Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

The senior barrister, a man who made his livelihood in the comfort of the bar’s protectionist rules, pressed his flubbery lips together but said nothing.

When Staughton and I met in his chambers, for my first performance review, and he told me things that he believed were self-evident, things that went, if not without saying, then without saying very much at all, I was troubled. What part of me was I being asked to give up?

I did have one question for him.

And how was my work these past three months? I asked.

Excellent, he replied.

Unless I’d misread him wildly, Staughton was oblivious to the point I had just made. I felt as if we were rehearsing a play but reading from entirely different scripts.

Of course, I mentioned none of this to Penelope Hampton-Wyvern; I shared none of my stories but kept my discussion to a few words about vague social rules.

I wonder if you might not be quite so confused after all, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. You seem, if I may say so, rather thoughtful and I daresay you’re coming to the bar with a much wider experience of the world than other barristers I know.

Might she be referring to her ex-husband, I thought, the High Court judge and former barrister; might that friendly remark have actually been a little dig elsewhere? James was grinning at me. Emily had not yet returned from her call.

Every part of life has its own ways, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. Don’t you think?

I suppose you’re right.

Are you worried you might miss an important social rule and stumble?

It’s possible, I replied.

Well, you’ll just have to pick up the rules as you go along. And if you stumble, you’ll have to pick yourself up, won’t you? said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

Yes, I will.

Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern addressed her son: I expect you need to be getting on with your packing?

Quite right, he said, standing up. I’m off grouse shooting in Scotland. Do you shoot?

I’ve never yet had occasion, I replied.

James again gave me a smile. It seemed to me a warm and generous smile, a boyish smile. But there was more in that smile, and though I could not know what exactly he had in his mind, I did believe then that his little grin acknowledged the distance I would have to cover to go from not shooting to shooting. Perhaps, I thought, it even acknowledged the distance I had covered to meet the Hampton-Wyverns. Not long afterward, however, I would learn that the Hampton-Wyverns had covered that distance already, going the other way.

James had barely stepped out of the room when Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern leaned forward in her seat.

You seem like an affable young man, she said. You may consider this out of turn but I must say it. Zafar, be careful with my daughter.

Of course, I said earnestly. It was exactly what a solicitous mother might say. In point of fact, I was flattered that she thought of my relationship with her daughter as serious, and I was also gratified to think that Emily must have represented it to her in such a way. I wanted to reassure Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern more, but Emily had appeared at the doorway. I could not immediately tell if she had heard anything of what her mother had said.

* * *

Zafar broke off there to make us both some coffee, but when he resumed his narrative, he did not pick up where he had stopped. At the time, I thought he was just veering off on another aside. Only later, when he talked about meeting Emily in Kabul, did it become apparent that what he framed in general terms was actually an observation drawn from very personal experience. He would return to the Hampton-Wyverns, but now he wanted to talk about Afghanistan and for that he was laying some groundwork.

Many years ago Zafar told me about a TV program he had seen in the junior common room at college. It was a time when liberals in the Church of England were condemning the brutality of Thatcher’s economic project. The archbishop of York appeared on the show, and the presenter, Jonathan Dimbleby, said to him: Your Grace, there is a great upsurge of the urge in people for certainty. Their charge is that you offer them not that kind of certainty but doubt. The archbishop paused to reflect. With his hands clasped, as if in prayer, he replied: Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin? This memory comes back to me now as a sign that his more recent preoccupations have actually been some time in the making.

I have seen serious scientists and mathematicians give talks, said Zafar, and their faces and manner conveyed nothing of the politician’s earnest certitude or confidence, no sign of gravity but of playful levity, as if — I have thought — as if they were a tad embarrassed, as if they didn’t fully accept that anyone else could be interested in what they had to say, or as if they were vaguely uncomfortable with this business of dissemination, a task that is auxiliary to their true calling, which is the inquiry and discovery itself. But now I suspect that this outward appearance may be the natural state of anyone who is in proximity to the truth. The mathematician cannot rely on his authority as a mathematician to carry him one inch of the way. It is not some modesty in the character of the mathematician that tells him so but something in the nature of mathematics itself that reveals the irrelevance of his person. If his mathematics is correct, his written findings are immune to every assault. Authority in the form of experience, authority in the form of worldly wisdom or charisma, such kinds of authority are impotent. The politician’s conviction is a stand-in: Men who want you to know that they are sure in their own minds seldom have the reasons to show on the page. This is what Einstein meant when he said that one author would have been enough.* But it doesn’t stop there. The mathematician knows that nothing empirical, nothing which we are to perceive in this world, can undermine by so much as one whiff of doubt any mathematical claim, and because he knows this, he is free.

The irony is that scientists are much less certain about what they say than politicians, policy makers, and pundits. The certainty of the kind you see in the face of a politician declaiming on tax increases or hear in the voice of a commentator condemning or endorsing a foreign policy decision, or the certainty you detect in the words of an op-ed writer pontificating on one thing or another — I used to think that they arrived at their certainty after considering an issue in great depth and finding that the evidence fell overwhelmingly in favor of a specific position. You must think me naïve ever to have thought this way. But I did. I used to think that a good argument was the midwife to certainty. If, as I now believe, it is the wish that fathers the thought, then certainty is the lingering imprint of a wish on thoughts and arguments, like DNA retained in progeny, acting invisibly but with visible effects.

I don’t know who it was that said that the three greatest feats of science in the twentieth century were Einstein’s theory of relativity, Crick and Watson’s discovery of the double helical structure of DNA, and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Few can doubt the impact of Einstein’s mass-energy equation, and if impact be the measure, then relativity gets a place on the podium. As for DNA and the double helix, we may be forgiven a little anthropocentrism, for nothing has ever so teased our lustful hubris as the power to understand and alter what we are. But what of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem? Time magazine included Gödel on a list of its Twenty Greatest Thinkers and Scientists of the Twentieth Century, but the truth is that unlike relativity and DNA, the Incompleteness Theorem has no place in the popular imagination.

At the center of the mathematical enterprise stands this rather awkward result, an extraordinary one that uses mathematics itself not to expound an irrefutable observation about circles or prime numbers or topological invariants and conformal mappings but to say something about the nature of mathematics itself. It is a theorem that denies certainty in the very realm where you might expect it most. Why should that matter? Mathematics is unique in all human endeavor. I might think that a violinist does or does not have a feel for music; perhaps I can have an opinion on that, for what it’s worth, but that opinion is always vulnerable, can only be vulnerable, to one differing opinion. Nothing that is proven in mathematics, however, can be assailed or undermined. You may take it as granted. It is the parent, the lover, the friend you can rely on, imaginary if need be. Mathematics, which doesn’t include the tawdry efforts of statistics or probability, pure mathematics, the product of the human mind turning to face itself, turning into itself, and finding in the realm of necessary consequences, where no contingent fact is to be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or touched — it discloses a beauty that exhausts human comprehension and a certainty the senses can never touch. No other effort in this world can deliver a thing of such exhilarating beauty that is also true in that way, in that way , I say, whose beginning and end are one and the same, which requires no venture beyond the cranial cage, no reliance on the perceptions that deceive or the memory that corrupts, no appeal to anything experienced. Christ in heaven! Can you bloody believe it?