I was looking for a quote I recalled about voting, in Tom Stoppard’s play ‘Jumpers‘. And of course, once TG found my copy, I sat down and read the whole brilliant thing. I saw it on Broadway in the mid-1970’s, and still remember how thrilling and funny it was.

So here’s something to keep in mind as we talk about voting and technology:

George: Furthermore, I had a vote.

Dotty: It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting, Archie says.

and since I couldn’t stop reading it and am a fast typist, something to keep in mind while I work on my post on ‘values’ (not italicized because it’s too darn long):

George: Professor McFee’s [the murdered jumper/gymnast/Professor of Logic] introductory paper, which it is my privilege to dispute, has I think been distributed to all of you. In an impressive display of gymnastics, ho ho, thank you, Professor McFee bends over backwards to demonstrate that moral judgments belong to the same class as aesthetic judgments; that the phrase ‘good man’ and ‘good music’ and prejudiced in exactly the same way; in short that goodness, whether in men or music, depends on your point of view.

By discrediting the idea of beauty as an aesthetic absolute, he hopes to discredit by association the idea of goodness as a moral absolute and as a first step he directs us to listen to different kinds of music. (He reaches for a tape recorder.) Professor McFee refers us in particular to the idea of beauty as conceived by Mozart on the one hand, and here I am happy to assist him …(Plays the Mozart again, very brief.) And on the other hand, as conceived by a group of musicians playing at a wedding feast in a part of Equatorial Africa visited only by the makers of television film documentaries, on of which the Professor happened to see on a rare occasion when he wasn’t jumping through the Vice-Chancellor’s hoop, I can’t say that, one of which he happened to see. He invites us to agree with him that beauty is a diverse notion and not a universal one. Personally, I would have agreed to this without demur, but the Professor, whose reading is as wide as his jumping is high…

(The SECRETARY raises her head)

…all right, all right, the Professor bolsters up his argument with various literary references including a telling scene from Tarzan of the Apes in which the boy Tarzan on seeing his face for the first time reflected in a jungle pool, bewails his human ugliness as compared to the beauty of the apes among whom he has grown up. I won’t dwell on Professor McFee’s inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, but as regards the musical references it might be worth pointing out that the sounds made by Mozart and the Africans might have certain things in common which are not shared by the sound of, say, a bucket of coal being emptied on to a tin roof. Indeed I have brought with me tonight two further trumpet recordings, starting off with the trumpeting of an elephant…(He plays the braying sound heard before.)…and I invite Professor McFee to admit that the difference between that and his beloved Mozart may owe more to some mysterious property of the music than to his classically trained ear. Anticipating his reply that the latter sound is more beautiful to an elephant, I riposte…(He plays the remaining sound, as heard before.)

…which is the sound made by a trumpet falling down a flight of stone stairs. However it is not my present concern to dispute professor McFee’s view on aesthetics but only to make clear what those views must lead him to, and they lead him to the conclusion that if the three sets of noises which we might label ‘Mozart’, ‘elephant’, and ‘stairs’, were playing in an empty room where no one could hear them, then it could not be said that within the room any one set of noises was in any way superior to either of the other two. Which may, of course, be the case, but Professor McFee does not stay to consider such a reductio as absurdum, for he has bigger fish to fry, and so he goes on to show, likewise, but at even greater length, that the word ‘good’ has also meant different things to different people at different times, and exercise which combines simplicity with futility in a measure he does not apparently suspect, for on one hand it is not a statement which anyone would dispute, and on the other, nothing useful can be inferred from it. It is not in fact a statement about value at all; it is a statement about language and how it is used in a particular society.

Nevertheless, up this deeply rutted garden path, Professor McFee leads us, pointing out items of interest along the way…the tribe that kills its sickly infants, the tribe which eats its aged parents; and so on, without pausing to wonder whether the conditions of group survival or the notions of filial homage might be one thing among the nomads of the Atlas Mountains or in a Brazilian rain forest, and another quite in the Home Counties. Certainly a tribe which believe it confers honour on its elders by eating them is going to be viewed askance by another which prefers to buy them a little bungalow somewhere, and Professor McFee should not be surprised that the notion of honour should manifest itself so differently in peoples so far removed in clime and culture. What is surely more surprising is that notions of honour should manifest themselves at all. For what is honour? What are pride, shame, fellow-feeling, generosity and love? The prevailing temper of modern philosophy is to treat the instinct as a sort of terminus for any train of thought that seeks to trace out impulses to their origins. But what can be said to be the origin for a genuinely altruistic act? Hobbes might have answered self-esteem, but what is the attraction or point of thinking better of oneself? What is better? A savage who elects to honor his father by eating him as opposed to disposing of his body in some -to-him ignominious way, for example by burying it in a teak box, is making an ethical choice in that he believes himself to be acting as a good savage ought to act. Whence comes this sense of some actions being better than others?-not more useful, or more convenient, or more popular, but simply pointlessly better? What, in short, is so good about good? Professor McFee succeeds only in showing us that in different situations different actions will be deemed, rightly or wrongly, to be conducive to that good which is independent of time and place and which is knowable but not nameable. It is not nameable because it is not another way of referring to this or that quality which we have decided is virtuous. It is not courage, and it is not honesty or loyalty or kindness. The irreducible fact of goodness is not implicit in one kind of action any more than in its opposite, but in the existence of a relationship between the two. It is in the sense of comparisons being in order.

Here’s a simple thing. If you read the last paragraph and nodded in assent, values make sense to you.

I’ll try and do a long post on values and the election this weekend.