I was never entirely convinced by Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex. The idea – I’m taking this from the original radio series, which I could once recite by heart, so variations in the books are non-canonical and therefore irrelevant – is that every piece of matter is connected to every other piece of matter, and therefore it is possible to extrapolate the entire universe from a small fairy cake. One scientist used this principle to annoy his wife; “Have some sense of proportion”, she would say to him constantly, and so he plugged her into the extrapolated universe so that she saw herself in relation to the entirety of creation, an invisible dot on an invisible dot, and it annihilated her brain. In a minor rewrite of Eliot’s “humankind cannot bear too much reality”, The Book concludes that “if life is going to exist in a universe this size, the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense for proportion.”
Matter extrapolation, fine. Problematic nature of a sense of proportion, fine. What never really made sense was the idea that people are *so* solipsistic that they imagine themselves to be big cheeses in relation to the universe. Honestly, the idea that I am small and insignificant in relation to the vastness of the cosmos is not going to come as a shock. Okay, when I was young I used to worry about the fact that the earth would some day be consumed by the sun and the universe would succumb to ultimate heat-death, but I don’t think I imagined I would be there to see it, or that this makes any difference to anything.
It’s a matter of scale, in a quite different manner from that envisaged by the Total Perspective Vortex. Most people do not live, or think of themselves, in relation to the entire majesty of creation. The truly terrifying prospect is the Embarrassingly Parochial Perspective Vortex, which extrapolates only a small part of the universe – a village community, a regional society, a sub-field of a minor academic discipline, a section of national cultural discourse – and provides a helpful label for “this is where you really stand”. Think of the truly tragic-comic figures, and what would destroy their sense of self: Captain Mainwaring simply wants the respect of his platoon, Father Ted just needs to be cleverer than anyone else in his parish, Dean Pelton wants a small community college in Colorado to take him seriously. Annihilating their brains by revealing their true insignificance does not take the entire universe.
Having had this thought earlier in the week, reality then helpfully delivered a bit too much of itself to serve as an example; someone quote-tweeted a remark I made about a poorly-researched new book – I might post on this at some point – with words to the effect of “You’re not so clever – you last published a book in 2018, but pretend that your 2014 book was published in 2020 to make yourself look better”. Okay, gratuitous rudeness from someone with a petty grudge – and the 2020 thing is not my fault, it’s the university’s semi-automatic research data system pulling in the date of the ebook and daring me to say I had nothing to do with the publication – but this is how people see me? Washed up, no publications worth speaking of in the last decade, massaging my cv to fend off thoughts of the abyss… You gotta hand it to those cupcakes, this is what really gives one a sense of insignificance.
Something else this week also brought to mind questions of perspective – though rather more the Mitchell and Webb “Hans, are we the baddies?” sketch. Major shareholders of Thames Water, responsible for siphoning off hefty dividends while loading the company with unsustainable debt and dumping sewage into rivers rather than actually investing properly in the infrastructure: at 20%, the Universities Superannuation Scheme, whose investment successes we academics have tended to celebrate in the basis that it might fund our retirements at a reasonable level.
This news doesn’t alter my firm belief that the water companies should be renationalised forthwith with no compensation for shareholders – but I can imagine the sorts of arguments that some may now be formulating in the name of realism and pragmatism. More significantly, we have no actual agency or influence here, just complicity. It’s similar to the ongoing “Are we the baddies?” aspect of working in a Russell Group university, knowing that institution-level policies are harming the institutions of friends and colleagues elsewhere. The fact that we can’t bear too much reality, can’t admit the truth of our actual circumstances, doesn’t excuse our obliviousness.
Leave a comment