his paramount concern now is: what his family, friends and the world at large will think about him after he is gone.  His last desire is a place in posterity.

So, was he really there with Edmund because of his concern for his family or was it really about himself?  Did he really care anymore what they might do when he was no more?  Were they just players in his drama, his life, each engaged in their own personal drama, in which he was just a soon to be retired player, soon to be deceased father and grandfather?  An: ex-husband, ex-partner, ex-lover, ex-manager, ex-employee. 

Did he really care about the future at all?  Well yes, posterity!  His ego, his sense of self-worth demanded that he be well regarded; that he had not spent 'this brief candle' pointlessly or in vain; that the world was a better place for his existence.   But there was such a short time left to bask in the glory of his own achievements; to indulge in self-congratulation.

The family and selected friends were writing their eulogies.  And he would enjoy some acknowledgement on Friday before he was no more.  It was one luxury he could enjoy that is unavailable to people who die unexpectedly. They never get to know what nice things people say about them at their funeral or how much people assert they will be missed. Eulogies and commemorations are for those who remain alive.  The dead are already oblivious.

Maybe he would be admired after his death and spoken of for years to come.  But what was the point of that, he would not be around to enjoy it.  Think of poor Vincent Van Gogh who never knew that he was a great painter and died in self-doubt and poverty, never having been acknowledged.  Even Mozart died relatively unacknowledged, except as a child prodigy.  And conversely, think of those who lived dissolute lives of pleasure and were only discovered to be wrongdoers after their death.  They died happy, oblivious to the ordure that subsequently attached to their name and reputation.

His ostensive reason for meeting Edmund, the future of the family, seemed to have evaporated.   Had Edmund engineered this change of priorities?  But then if that was so, Edmund too had no actual control over his actions.  Free will, our ability to act without being obliged to do so by our nature and circumstances, must be an illusion.

So, it seemed more important to pursue the question of our ability to exercise free will. Can he actually make changes to the present, now, that are contrary to actions that could be predicted, that were inevitable the day he was born?  Can anyone?

For example, did Napoleon or Winston Churchill have any control over the actions they took or decisions they made, even at the most miniscule level, like farting, privately smelling their armpit or changing their socks.

Looking at the glass shards and spilled drink that a staff member was now cleaning up he asked Edmund:

"Do you think that those shards of glass fell exactly as they had to, in exactly that pattern, given the physics of that instant?  Because had they not, that person would now need to sweep differently, to make different decisions, perhaps taking longer or less time, like getting that piece of glass over by the rail.  They'd have made a unique decision, not one laid down since the beginning of time.  The future would have changed.  A second either way in someone's life is time to avoid a future accident or to suffer one, perhaps the extra time taken getting that particular stray piece of glass has saved her a burnt hand in the kitchen."

Edmund was equivocal:

"As I said I'm not sure how free anyone can be it depends on the degree of 'noise' in the system, because it is only that tiny degree of system randomness that allows the glass shards to fall differently, assuming the exact same starting conditions. In the manufacturing process lack of variability, repeatability, is equated with quality.  With great care and proper systems complex events and processes can be replicated with surprising levels of predictability.  But as I said earlier, information theory gives us hope that nothing is completely repeatable, noise free.  And so all events have a small, potentially random, variability."

"So, you are denying Doris Day's: Whatever Will Be, Will Be?"

"Well at one level that's a meaningless statement, a tautology.  But at another it suggests that the future is already decided.  People have understood the ethical difficulties around our apparent lack of responsibility for our own actions ever since the first philosopher sat down and gazed at his or her navel."

"The solution to the impasse has often been to hypothesise some external random or calculated influence that breaks the chain of causality. For example, playful gods, or more recently, just one god's enigmatic, ineffable plan for Mankind - his supreme creation," he continued.

"Well, if they believed a robber couldn't avoid robbing it didn't stop them chopping off his hands," Bertram had remarked.

"You are just echoing the modern liberal view that if people are not fundamentally liable for their actions, we should moderate their punishment:  My client was under the influence Your Honour; my client had a break-down; my client's a half-wit.  Nonsense!" 

"It's because most actions are determined by the perpetrators' circumstances that we must punish criminals. The outcome becomes the past and predetermines the future.  In law, action and consequences must be clearly defined.  Spare the rod and spoil the child," he'd continued.

"That's so far from your behaviour with you own child, and the other kids, that I know you don't believe it!  Didn't Kant argue that there was a Categorical Imperative that defined everyone's underlying ethics?"

"There is certainly an underlying ethical standard essential for our species survival," Edmund agreed. "Early childhood studies show that all normal humans have certain species-wide behavioural patterns.  Just as a normal but motherless kitten will still know to bury its faeces, all normal humans and a number of other primates have the urge to affiliate, expressed in a corresponding core set of moral precepts like accepting authority and a sense of what's not fair." 

"But as I seriously doubt the permanence, importance or relevance of Mankind to the Universe, any ethical proposition, like Kant's, that involves us having a unique role in creation or in the wider universe has to be nonsense."

"Yet I agree with him that for us to be able to act responsibly there has to be something disrupting the chain of absolute causality. We could agree on most things if he had defined God as random noise."

"So, God is quantum or information noise?" Bertram had asked whimsically.

"On balance, I would prefer to believe that my interaction with the world is not completely predictable; because the world is not.  So that when I say or write something, it is me doing it, not just the inevitable outcome of the cellular colony that is me reacting according to its present structure and the immediate stimulus.  Information theory gives me hope that it may be me, whoever that is, making the decision.  The trouble is, that we have no way of predicting the impact of that 'noise'.  It is by nature, random and unpredictable. It's outside our control or volition. So, it can hardly be called free will."

"So, I might not die on Friday?" Bertram had exclaimed, half-joking.

"Unfortunately, it's very likely you will.  If the future was that uncertain you could not rely on this club being here in an hour's time or falling glasses accelerating towards the centre of mass of the Earth, as we are confident that they have always done in the past.  The uncertainties, particularly in the short term, are likely to be very small."

"Damn!" Bertram said with a smile, he was enjoying this discussion.

"Of course, we've been dealing with uncertainty for a very long time. The insurance industry depends on it. Just as we defeat noise in digital messages by sending 'check bits' and bytes to see if data has been sent correctly, and repeat sending that string of data until the check tallies at the receiver.   So, in everyday life we have all sorts of little ways of coping with future uncertainties and of putting things back on track.  Like this comely young woman ready with pan and brush to sweep up after our little accident." 

The young woman had blushed brightly.  She was Bogan and unlikely to be familiar with antique words but she'd obviously guessed that 'comely' was a complement.  And Edmund was smiling nicely at her, flirting. And he's good looking and obviously well-off.

"The problem is," he said, "that most people want to do good. We learn goodness at our mother's breast and unless we are psychopaths or sociopaths it's hard to shake it off."

"Now that's the Edmund I will miss!" Bertram had declared. "The problem of 'Original Goodness', that's a new one. So, what about Original Sin?"

"Oh, that's just a construct to explain away evil and retribution in a world with only one all-powerful and supposedly benign Creator," he'd replied dismissively. "Although how the sin of man born of God can explain evil in an almost infinite universe I've no idea. Perhaps it only happens around here. Theology bores me."

"So, you say, but you're always on about it."

"If we have Original Goodness, how do you explain evil men like Hitler."

"Are you kidding! Hitler thought he was saving the Arian race.  He believed absolutely in his cause.  At one stage, like Stalin, he was going to become a priest, and he remained a mystic and theist, doing God's work.  He was a genuine war hero, awarded twice for bravery.  He just believed ridiculous things absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt. He was exactly like the Christian Crusaders; or the Muslim Jihadists of the 21st century; and like all the other perpetrators of mass murder and genocide. They were all in the thrall of some idiotic belief.  He was another bloody do-gooder.  As a neo-Kantian he might have claimed the 'rightness' of his cause. No one but a 'true believer' commits such crimes.  And moment's reflection tells one that sociopaths can't lead a mass movement. The leader needs to be empathetic and persuasive. Hitler is reported to have been personally charming and he loved animals and children.  The followers of charismatic leaders need to be certain of the rightness of their cause.  That it justifies their actions; that it is for the best, the glorious future. Young men need to be stirred to leave home to go and fight for the cause.  They all think they are doing good, even when it involves mass murder."

"That's not quite the view that's taken by the victims," Bertram had remarked.

"Well obviously not. It's a bit difficult to forgive someone who thinks the best thing they can do is to put you and your family in a gas chamber or wall you off, so you can't thrive or escape, then blow up your entire suburb: murdering wives, mothers, children, neighbours and friends."

"Accusing their leader of being a 'sociopath' is probably at the mild end of the abuse spectrum," Edmund suggested.

"All that seems so unbelievable on a beautiful day like this.  How can someone be so uncaring so cruel to another, all in the pursuit of goodness?" 

"The problem lies in the do-gooders' idea of what is right and proper. Their world view. And that they often get that from their mother too. Once off the breast, maternal succour and early teaching is augmented or modified, initially by other relatives and teachers to produce a world view, a belief system. Often religion is involved."

"It's no accident that Catholic Christians have children who are, at least initially, Catholics, Hasidic Jews have Hassidics, Sunni Muslims have Sunnis and so on.  To survive, every religion must impart its beliefs to future generations. And their intentions are always good or right: Paths to Righteousness."

"The individual's innately 'good' childhood is then acted upon by the inevitabilities, or perhaps accidents of their lives, over which they have little or no control," Edmund had continued.

Watching a seagull suddenly swerve and swoop over the pretty yachts moored in the bay, Bertram had been moved to speculate: "So suppose there was some infinitesimal, random event, or signal noise as you call it, at the beginning of the 20th century that changed things so that the mass killings and genocides were not inevitable.  Say, due to a mixed signal in its brain, an unfortunate pigeon swooped into the bullet's path, just as it was on its way to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.  So, the assassination that started the First World War failed."

But before he could take his amusing speculation, on the apparently random acts of birds due to signal noise in their nervous systems any further, he was cut short by Edmund's interjection:  "That's one of those stupid 'what if's'. Then you and I would not have come into existence and would not be here discussing it.  Similar people might exist, even that's unlikely, but their past would be vastly different and they would be discussing that past instead."

"Ok. My error. I should've expected your standard answer. You've been saying something similar for as long as I've known you."

"But I still find people who want to say that 'if only' some past event had not happened the world would be a better place," said Edmund.  "I want to shout: You fool!  This world, as we know it, would not be here at all.  In particular, you and I and all you love would not be here to enjoy, or suffer, in this particular existence."

"So going back a step.  In your view it's do-gooders who are invariably responsible for genocide. Is the same true for all the ills of the world?"

"Unfortunately, we are all 'Original Goodness' victims.  Let's say that we support conventional Utilitarian morality and hold that we should choose our actions to maximise happiness and minimise suffering.  And that anything that runs counter to that goal is bad."

"Who wouldn't agree with that? It's like motherhood," Bertram had declared.

"Just so! But when you put it in the terms of the The Rubáiyát, or the Epicureans: 'there is no purpose to life other than the pursuit of pleasure', then many a do-gooder will have a wide range of objections based on their particular world view: What about duty?  What about love of and for others? What of family and tradition? What about spending hours praising some deity? What of bringing the light of true knowledge and God's sacrifice to the heathens? What of revenge or retribution for some past or perceived hurt? What of racial purity and eliminating contamination? and so on; and so on."

"They can't help themselves. They believe absolutely in their view of what is good and what is right, and start involving themselves in the lives of others, who were given different core values as children and consequently disagree."

"As I said, we all do it to some extent," he'd continued. "And it is like motherhood. Together with genetic memory, an innate sense of fairness and co-operation that can be demonstrated on all primates, our mother's care is where we all learn this tendency to aggressive goodness in the first place."

"So, your solution is not to try to be good?  Or not to have a world view?  If that's the case you've failed, at least as far as the world view is concerned." 

"No. My solution is to be as detached and non-involved as possible.  I learnt that the hard way from my father."

"I haven't met your father, he lives overseas, doesn't he?"

"Well, you're never going to meet him now. Too late for that," Edmund had said, being factual rather than deliberately cruel.  "No, he's in an institution. He had a major breakdown after he inadvertently killed three billion people.  You see he was involved, a do-gooder with a world view that he was passionate about."

"That's ridiculous!  He can't have personally killed three billion. The only thing that's ever killed that many people was climate change."

"Yes, he was personally responsible.  He ran the International Climate Change Authority and was a true believer.  Temperatures were climbing inexorably and he and many others believed that we would reach a tipping point at which catastrophic climate change would occur.  All the science seemed to back it up and anyone who was sceptical was shouted down and received no research funds."

"But that wasn't his fault.  He was right, we did reach the tipping point. The sceptics were wrong."

"Only unexpectedly the Earth suddenly cooled, not heated," Edmund had remarked, questioningly.

"That was due to changes in ocean currents.  An old movie: The Day after Tomorrow even predicted it."

"So everyone was told. What few people know, because all references are protected and securely encrypted in The Cloud, is that my father and his team decided to geoengineer the climate with ocean iron fertilisation and high atmospheric sulphur aerosols to stave off the predicted catastrophe. But their computer models turned out to be inadequate to accurately predict the outcome. Maybe signal 'noise' was to blame. So, they way over-compensated and precipitated the start of the next interglacial.  My father was trying to save the human race.  Instead, he starved three billion to death."

"Wow.  No wonder it is put down to an act of God, brought on by our collective sin of overconsumption. Accidentally killing three billion is not trivial and there would likely be unpleasant recriminations." 

"So, your reaction has been to withdraw to become an amused observer of human foibles. And a computer nerd?"

"That's right.  Because it was not an 'accident'.  It was deliberate.  Trying to do good with insufficient information. It taught me that whatever we do has consequences, but that we have no way of knowing what they will be, except in the very short term.  Joan of Arc inevitably led to Hitler. Ghandi inadvertently caused the death of tens of millions. Even our best computer models can't predict the influence of random noise in complex systems like the climate or society.  And the longer into the future we project the more complicit we become in the future of everyone to come.  Inevitably if do-gooding humans continue to have their way, our future will include continuing genocides and other evils.  Do-gooders will continue to interfere with the right of others to enjoy their lives.  Maybe computers can learn to do it better."

"So, it was your father's beliefs that led inevitably to the Ten-Two initiative, and my compulsory suicide this Friday!"

"Exactly, and I'm going to miss you."  Unbelievably, Edmund's voice had broken and his eyes watered. Bertram was nonplussed.  It seemed totally out of character. He wanted to embrace his son-in-law but that would be a step too far.  So he just waited for him to compose himself.

"Now, enough of that," said Edmund, clearing his throat. "What was it you wanted to ask me when we sat down?  It was to be a good parent and ask if I'll look after Samantha and Anne and Mary, wasn't it?  Well, I can assure you I'm already doing my best to ensure their happiness."

Cynical, Byronic, Edmund was back. 

Given their earlier conversation, Bertram is not entirely sure he liked this order of priority that put his wife above Edmund's, his daughter. And why was his other daughter Mary included in the list but not his youngest daughter Angela?  Was his assurance that he would assure their future happiness made in the spirit of a reluctant 'do-gooder', or was it rather in the Rabelaisian spirit of the The Rubáiyát?  

"And as to Alexandra and Charles," Edmund had added: "I need to have a serious adult talk to them about their taking actions that impact on the future."

They fell silent with their own thoughts, gazing out, as a large ship sailed across the distant background, obscuring the far shore.  As it disappeared, somewhere up harbour and into the future, they both rose and spontaneously embraced for half a minute.

Then they left, unable to speak, each to their separate ways.