In the past half hour I have driven in pouring rain to a petrol station to buy some cigarettes and in that half hour I confronted myself with 11 questions and they are listed below. The 11 questions led me to the first one. So, let’s make a start.
1) What is Vincent’s law?
2) How much time have we got?
3) When did Jesus know he was the Messiah? Does it matter?
4) Is it forgivable to take drugs?
5) How come we run out?
6) Why do accidents happen?
7) Why don’t they happen?
8) Why does Ahmed smoke?
9) Why did a phone call cost £5 in Ecclefechan?
10) Why do we look out of the window in trains?
11) Whatever became of the friends and relatives of those who died in 9/11?
12) Why did Heather write and like the Benny Hill article?
So, where do we start? Vincent’s law. Murphy has a law. Parkinson has also got a law and maybe I, Vincent, also have a law. Murphy’s law is that if something can go wrong it will go wrong, despite what precautions you take to prevent that. Parkinson’s law is more complicated than that: it is that the amount of work requiring to be done expands as the resources available for doing it also expand. Vincent’s law is that the more you think about something, the closer you get to an answer, and the greater the amount of thinking that remains to be done. Vincent’s law is an extrapolation of Parkinson’s. Thank you, Parkinson, except I only concluded that after thinking about it a little more. So it was mine all along. [Sticks tongue out at Parkinson; and boots Murphy into touch.]
Plato was a thinker and he thought his whole life long, and it was a long life. He looked at democracy and considered it, ultimately, a bad idea. Thinking is what takes the thinker from a simple “what” to a “why”, and, without wanting to seem sceptical, that, I believe, is where the majority of mankind stops.
I just wrote to the council worker who coordinates help for refugee Ukrainians here in our town. I am helping a couple from Mykolaiv whose lives have been destroyed, but am having difficulty relating to the lady in question – her husband is seriously injured in hospital after defending the gap site that is now Mariupol. I’m pushing the council worker to press for some answers – why does the Ukrainian lady not contact me? I have not given up on her, but the worker asks “Would you like to accompany someone else?” and I said, “No.” There is a reason for this and I must know it. When I know it, I can help Oksana. Now is not the time to hook off and try my guardianship skills on another guinea pig. If we’re to achieve something, perhaps both of us need to learn, from each other, and hooking off defeats that purpose entirely:
No. Maybe, in addition. Oksana is not forthcoming. But she is that for a reason. And I want to know what it is. Because, when I know what that is, I may be able to help her. But, there are rules about help:
If you see a need and offer help, your help may be refused, for reasons of pride; or accepted, for acquiescence. They will then become a pain in the butt. You will not be thanked.
If there is no need, you will be rebuffed.
If the person in need asks for help, they will thank you, and perhaps ask for more. Asking for more help is a way to say “thank you”.
This seems illogical, but you’re in the helping business, Charlotte. So ask yourself if this is borne out by your experience. It is illogical that bees can fly. But they do.
Help is given altruistically but, if you do it for yourself, you will not have any satisfaction from it. Perhaps self-satisfaction, but not true satisfaction. If you do it out of pure altruism, without caring for yourself, then you will gain more fulfilment from it. Selflessness serves the self, but is given unconsciously. Self-serving disappoints, but is given consciously. Upside-down? Well, try this.
Plato looked at democracy, which is high on the vanguard right now, especially in places where it is under great threat – Brazil, the US, India, Russia, Mexico and Ukraine. Feel free to add your own country.
It is founded on (a) equality of all before the law that rules us all; and (b) the freedom of all to do all that is permitted within the constraints of that law. That is democracy and nothing else. And Plato disapproved. Because (b) sooner or later impinges on (a) to render both null and void. Only the label “democracy” remains, as a travesty of its true self. But, without knowing, I’ll still warrant that Plato at some time embraced democracy as an ideal. Till he saw, not the “what” or even the “why”, but the “why behind the why”, and that’s where you go with thinking after thinking. And that’s where few, if any, do go. Because it starts to turn the world we know upside down. The world we know is in fact seen by us upside down. We correct it with our brains. But what if it really is “upside down” and we correct it incorrectly, by adding our self-interest to the mix?
The commonly held alternative to democracy is autocracy and, because people like committees, since everyone gets to have their say, even if the decision is ultimately out of their control, then people also like democracy, because they think they can change the world with a bit of paper in a black box. But they can’t. You need millions of bits of paper in black boxes to change the world; or a howitzer or two. Because, although millions of bits of paper are a lot of paper, they’re not if you spread the labour effort of placing crosses on them among millions of people. And you can fairly easily get millions of people to put crosses on papers by telling a few lies that just happen to work pretty well in your own favour. Elections are increasingly about voting for the guy who lies least (thinks: or, most; depending on lots of things - although some voters do still vaunt the creditable virtue of having blue eyes). Howitzers are cumbersome and take up more space than bits of paper, but you do generally need fewer of them to bring about change and just one is enough to rid a country of an autocrat, provided it’s the autocrat’s backside it is lined up behind. The overall effort required to change a democratic government is probably about the same as that required to change an autocratic government (barring the intervention of the autocrat’s army, and armies are generally absent at democratic ballots, except in the Donbas regions of Ukraine, of course), so in terms of regime change, democracy has a nose ahead of autocracy, but just a nose. The big advantage with autocracy is knowing which policy you’ll be pursuing next year, next decade and, if you’re lucky, next century. But, the major drawback, which even Plato anticipated in his long lifetime, was getting the wrong kind of autocrat. Bad democratic governments are bad; and bad autocratic governments are simply awful. But, if the conclusion is that democracy and autocracy both suck, someone somewhere needs to put their thinking cap on, and it’s not Beckett’s Lucky. Regardless of what you think or don’t think about autocracy, democracy will never be a water-tight system of government as long as it’s mankind that does the governing. When ants take over the world, democracy should work better.
Fly swats kill flies. When one lands on your finger, you take up the fly swat and then the fly disappears. You wait a few seconds and then continue what you’re doing, put the fly swat down again. Then, the fly comes back. It takes a lot of that before finally, you swat the fly. That is Vincent’s law. Robert the Bruce was inspired by a spider; and I was inspired by a fly. Funny, that.
Next question: how much time have we got? With this question I don’t mean how much time do I have in which to discuss the other 10 questions. I mean literally: how much time have we got until we leave this life? Clearly, in terms of years, months, days, hours, seconds, milliseconds, and nanoseconds, I don’t know the answer to this. We express time in terms of those units of measure, and scientists in centuries gone by sought long and hard to determine the units of measure best suited to putting into conceivable concepts the passage of time. And, in a way, the fact that that needed doing, so that we could keep appointments books and knew when a train was going to arrive at the station in the year 2022, contrasts greatly with how time was conceived of before men sat down and worked out how many degrees there are to a line of longitude and what the circumference of the earth is and where the sun rises in the sky and sets in the sky. I could look it up but it’s really not that important, just exactly when the great scientists of Mesopotamia and Greece and Denmark and England were all looking at apples and training their eyes on the sky and inventing telescopes but, for a huge sweep of time before they did all that, the concept of time was divided into that which could be utilised in tilling the earth, daytime, and that which could not usefully be deployed for that purpose and was therefore dedicated to leisure, to eating, to recreating, to procreating and to just sleeping, night-time: both together, the “day”.* I recently saw a piece on a social media website in which a Frenchman was crossing a desert on a camel’s back in our times, in the company of the camel tender, an Arab gentlemen, who was guiding the Frenchman across the sandy wasteland. The Frenchman asked the Arab what time it was. The Arab looked up into the sky and replied, “We have time enough before sundown, but it’s you who have the wristwatch.” There is something seminal about this reply because, even today, Arabs in the desert consider time in terms of the amount of available daylight and not of the position that the hands of a clock have achieved in their circumnavigation of the dial.
How much time have we got? My mortal answer has to be, still, that I don’t know. But my spiritual answer has to be “forever.” Just as with the ancient day, some of that will be spent in one activity, and that is known; and some of that will be spent in another activity, and that is unknown. My sundown has not yet arrived and I do not know what the night will bring. It may bring a storm, and I may need to run for cover; and it may bring a cup of warm soup and a cuddle and embrace from another, as we nestled down in our bed for the night; and it may bring tasks like tilling the earth, maybe by arc light, or even different from tilling the earth; their nature and content, I am yet to know. I have a sense that the night will not come, however, until this land has, in daylight, been tilled.
When the land has been tilled, then, it will be time for nightfall.
Next question: why do we look out of train windows?
I’m a train buff so I know the answer to this. To know where we are on the journey. I could say more, but hopefully the message is clear.
Two down, the rest will follow.
* It can in fact be argued that the need for “holidays” was rendered redundant by the invention of the electric lightbulb, since feasts and festivals otherwise needed to be organised in daytime before artificial light was invented. With artificial light, we’re able to turn night-time into daytime, but prior to that, a day needed to be cleared in the calendar for such events, which were not just then for some, but for everyone: that way, the feast was worth organising. However, it can also be argued that the need for holidays was in fact doubled as a result of that invention. Both are in fact true. The need for public holidays is outmoded - people do what they like instead of gathering together; but the need for “two weeks off” is great, because we make night into day in our work lives.