In the mid-seventeenth century there was a philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who derived from the synthetic Renaissance position, and from his criticism of Descartes' publications, a wholly new view of causality. He was one of several figures who bridged the Renaissance and helped engender the Enlightenment. He developed his critical view of his own Jewish cultural authorities into a new rational view of universal causality. He rejected Moses' hearing God's voice, and angels, and lots more 'occult' thinking, particularly early cabbalism;24 he took the naive magic out of his own religion. He was a lens-grinder, an occupation that requires the persistent checking of performance against reality. So he put in the artisan's view of causality, and he took out the magic of God's word. The Jewish community in Amsterdam excommunicated him. They'd learned about that from the Catholics, but it didn't translate very well into Jewish practice, even of those times.
Spinoza was a pantheist. That is, he believed there is a little bit of God in everything. His main reason for believing this was that if God were separate from the material universe, then there would be an entity greater than God, namely, the entire universe plus God. It follows that Spinoza's God is not a being, not a person in whose image humanity can be made. For this reason, Spinoza was often considered to be an atheist, and many orthodox Jews still view him that way. Despite this, his Ethics makes a beautiful, logically argued case for a particular type of pantheism. In fact, Spinoza's viewpoint is almost indistinguishable from that of most philosophically inclined scientists, from Newton to Kauffman.
Before Spinoza, even his supposed predecessors like Descartes and Leibniz had God moving things in the World by the power of his Voice: magic, child-thinking. Spinoza introduced the idea that an overarching God could run the universe without being anthropomorphic. Many modern Spinozans see the set of rules, devised, described or attributed by science to the physical world, as the embodiment of that kind of God. That is to say, what happens in the material world happens that way because God, or the Nature of the Physical World, constrains it to do so. And out of that come ideas resembling narrativium instead of magic and wish-fulfilment.
A Spinozan view of child development sees the opposite of wish-fulfilment. There are rules, constraints, that limit what we can do. The child learns, as she grows, to modify her plans as she perceives more of the rules. Initially, she might attempt to cross the room assuming that the chair is not an obstacle; when it doesn't move out of her way, she will feel frustration, a 'passion'. And throws a paddy. Later, as she constructs her path to avoid the chair, more of her plans will peaceably, and successfully, come to fruition. As she grows and learns more of the rules -God's Will or the warp and woof of universal causation -this progressive success will produce a calm acceptance of constraints: peace rather than passion.
Kauffman's At Home in the Universe is a very Spinozan book because Spinoza saw that we do indeed make our home, with the reward of peace and the discipline of passion and its control, each of us in their own universe. We fit the universe as a whole, we evolved in it and of it, and a successful life is based on appreciating how it constrains our plans and rewards our understanding. 'Please' and 'thank you' have no place in Spinozan prayer. That view melds the artisan with the philosopher, the tribal respect for tradition with the barbarian virtues of love and honour.
And it gives us a wholly new kind of story with a civilising message. Instead of the barbarian
'And then he rubbed the lamp again ... a again the genie appeared', we have the first king's son taking on a task, to win the hand of the fair princess ... and he fails. Amazing! No barbarian protagonist ever fails. Indeed, nobody ever ultimately fails except evil giants, sorcerers and Grand Viziers, in tribal or barbarian magical tales. However, the new story tells of the second king's s learning from this failure, and shows the listener -the learner -ho difficult the task is.
Nevertheless, again he fails, because learning not easy. But the third son -or the third billygoat Gruff or the third pig, with his house of brick -shows how to succeed in a Spinoza enlightened world of observation and experience. Stories in which people learn from the failures of others are a hallmark of a civilised society.
Narrativium has entered our Make-a-Human kit. It makes a different kind of mind from the tribal one, which is all 'do this because we've always done it that way and it works' and 'don't do that because it's taboo, evil and we'll kill you if you do'. And it also differs from the barbarian mind:
'That way lies honour, booty, much wealth and many children (if I can only get a djinn, or a dgun); I would no demean myself, dishonour these hands, with menial work.' In contrast, the civilised child learns to repeat the task, to work with the grain of the universe.
The reader of tales that have been moulded and informed by narrativium is prepared to do whatever an understanding of the task requires. Perhaps, in the universe of the story, qualifying for princesses' hands in marriage isn't the preoccupation of the average middle-class but the attitude of the third prince will serve him well down the mine, in the Stock Exchange, in the Wild West (according to Hollywood, a great purveyor of narrativium), or as father and baron.
We say 'he' because 'she' has a more difficult time: narrativium has not been mined and modelled for girls, and the way the feminist myths are shaping it does not seem to address the same questions as the old boy-oriented models. But we can put that right if we realise that narrativium trains by constraint.
Discworld, although technically a world run on fairy tale rules, derives much of its power and success from the fact that they are consistently challenged and subverted, most directly by the witch Granny Weatherwax, who cynically uses them or defies them as she sees fit. She roundly objects to girls being forced by the all-devouring 'story' to marry a handsome prince solely on the basis of their shoe size; she believes that stories are there to be challenged. But she herself is part of a larger story, and they follow Riles, too. In a sense, she's always trying to saw off the branch she's sitting on. And her stories derive their power from the fact that we have been programmed from an early age to believe in the monsters that she is battling.
CARGO CULT MAGIC
The phrase that kept occurring to Rincewind was cargo-cult. He'd run across it -he encountered most things by running across them - on isolated islands out on the big oceans.
Say that, once, a lost ship arrived, and while taking on food an water it handed out a few goodies to the helpful locals, like steel knives, arrowheads and fish-hooks.25 And then it sailed away, and after a while the steel wore out and the arrowheads got lost.
What was needed was another ship. But not many ships came to these lonely islands. What was needed was a ship attractor. Some sort of decoy. And it didn't much matter if it was made out of bamboo and palm leaves, so long as it looked like a ship. Ships would be bound to be attracted to another ship, or else how did you get small boats?
As with many human activities, it made perfect sense, for certain-values of 'sense'.
Discworld magic was all about controlling the vast oceans of magic that poured though the world. All the Roundworld magicians could do was to build something like bamboo decoys on the shores of the big, cold, spinning universe, which pleaded: please let the magic come.
'It's terrible,' he said to Ponder, who was drawing a big circle on the floor, to Dee's fascination.