A Perfect Vacuum (19 page)

It is instructive, this voluminous discourse, the quotation from which we have used to crown our discussion. Instructive, because it shows there is simply no thing appearing to some as evil incarnate and misfortune itself that others will not at the very same time consider a positive godsend and raise to the pinnacle of perfection. This reviewer is of the opinion that technoevolution cannot be declared the existential panacea for humanity, if only because the criteria of optimization are too intricately relativistic for them to be regarded as a universal pattern (that is, as a code of salvational procedure that is unerring, couched in the language of empiricism). In any case, we recommend to the reader
Civilization as Mistake,
since it is, typical of the time, yet another attempt to limn the future—still dark, despite the combined efforts of the futurologists and such thinkers as Klopper.

(2 Volumes Statni Nakladatelství N. Lit., Prague)

 

The author is Cezar Kouska on the cover, but signs the Introduction inside the book as Benedykt Kouska. A misprint, an oversight in the proofreading, or an inconceivably devious device? Personally I prefer the name Benedykt, therefore I will stick with that. So, then, it is to Professor B. Kouska that I owe some of the most delightful hours of my life, hours spent in the perusal of his work. The views it expounds are unquestionably at odds with scientific orthodoxy; we are not, however, dealing here with pure insanity; the thing lies halfway in between, in that transitional zone where there is neither day nor night, and the mind, loosening the bonds of logic, yet does not tear them so asunder as to fall into gibberish.

For Professor Kouska has written a work that demonstrates that the following relationship of mutual exclusion obtains: either the theory of probability, on which stands natural history, is false to its very foundations, or the world of living things, with man at its head, does not exist. After which, in the second volume, the Professor argues that if prognostication, or futurology, is ever to become a reality and not an empty illusion, not a conscious or unconscious deception, then that discipline cannot avail itself of the calculus of probability, but demands the implementation of an entirely different reckoning, namely—to quote Kouska—“a theory, based on antipodal axioms, of the distribution of ensembles in actual fact unparalleled in the space-time continuum of higher-order events” (the quote also serves to show that the reading of the work—in the theoretical sections—does present certain difficulties).

Benedykt Kouska begins by revealing that the theory of empirical probability is flawed in the middle. We employ the notion of probability when we do not know a thing with certainty. But our uncertainty is either purely subjective (we do not know what will take place, but someone else may know) or objective (no one knows, and no one can know). Subjective probability is a compass for an informational disability; not knowing which horse will come in first and guessing by the number of horses (if there are four, each has one chance in four of winning the race), I act like one who is sightless in a room full of furniture. Probability is, so to speak, a cane for a blind man; he uses it to feel his way. If he could see, he would not need the cane, and if I knew which horse was the fastest, I would not need probability theory. As is known, the question of the objectivity or the subjectivity of probability has divided the world of science into two camps. Some maintain that there exist two types of probability, as above, others, that only the subjective exists, because regardless of what is supposed to take place,
we
cannot have full knowledge of it. Therefore, some lay the uncertainty of future events at the door of our knowledge of them, whereas others place it within the realm of the events themselves.

That which takes place, if it really and truly takes place, takes place indeed: such is Professor Kouska's main contention. Probability comes in only where a thing has not yet taken place. So saith science. But everyone is aware that two duelists firing two bullets which flatten each other in midair, or that breaking one's tooth, while eating a fish, on a ring which by accident one had dropped overboard at sea six years before and which was swallowed by that exact same fish, or—for that matter—that the playing, in three-four time, of Tchaikovsky's Sonatina in B Minor in a kitchen-utensil store by bursting shrapnel during a siege, because the shrapnel's metal balls strike the larger and smaller pots and pans exactly as the composition requires—that any of this, were it to happen, would constitute a happening most improbable. Science says in this regard that these are facts occurring with a very negligible frequency in the sets of occurrences to which the facts belong, that is, in the set of all duels, in the set of eating fish and finding lost objects in them, and in the set of bombardments of stores selling housewares.

But science, says Professor Kouska, is selling us a line, because all its twaddle about sets is a complete fiction. The theory of probability can usually tell us how long we must wait for a given event, for an event of a specified and unusually low probability, or, in other words, how many times it will be necessary to repeat a duel, lose a ring, or fire at pots and pans before the afore-mentioned remarkable things come about. This is rubbish, because in order to make a highly improbable thing come about it is not at all necessary that the set of events to which it belongs represent a continuous series. If I throw ten coins at once, knowing that the chance of ten heads coming up at the same time, or ten tails, works out to barely 1:796, I certainly do not need to make upward of 796 throws in order that the probability of ten heads turning up, or ten tails, become equal to one. For I can always say that my throws are a continuation of an experiment comprising all the past throws of ten coins at once. Of such throws there must have been, in the course of the last five thousand years of Earth's history, an inordinate number; therefore, I really ought to expect that straightaway all my coins are going to land heads up, or tails up. Meanwhile, says Professor Kouska, just you try and base your expectations on such reasoning! From the scientific point of view it is entirely correct, for the fact of whether one throws the coins nonstop or puts them aside for a moment to eat
knedlach
in the intermission or go for a quick one at the corner bar, or whether—for that matter—it is not the same person who does the throwing, but a different one each time, and not all in one day but each week or each year, has not the slightest effect or bearing on the distribution of the probability; thus the fact that ten coins were thrown by the Phoenicians sitting on their sheepskins, and by the Greeks after they burned Troy, and by the Roman pimps in the time of the Caesars, and by the Gauls, and by the Teutons, and by the Ostrogoths, and the Tartars, and the Turks driving their captives to Stamboul, and the rug merchants in Galata, and those merchants who trafficked in children from the Children's Crusade, and Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Robespierre, as well as a few dozen tens of thousands of other gamblers, also is wholly immaterial, and consequently, in throwing the coins, we can consider that the set is extremely large, and that our chances of throwing ten heads or ten tails at once are positively enormous! Just you try and throw, says Professor Kouska, gripping some learned physicist or other probability theorist by the elbow so he can't escape, for such as they do not like having the falsity of their method pointed out to them. Just you try, you'll see that nothing comes of it.

Next, Professor Kouska undertakes an extensive thought experiment that relates not to some hypothetical phenomenon or other, but to a part of his own biography. We repeat here, in condensed form, some of the more interesting fragments of this analysis.

A certain army doctor, during the First World War, ejected a nurse from the operating room, for he was in the midst of surgery when she entered by mistake. Had the nurse been better acquainted with the hospital, she would not have mistaken the door to the operating room for the door to the first-aid station, and had she not entered the operating room, the surgeon would not have ejected her; had he not ejected her, his superior, the regiment doctor, would not have brought to his attention his unseemly behavior regarding the lady (for she was a volunteer nurse, a society miss), and had the superior not brought this to his attention, the young surgeon would not have considered it his duty to go and apologize to the nurse, would not have taken her to the café, fallen in love with her, and married her, whereby Professor Benedykt Kouska would not have come into the world as the child of this same married couple.

From this it would appear to follow that the probability of the coming into the world of Professor Benedykt Kouska (as a newborn, not as the head of the Analytical Philosophy Department) was set by the probability of the nurse's confusing or not confusing the doors in the given year, month, day, and hour. But it is not that way at all. The young surgeon Kouska did not have, on that day, any operations scheduled; however, his colleague Doctor Popichal, who wished to carry the laundry from the cleaners to his aunt, entered the aunt's house, where because of a blown fuse the light over the stairwell was not working, because of which he fell off the third step and twisted his ankle; and because of this, Kouska had to take his place in surgery. Had the fuse not blown, Popichal would not have sprained his ankle, Popichal would have been the one operating and not Kouska, and, being an individual known for his gallantry, he would not have used strong language to remove the nurse who entered the operating room by mistake, and, not having insulted her, he would not have seen the need to arrange a tête-à-tête with her; but tête-à-tête or no tête-à-tête, it is absolutely certain in any case that from the possible union of Popichal and the nurse the result would have been not Benedykt Kouska but someone altogether different, with whose chances of coming into the world this study does not concern itself.

Professional statisticians, aware of the complicated state of the things of this world, usually wriggle out of having to deal with the probability of such events as someone's coming into the world. They say, to be rid of you, that what we have here is the coincidence of a great number of divaricate-source causal chains and that consequently the point in space-time in which a given egg merges with a given sperm is indeed determined in principle,
in abstracto;
however,
in concreto
one would never be able to accumulate knowledge of sufficient power, that is to say all-embracing, for the practical formulation of any prognosis (with what probability there will be born an individual X of traits Y, or in other words
how long
people must reproduce before it is certain that a certain individual, of traits Y, will with absolute certainty come into the world) to become feasible. But the impossibility is technical only, not fundamental; it rests in the difficulties of collecting information, and not in the absence in the world (to hear them talk) of such information to collect. This lie of statistical science Professor Benedykt Kouska intends to nail and expose.

As we know, the question of Professor Kouska's being able to be born does not reduce itself merely to the alternative of “right door, wrong door.” Not with regard to one coincidence must one reckon the chances of his birth, but with regard to many: the coincidence that the nurse was sent to that hospital and not another; the coincidence that her smile in the shadow cast by her cornet resembled, from a distance, the smile of Mona Lisa; the coincidence, too, that the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, for had he not been shot, war would not have broken out, and had war not broken out, the young lady would not have become a nurse; moreover, since she came from Olomouc and the surgeon from Moravská Ostrava, they most likely would never have met, neither in a hospital nor anywhere else. One therefore has to take into account the general theory of the ballistics of shooting at archdukes, and since the hitting of the Archduke was conditioned by the motion of his automobile, the theory of the kinematics of automobile models of the year 1914 should also be considered, as well as the psychology of assassins, because not everyone in the place of that Serb would have shot at the Archduke, and even if someone had, he would not have hit, not if his hands were shaking with excitement; the fact, therefore, that the Serb had a steady hand and eye and no tremors also has its place in the probability distribution of the birth of Professor Kouska. Nor ought one to ignore the overall political situation of Europe in the summer of 1914.

But the marriage in any case did not come about in that year, or in 1915, when the young couple became acquainted in good earnest, for the surgeon was detailed to the fortress of Przemyśl. From there he was to travel later to Lwów, where lived the young maiden Marika, whom his parents had chosen to be his wife out of financial considerations. However, as a result of Samsonov's offensive and the movements of the southern flank of the Russian forces, Przemyśl was besieged, and before long, instead of repairing to his betrothed in Lwów, the surgeon proceeded into Russian captivity when the fortress fell. Now, he remembered the nurse better than he did his fiancee, because the nurse not only was fair but also sang the song “Sleep, Love, in Thy Bed of Flowers” much more sweetly than did Marika, who had an unremoved polyp on her vocal cords and from this a constant hoarseness. Marika was, in fact, to have undergone an operation to remove the polyp in 1914, but the otorhinolaryngologist who was supposed to remove the polyp, having lost a great deal of money in a Lwów casino and being unable to pay off his debt of honor (he was an officer), instead of shooting himself in the head, robbed the regimental till and fled to Italy; this incident caused Marika to conceive a great dislike for otorhinolaryngologists, and before she could decide on another she became betrothed; as a betrothed she was obliged to sing “Sleep, Love, in Thy Bed of Flowers,” and her singing, or, rather, the memory of that hoarse and wheezy voice, in contrast—detrimental to the betrothed—with the pure timbre of the Prague nurse, was responsible for the latter's gaining ascendancy, in the mind of doctor-prisoner Kouska, over the image of his fiancee. So that, returning to Prague in the year 1919, he did not even think to look up his former fiancee but immediately went to the house in which the nurse was living as a marriageable miss.