5.
It was the fourth day of the competition. The thirteen candidates had taken their seats in the great amphitheatre again, where three Nobels took it in turns to supervise them. Fawell removed some pages full of scribbles from his briefcase and quickly read them again. It was his work from the previous three days. He had two reasons for being satisfied: first the awareness of having dealt with the topic well, and secondly he felt that his mind was freer, having finished a necessary but rather boring stage. Today he would finally be able to tackle the essential points.
That first part of his programme dealt with the resolution, as soon as possible, of the material problems which hindered the development of the world by keeping it in a condition of poor health and permanent anxiety. If he gave first priority to these issues, it was just as much because he reckoned that nothing serious could be realised on Earth as long as men were suffering from hunger, sickness and the slavery of work, as because of his quite Machiavellian intention of provoking surprise among the examiners. They no doubt expected that someone like him, a specialist in nuclear physics, would mobilise the world, as a matter of urgency, in favour of an accelerated and finally coherent programme of atomic research. This was in fact what his instinct and his scientific belief suggested to him at first. But on reflection it seemed to him that some preliminary preparation was vital and that to delay was the sign of a mind with lofty and far-reaching views, of the kind which would be suitable for the head of a world state.
In addition he recalled quite a lively argument against the Nobels during a meeting in which the structure of such a state was envisaged. The physicists were only concerned about the progress of their science, that is to say in accessing complete knowledge about inorganic matter by analysis of infinitesimally small particles. They had agreed, when curtly reminded by their colleagues, the physiologists and medical doctors, that planet Earth was itself not a negligible part of what we call the world, and that what they tended to forget was that this was inhabited by beings possessing a certain quality called life. Indeed, there were those beings called humans who were animal organisms subject to all kinds of needs and troubles, and which science should not despise. If the cells of this organism could, in the final analysis, be resolved into atoms and electrons, that was no reason to neglect its individual structure, nor the biological study of it, in order to improve it and ensure the harmonious evolution of our species. Against his instincts, Fawell therefore decided to concern himself first with human beings and their material life.
To deal with this problem, he had reasoned that the first fact to be determined was the optimal population of the world, taking into account the resources which one could expect from it. He had discussed this question, calling upon his recollections of various things he had read, which his faultless memory supplied him with. He regretted, however, not having complete documentation to make a more precise evaluation possible. Yet the figure he arrived at seemed to him to be a reasonable approximation, and he estimated it thus: about four billion human beings. He listed very convincing reasons showing that it was imperative to keep to this figure.
However he was careful to emphasise that for him it was a not a question of inaugurating an era of test-tube babies, like that described by Aldous Huxley. It was one of his principal concerns that they should not go to such extremes, and most of the scholars of his age agreed. Birth control would doubtless have to be imposed through strict discipline at the beginning, but in the light of the enormous advantages that it brings, he predicted
that the world would submit to it with good grace.
A delay of three years was planned to settle these preliminary problems. Content with enumerating the principal ones, he had gone in depth into the two problems which appeared to him to be the most urgent and most likely to catch people’s imagination: world hunger and cancer.
He demonstrated that the problem of hunger was relatively easy to solve, and if it had not been solved yet, it was due to laziness, ineptitude and the lack of coordination between governments. A provisional solution would be provided right away in the first few months by the mobilisation of all available military transport, and God knows there was plenty of it! The capacity alone of the battle fleets with their giant vessels, their thousands of airplanes and helicopters, which could be freed up by a stroke of the pen, would be more than enough (he provided numerical proof) to transport the enormous surpluses from the countries who have too much to the unfortunate regions, which suffer periodically from famine. At the same time, an in-depth study, taking into account the optimum population density, would make it possible to determine the exact surface areas of the earth which should be cultivated in this or that part of the world, and the quantity and quality of fertilizer that was necessary, the manufacture of which should also be started. Irrigation works, on a scale never before considered seriously, should also be undertaken without delay. According to the plan that he was proposing, a considerable proportion of current desert areas would thus be made fertile and the problem of hunger would, in three years at the most, be settled for good.
He granted his future administration the same period of time to eliminate cancer. In this area too, without being a specialist, he possessed certain gifts which were precise enough to enable him to present the following judgement and to justify it with at least approximate figures: ‘Given the advances in research, although it is uncoordinated, without any collaboration between various countries, and conducted most of the time with insufficient funding due to lack of credit, and given above all the quality of the researchers…’ (this was clever flattery right in the faces of the Nobel physiologists, from whom he expected some reluctance to appoint a physicist to the supreme post), ‘…all this leads one to expect that the work of researchers will succeed very quickly when they are coordinated and reasonably well financed. It is my conviction that it is only a question of setting up an organisation like NASA, admittedly not with the same goal, but possessing the same spirit of inevitable victory. This organisation will have as its unique goal to rid humanity of cancer over a period of three years and it will be provided with the means necessary for this task.’
Concerning these means and the financing of the enterprises, without giving too many details, which he did not consider necessary within the framework of his study, Fawell demonstrated that he never lost sight of them. He listed in a few paragraphs the enormous resources which his government had at its disposal, by the simple fact that it would be global, and able thus to make impressive savings compared with the wastefulness of previous administrations. One of them was blindingly obvious, admittedly not the most important, but he considered it a good idea to mention it at the beginning, and even with a touch of humour, which some of the Nobels appreciated sometimes: the idea was to get rid of every country’s ministry of foreign affairs immediately.
The other savings would be even more important and just as obvious. All ministries of war would also be suppressed. Armies and armaments would be got rid of, except for those which would be at the disposition of the government for maintaining order. Finally all other ministries would be condensed into a few central organisations, which would be infinitely less onerous than when they were broadly scattered in former times.
Many other issues had to be sorted out in order to ensure the planet developed in a suitable way. Fawell had resigned himself to only being able to mention them, providing a simple sketch of possible solutions. In this way he dealt with trade, language and regulations controlling work, proposing the creation of an appropriate organisation for each delicate problem. He cited again the example of NASA, which was proof that almost any result could be obtained by using powerful means and rational methods. If certain of NASA’s achievements were neither as important nor as urgent as many others, from a strictly scientific point of view, the responsibility rested with the politicians who had requested them (Fawell knew that the majority of the Nobels had been opposed at the time to the Apollo project). It would be the job of the government in the future to determine the tasks to be undertaken, with a reasonable order of priority, and it seemed obvious to him that such organisations would bring the most difficult missions to successful conclusions.
6.
After having dealt with material problems in this way and laid out a plan of measures to be undertaken to create order on a planet which had hitherto been abandoned to anarchy and mismanagement, Fawell started to tackle the spiritual realm, the noble and precious essence, the development of which was at the same time the reason for existence and the ideal goal of a scientific world state. At last he had a subject worthy of him, which greatly excited all his nerves, demanding as much faith and passion as wisdom.
For, at the start of the twenty-first century, the mind held a prominant place among Fawell’s concerns, as was the case also with Yranne, Zarratoff and the majority of the revolutionary scholars, who, in other respects, considered themselves to be materialists. For them science was a philosophy, almost a religion, a religion whose enigmatic and currently inaccessible God was the essence of the universe. The only rites allowed were continuous research, and its dogma, knowledge of the universe, had the strange characteristic of being questioned anew each day, then abandoned, taken up again, revamped, recreated, following constantly repeated experiments and laborious speculation occasionally shot through with a flash of genius.
The rigorous positivism of the nineteenth century was long gone. In one short phrase Einstein had defined its limits: ‘A theory can be proved by experiment, but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.’ Later he often talked of ‘cosmic religiosity’ and this formula seduced even astronomers like Zarratoff. After him, since the second half of the twentieth century, metaphysics, which had been despised since Descartes, had started to invade science again. At the very least it started to invaded physics, for, strangely enough, the majority of biologists were not a part of this trend and condemned it in the name of intellectual austerity, continuing to maintain that nothing exists outside experience. But physicists like Fawell and enthusiasts of cosmogony like Zarratoff were immersed in it. Perhaps this was due to the fact that their respective fields, the infinitely small and the infinitely large, often defied all direct observation to the extent that they wanted to penetrate more deeply, which obliged them to use their intellect to compensate for the imperfection of their instruments, and to fill what was invisible with mysteries.
If, in the twentieth century, it appeared for a moment that science was being deviated towards soulless industrialisation without a worthy goal, and directed by a staff of robots and computers, then true scholars were not responsible for these heresies, and a reaction was not long in coming. The true object of this science was first affirmed by a small number of thinkers: this was the acquisition of knowledge, the progressive penetration into the secrets of nature. Today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, there is no doubt about this among civilised minds and they consider this knowledge to be the sole noble goal that could be assigned to humanity. Material progress and technology are scarcely interesting in themselves. They had sworn to always maintain computers and other machines which served as tools, and which were convenient and ingenious and no more. If Fawell admitted, indeed even considered, that the development of the practical applications of science were indispensable, then it was only because this allowed humanity to be relieved of crude and stupefying tasks, thus allowing it to devote an increasingly large part of its time to the only true progress which he recognized: the acquisition of sacred knowledge. This was the way that scholars of this century were thinking. It was because they were fascinated thus by such things that they planned to mobilise all the Earth’s resources in the service of their ideal, those inestimable riches which had been hitherto dissipated, diverted from their natural reasons for existence by the trivial concerns of countries and of ownership, or by outdated beliefs based on superstition, the dreams of false prophets and the general negation of reality.
There were admittedly certain nuances in the image that the physicists created for themselves of the new God. For some of them it was a matter of imagining an absolute form of the human mind, while for others it was a discovery and a conquest. The first of them talked of a kind of emergence. Among these one could detect the remote influence of Bergson, but they preferred to cite certain formulae of Professor Samuel Alexander to characterise their beliefs. The world strives towards divinity they say and add, as he did, that it is not God who created the world, but on the contrary it is the world which is in the process of creating God, after passing through the intermediate stage of Man.
Others, of a pantheistic tendency, have submitted themselves to various influences, from Thales with his ‘All things are full of gods’ to Teilhard de Chardin, via the dialectic materialism of Professor J.B.S. Haldane and a certain number of philosophical poets from whom Zarratoff liked to quote certain striking phrases, such as ‘the drop of spirit in matter’1. But the physicists in the group claimed to be above all disciples of Father Teilhard, interpreting what they considered his essential idea to be: inert matter does not exist. Evolution obeys a cosmic design. Having been started at the stage of atoms by this vague cosmic consciousness in each infinitesimally small particle, and having continued to scale the heights of humanity through an infinitely more important concentration of means, it must end up in total identification with the Universe, through a complete identification with its mysteries.
There were no doubt quite a lot of differences between these simple formulae and the Christian faith of the Jesuit father, which would perhaps have prompted the latter to disown them as disciples, but the scholars regarded these differences as insignificant details. For Fawell, who belonged to this school of thought, even though he rejected almost everything Christian in Teilhard’s credo, this did not diminish at all the admiration that he bore for him. The God, which he pursued in his passionate researches on matter, he described as the essence of the Universe, but whether one called it by the name Universal Christ, and whether evolution was named christogenesis and the limit of total knowledge signifying fusion was called the Omega point, these were for
him simple questions of vocabulary without the least importance. This was not always the point of view of his friends with whom he liked to discuss the subject. Yranne and Zaratoff, for example, criticized quite severely the attempt at synthesis which the religious scholar had made between science and faith, even going as far as accusing him of Jesuitism.
Strangely enough, when they got involved in a discussion of this sort, Mrs Betty Han, who always kept at least one foot on the ground and whose mind was probably less inclined towards cosmic religiosity, defended both the scholar and the Jesuit vigorously. She did so moreover in a strange manner which was tinged with ambiguity. This synthesis, she asserted, represented in her eyes as a professional psychologist the most perfect example that she knew of the desperate efforts by the human mind to force in an artificial way disparate and even perfectly contradictory elements into agreement with each other. She could not help but admire unreservedly this passionate attempt which had almost succeeded, and maintained that if it was Jesuitism then it was a brilliant aspect of Jesuitism, which she acknowledged with admiration and which stirred her enthusiasm. But when she went that far, the others looked at her in silence, smiling in their perplexity, for the image of Betty as an ‘enthusiast’ was disconcerting, not to say absurd, in the eyes of those of her friends who knew her well.
Whether they had a vision of total creation made by one god, or of its discovery and assimilation, the physicists could generally agree about an ideal situated in the future and on a sanctification of knowledge. The biologists also ranked knowledge first among their concerns (this was almost the only philosophical view common to both classes of scholars), but they fought doggedly against all temptation towards metaphysics.
It had not always been like that. During the first half of the twentieth century, some of them even made brilliant efforts to demonstrate with the aid of the mathematics of probability, and citing examples which emphasised the behaviour of monkeys using typewriters, that the emergence of the human brain was such an improbable phenomenon, without some supernatural guidance of evolution, as to be virtually an impossibility. This reasoning has been criticised nowadays, as much, moreover, by contemporary biologists as by physicists. The former objected that if the combination of atoms which would develop into a brain and consciousness were indeed quasi-impossible, then all other combinations would have the same characteristic of being quasi-impossible. All the same, in a lottery comprising billions and billions of billions of numbers, one of these numbers, that is to say a particular number, has of necessity to come out, and the drawing of this particular number thus has, a priori, a quality which is as miraculous as the human brain. There was no intellectual disadvantage for them in admitting this to be the result of chance, which they did, a chance so extraordinary that it was impossible for it to be reproduced in the universe.
The physicists, who were convinced materialists in the sense in which this term is usually taken, would no longer accept the idea of there being a ‘supernatural’ power controlling evolution. Fawell quite simply criticised the reasoning of the ancient mathematical biologists for considering atoms to be like marbles and the human body to be like a sack of marbles. Indeed it should be possible to apply calculations of probability to them, illustrated if required by examples of monkeys using typewriters. But all their reflections and experiments on infinitesimally small particles had gradually convinced them that material bodies were in no way like sacks of inert marbles. For them matter was something completely different… They often talked of ‘holy matter’, another expression borrowed from Father Teilhard, passages of whose writings they knew by heart. This matter had by its own nature given birth to spirit, and probably on many planets other than Earth.
Scholars of biology and of physics thus had quite a lot of differences. This led to discussions only rarely, for they scarcely met each other, but they were expressed in sarcastic comments made from afar, in quite a paradoxical way: the same terminology was used by both groups, but with different meanings, to stigmatise the misguided philosophical ways of the opposing clan. ‘Anthropocentrists’ was for example the contemptuous expression used by O’Kearn for the Nobel physiologists. He meant by this that they considered Man to be a unique miracle created by chance and reduced all science to observations made by him. ‘Anthropocentrists’ was also the term applied to the neo-materialist physicists by the biologists, who signified thus their scorn at the desire to establish a qualitative relationship between the human brain and the cosmos. However, in the stormy debates which brought them together sometimes, this expression was not uttered, for it was considered by both parties to be the supreme insult, both crude and defamatory, which would require redress.
But there remained the ideal of knowledge as a common central concern for all the scientific minds of that period. For the physicists it became a veritable religion; and for the biologists it was a sort of ethic, a gratuitous act, about which they had a confused feeling of imperious necessity, to enable them to escape the despair of nothingness. Both of these groups felt that this total knowledge could only be attained by the combined efforts of the whole of humanity. It is clear how different the world they dreamed of was from Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’.
Fawell allowed himself some time for reflection before making a start on the second part of his programme, organising the ideas that had obsessed him for part of the night. His conclusion caused him some bitter disappointment, but reason had imposed this upon him as had his realistic view of the current state of the world. Admittedly he had been bothered by the desire to establish a coherent plan for research immediately, especially concerning his own special field, that of infinitesimally small matter about which so little was known still, and to set humanity to work immediately to realise it. But he had to acknowledge that humanity was not ready for such an enterprise. It was necessary to prepare it for this, and the nine years allocated to the first government would be barely sufficient. After putting material concerns in order, it was essential to plan for a long period of spiritual development, or rather, education.
It didn’t require any effort to imagine himself in the supreme post, and this was in the spirit of the competition. He sighed when he thought about the fact that his government would only be a transitional organisation. His task and his duty would only be to prepare the way for the plan to finally take shape, but it was inevitable. This period would require at least four or five years, and he should not pretend to himself otherwise. Following the three years already planned, there would only remain one or two to tackle the major task. He decided to devote only one day of this competition, which he was experiencing now like some scaled down representation of reality, to sketch out a plan of essential research. He should reserve the greater part of his remaining time for the subject of education.