Cultural Amnesia (20 page)

CHARLES CHAPLIN

For most of his life, which stretched from 1889 to 1977, Charles Chaplin was world-famous, and for
much of the early part of his career, up until the end of the silent movie era, he was, if measured in terms of recognizability and media coverage, by far the most famous person in the world.
Readers of his stilted
My Autobiography
might assume that it all went to his head. The facts say that it didn’t. The object of adulation on a
scale that would have embarrassed Louis XIV, Chaplin nevertheless maintained his identification with the common people from whom he emerged. His progressive politics were genuinely felt, and
his embarrassment at the hands of Red scare witch-hunters during the McCarthy era—the persecution drove him into exile—was an episode in modern American history of which his
adopted country had no cause to be proud. In his later and less successful movies of the sound era, there were signs of disabling conceit in his determination to take every major credit
including that of composer, but nobody had a better right to consider himself an artistic genius. He knew, however, that he wasn’t a genius about everything else as well. Hitler, who
awarded himself credentials for peculiar insight even into science, was thus a perfect subject for Chaplin’s
comic gift.
The Great
Dictator
(1940) was a study of megalomania by an essentially humble man.

They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you
because no-one understands you.

—CHARLES CHAPLIN TO ALBERT
EINSTEIN AT THE 1931 PREMIERE OF
City Lights

O
N THE
BIG
night, both of the great men looked good in their tuxedos, but the film star was undoubtedly the more adroit at social charm. He said exactly the right thing. He wasn’t quite
right, however, about the “no-one.” Contrary to the lasting myth—generated by a
New York Times
reporter keen to sex up the
story—every physicist in the world understood the theory of special relativity straight away, even if they thought it might be wrong. By now, almost every literate person can recite the
equation E = mc
²
, and even give a rough account of what it means. They might not be able to do the same for the multiple equations of the theory of general
relativity, but they have some idea of what the theory deals with. To give a rough account, however, is not the same as giving a precise one, and having some idea is not the same as
understanding. It remains true that only the scientifically competent can fully know what is involved. Everybody else has to take it on trust. Chaplin’s remark nailed down a discrepancy
between two kinds of knowledge: the artistic and the scientific.

The discrepancy had already been there when Goethe rejected Newton’s theory about the composition
of light because it didn’t strike him as artistically satisfactory. The discrepancy was there, but it wasn’t obvious. (Certainly it wasn’t obvious to Goethe.) By the time
Chaplin and Einstein both went to see
City Lights
, it was obvious to all but the insane. Most of science, for those of us without mathematics, is a closed
book. But some of the book’s contents can be transmitted in a form we can appreciate, and there is consolation in the fact that the humanities unarguably constitute a culture, whereas
whether or not science is a culture is a question that science can’t answer. When the British scientist cum novelist C. P. Snow gave his lecture called
The
Two Cultures
in 1959—his main point was that literary people who didn’t
know something about science couldn’t know enough about the modern
world—he started a quarrel that he was bound to lose, because the dispute could be conducted only within the framework of written argument. There was no way of conducting it by experiment,
or stating it in symbols. It could take place only in language—on the territory, that is, that the humanities have occupied throughout history.

Science lives in a perpetual present, and must always discard its own past as it advances. (If a contemporary
thermodynamicist refers to the literature on phlogiston, he will do so as a humanist, not as a scientist. Nor did Edwin Hubble need to know about Ptolemy, although he did.) The humanities do not
advance in that sense: they accumulate, and the past is always retained. The two forms of knowledge thus have fundamentally different kinds of history. A scientist can revisit scientific history
at his choice. A humanist has no choice: he must revisit the history of the humanities all the time, because it is always alive, and can’t be superseded. Two different kinds of history, and
two different kinds of time. Humanist time runs both ways: an arrow with a head at each end. If Homer could be beamed up from the past, taught English, and introduced to Braille editions of the
novels of Jane Austen, he would be able to tell that they were stories about men, women and conflict, and more like his own stories than not. Much of the background would be strange to him, but
not the foreground. A couple of millennia have done not much more to make the present unrecognizable to the past than they have done to make the past unrecognizable to the present. Science, on
the other hand, can make its own future unrecognizable in a couple of decades. If the most brilliant mathematicians and computer engineers of 1945 could be brought here now and shown an ordinary
laptop, they might conceivably be able to operate it, but they would have no idea of how it worked. Its microprocessors would be insoluble mysteries. The power of science is to transform the
world in ways that not even scientists can predict. The power of the humanities—of the one and only culture—is to interpret the world in ways that anybody can appreciate. Einstein
knew that science had given Chaplin the means to be famous. Einstein also knew that Chaplin could live without a knowledge of science. But as Einstein told Chaplin on many occasions, he himself,
Einstein, could not live without a knowledge of the humanities. Einstein loved music, for example, and was so wedded
to the concept of aesthetic satisfaction that he gained
added faith in his general relativity equations from finding them beautiful, and frowned on the propositions of quantum mechanics because he found them shapeless. On the latter point he turned
out to be wrong, and physicists in the next generation were generally agreed that his aesthetic sense had led him astray. The two different kinds of inspiration almost certainly connect, but only
at a level so deep that nobody inspired in either way can ever know exactly how he does it. Whoever was inspired to invent the tuxedo, however, did the world a service: on the big night, the two
different geniuses looked like the equals that they were.

NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI

Born in East Bengal in 1897, Nirad C. Chaudhuri lived for a hundred years, which meant that for
almost the whole of the twentieth century one of the great masters of English prose was an Indian: and of Indian masters of English prose, Chaudhuri was by a long way the most distinguished.
He was granted that title even by other writers of Indian background who might well have claimed something like it for themselves: V. S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose. They revered him
even when they disagreed with him. Chaudhuri himself never set foot outside India until 1955, for a trip to the centre of the old British Empire—rapidly shrinking at the time—that
he had always infuriated many of his compatriots by more admiring than not. His short book about that short visit,
A Passage to England
, gives us the
essence of his limpid style and historical range. But readers should not be afraid to tackle at least two of his longer books.
Thy Hand, Great Anarch!
,
his account of the crucial years in Indian history between 1921 and 1952, is one of the indispensable historical works of the century, and
The Autobiography of
an Unknown Indian
is rich in self-examination, unfailingly hard-headed in its liberal sweep, and true in every detail except its title. If ever there was a known Indian, it was
Chaudhuri. His decision to live out the last act of his life in Britain had profound impliciations for some of his fellow Indian intellectuals. Many of them resented it. But his
belief in India’s importance to the world remained beyond question.