Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

The Professor mooched over to the lectern and stood for a while several feet behind it, regarding his audience with baleful eyes. I was shocked to see that he was dressed rather nattily for an emeritus professor in a sharp Italian suit with the narrowest of chalk stripes. He was also quite a bit more virile in appearance than I had at first supposed. Although over sixty his hair was still intact and ungreying, his jaw was set and two veins rode up his temples and seemed to visibly throb in the wan light of the lecture theatre. He hovered over the lectern as a surgeon might an operating table. He carried no notes.

‘Picture the future. Picture it like this.’ His voice was sonorous, insistent and persuasive, more spiritual than academic. ‘An orderly phalanx of flagellants some four hundred in number march down off the Marylebone Flyover. They chastise themselves with the precise, timed strokes of their leather lashes. They take up the entire inside lane of the road. The chastisement is considered and vicious. Each stroke on each back brings forth blood, which spatters the windscreens of the cars that are backed up in the two offside lanes, all the way from Lisson Grove. The morning air is full of a pink, frothy spray as the passive commuters put on their water jets and windscreen wipers in an attempt to stop their windscreens coagulating.

‘Or, if you prefer, picture this: Speaker’s Corner is in full swing on a Sunday afternoon. There are the usual crop of eccentrics — cranks and people with extreme political views — but on this Sunday, to their chagrin, they are wholly eclipsed by bands of ragged men and women wearing filthy grey shifts. These people move among the crowds enjoining them to enter a state of grace immediately and to throw off the restrictive chains of mere human morality.

‘ “Rejoice! We are already saved!” they cry. They shamelessly roll on the ground, fighting, copulating, and drinking to prove their point. Together with other adherents they are forming a secessionist commune in Hyde Park, dedicated to the anticipation of the Apocalypse.

‘Can you picture this? Or is it beyond your comprehension?’ Stein paused and raked his meditative gaze over the darkened theatre. I could imagine it all right, I was rapt. I hadn’t expected anything like this. Jim was clearly imagining it too, he sat hunched forward on his seat, panting. I looked round the rest of the audience: the octogenarians still slept, the perpetual students took notes. Stein continued, ‘My purpose in this lecture is to briefly outline the central argument of my forthcoming book. Obviously time will mean that this outline will be incomplete, but nonetheless I hope to make it reasonably clear that the kind of scenarios that I just asked you to envisage are not accurate predictions of the way millenarianism will affect the populations of Western societies as we move towards the third era since the death of the Christ-figure. These things may have occurred in the past, but I believe that there are now certain overriding factors that make a recurrence of such phenomena distinctly unlikely …’

And there I lost him. The rest of the lecture became increasingly involved, turgid and difficult to follow. Stein didn’t help matters by continually digressing from his central argument in order to inveigh against other academics in the same field. The digressions themselves had digressions. As far as I could gather they related specifically to the difficulties involved in the exegesis of certain recondite texts, penned in the closing years of the ninth century by monks scattered across Europe. Stein raised his voice, he moved out from behind the lectern and came to the front of the stage, as if intending to embrace his audience like an ageing singer having a Las Vegas comeback.

For me, it was all to no avail. The sheer weight of detail eroded my attention. His digressions began to resolve themselves into a series of Post-it notes stuck fluttering in my mind … I began to tune out. When I tuned back in again it was 6.50 and Stein was summing up.

‘… To sum up: The existence of the possibility of the destruction of the world by men themselves, in a number of different forms — nuclear war, ecological disaster, man-made pandemics — means that although in a sense we live in a time that is more acutely aware than ever before of the possibility of some form of the Apocalypse, nonetheless that Apocalypse is no longer in any sense evidence of the immanent; it is merely possibly imminent. In the past, the ending of an era, or even a century, was viewed with great fear and a spontaneous move towards salvation in one form or another, a move that can only be understood solidly in the context of the Judaeo-Christian cultural dialectic. The end of this current era will, I believe, be met with at worst indifference and at best with some quite good television retrospectives.’

Before the chairman could get to his feet and ask whether there were any questions, one of the perpetual students was already on his and asking. He was a grey-black man, tall and rangy in a slightly unravelled raglan sweater, with three neat fish-shaped scars on either cheek.

‘Professor Stein. Sir, to what extent, sir, can the arguments you have just presented, sir, be held seriously. In view of the fact’ , particular emphasis on ‘fact’, ‘that such arguments have themselves been present in other cultures during the end of other eras. Does not the fact, sir, that this is not the first time that people have believed they had the power to destroy their own world to some extent invalidate your argument? Well, sir, what do you think of that?’

The cicatrised African sat down as abruptly as he had stood up. There was an uncomfortable pause. Professor Stein was straining forward. From the expression on his face it was quite clear that he hadn’t heard a word the African had said. At length the chairman leant forward and whispered into his ear. Stein nodded several times and then rose to his feet.

‘I think the answer is no. As to why, the answer is that although previous cultures have thought that they possessed the power to destroy the world themselves, they in fact didn’t. We are dealing in this instance with a reality which can be empirically verified.’

I was aware of Jim batting about in the seat next to me. He was sweating profusely and his long, mechanical arms gripped the back of the seat in front of him as if he wanted to rip it off the ground and throw it at the podium. Jim didn’t give the African a chance to respond to Stein’s reply — he was on his feet.

‘Professor Stein. You say that the difference between this and previous eras is that humankind now possesses the real ability to destroy the world in which we live — and that this fact means that the wilder manifestations of millenarianism are unlikely to occur as we move towards the 21st century. However, could this lecture itself not be said to be an even wilder manifestation in its own right? This surely is the first era in which the historically literate have felt free to say “Well, in the past people got over-excited about the millennium and expected Armageddon and all sorts of other terrible things, but we’re beyond that.” Is this not the purest form of hubris? Do you not agree that there is an aching feeling in our society, people are desperately waiting for something — anything to happen! Look at these people,’ Jim swept an arm around the lecture theatre to embrace the ancient Fabians and the perpetual students, ‘aren’t they waiting for something to happen? I don’t think your lecture, your calm, measured reasoning will serve to dampen down the great currents of expectation which are bound to flow with increasing strength throughout the population. Well, what do you think of that?’

Jim sat down, still quaking and sweating. I wasn’t sure that what he had said could altogether be classified as a question. However, Stein seemed to be taking it seriously enough. As Jim sat down, the Professor set down his pen and scrutinised us.