Robert Carter's Blog: http://novelcarter.blogspot.co.uk/, page 14
July 29, 2012
The Only Way is Ethics
A few blogs back I mentioned the black hole at the center of moral philosophy, which is: because we can't know the full consequences of what we choose to do, our choices remain uninformed, and we have no way of knowing whether even our best intentions will ultimately lead to beneficial outcomes.
So how might we confidently go about shaping things for the better and not for the worse? How, in short, do we know right from wrong?
Biology, it turns out, offers us a clue. Our behavior as a social species has been shaped by millions of years of evolution, and shaped according to one main principle: the favoring of behavior that tends to help the survival of an individual's genes.
The ramifications of this idea are weighty and vast. It explains why we tend to favor close family over strangers, why we codify certain laws and even why different societies tend to develop similar taboos.
Our sense of right and wrong is largely a matter of reciprocity - do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or more precisely: do not do unto others that which you wouldn't have done to you. That gets us a long way, too. But none of the above amounts to a wholly consistent ethics, indeed the revelations of sociobiology seem to show that a wholly consistent ethics is not actually possible.
This is because seen from different standpoints different behaviors appear right and wrong simultaneously. Theft, for example, might be thought of as unequivocally wrong, but what about the poor mother who steals a loaf of bread to feed her starving child? To take an even more extreme example: murder may be thought wrong, but what about the man who kills an aircraft hi-jacker and so prevents hundreds or thousands dying? Perhaps that murderer deserves a medal.
Novelists usually operate in a god-controlled world, in that world the author is god. The real world may be quite different. What we are presently learning may not be what we wanted to find.
About a hundred years ago physics began to move into a new era where all the old certainties evaporated in the burning bright light of new discoveries and a new understanding. It looks to me as if ethics is presently undergoing a similar transition. For those people who crave certainty in an uncertain world, better strap in tight, because the ride is going to be a bumpy one.[image error]
So how might we confidently go about shaping things for the better and not for the worse? How, in short, do we know right from wrong?
Biology, it turns out, offers us a clue. Our behavior as a social species has been shaped by millions of years of evolution, and shaped according to one main principle: the favoring of behavior that tends to help the survival of an individual's genes.
The ramifications of this idea are weighty and vast. It explains why we tend to favor close family over strangers, why we codify certain laws and even why different societies tend to develop similar taboos.
Our sense of right and wrong is largely a matter of reciprocity - do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or more precisely: do not do unto others that which you wouldn't have done to you. That gets us a long way, too. But none of the above amounts to a wholly consistent ethics, indeed the revelations of sociobiology seem to show that a wholly consistent ethics is not actually possible.
This is because seen from different standpoints different behaviors appear right and wrong simultaneously. Theft, for example, might be thought of as unequivocally wrong, but what about the poor mother who steals a loaf of bread to feed her starving child? To take an even more extreme example: murder may be thought wrong, but what about the man who kills an aircraft hi-jacker and so prevents hundreds or thousands dying? Perhaps that murderer deserves a medal.
Novelists usually operate in a god-controlled world, in that world the author is god. The real world may be quite different. What we are presently learning may not be what we wanted to find.
About a hundred years ago physics began to move into a new era where all the old certainties evaporated in the burning bright light of new discoveries and a new understanding. It looks to me as if ethics is presently undergoing a similar transition. For those people who crave certainty in an uncertain world, better strap in tight, because the ride is going to be a bumpy one.[image error]
July 28, 2012
Magic
"You say you're into science, and yet your fantasy trilogy deals with magic!"
A fan of my Language of Stones trilogy accused me thus, recently. Well, this is true, but
nothing stops a person who doesn't believe in magic in this world creating a fictional
world in which there is magic.
Even hardened reality junkie scientists like to read stories set in imagined landscapes now
and again. There's a great quote from the excellent Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame,
to the effect that real magic is fake and fake magic is real.
The big man is right. (He usually is.)
I love the idea of magic. I love the idea of a system that can extend human power and
control that which was once uncontrolable, and deliver a deeper understanding of the world.
But, hey, that's a pretty good description of science too, isn't it? It was once said, and I
forget by whom, that any sufficiently advanced form of science will look like magic. That
(presumably) explains why the Little Green Men have done such a good job of hiding from us.
Hmmm, I really must have a go at a science fiction novel one of these days.
A good friend of mine is Fay Presto, the magician. An evening with her is like no other.
Apart from being intelligent, witty and kind, she is so skilled at close-up magic that a
person like me is utterly amazed and thrilled by it. Close-up magic is delightful stuff to
watch. I think the recent TV shows of Dynamo illustrate what I mean: watch the faces of the
people he demonstrates his skills to. It doesn't matter how surly or mean they look when he
starts, in the end those faces are lit up like light bulbs. Not much else can do that.
A fan of my Language of Stones trilogy accused me thus, recently. Well, this is true, but
nothing stops a person who doesn't believe in magic in this world creating a fictional
world in which there is magic.
Even hardened reality junkie scientists like to read stories set in imagined landscapes now
and again. There's a great quote from the excellent Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame,
to the effect that real magic is fake and fake magic is real.
The big man is right. (He usually is.)
I love the idea of magic. I love the idea of a system that can extend human power and
control that which was once uncontrolable, and deliver a deeper understanding of the world.
But, hey, that's a pretty good description of science too, isn't it? It was once said, and I
forget by whom, that any sufficiently advanced form of science will look like magic. That
(presumably) explains why the Little Green Men have done such a good job of hiding from us.
Hmmm, I really must have a go at a science fiction novel one of these days.
A good friend of mine is Fay Presto, the magician. An evening with her is like no other.
Apart from being intelligent, witty and kind, she is so skilled at close-up magic that a
person like me is utterly amazed and thrilled by it. Close-up magic is delightful stuff to
watch. I think the recent TV shows of Dynamo illustrate what I mean: watch the faces of the
people he demonstrates his skills to. It doesn't matter how surly or mean they look when he
starts, in the end those faces are lit up like light bulbs. Not much else can do that.
What Are You Trying To Prove?
If you've read my novel "The Sandboy", you'll know that astronomy was one of the first loves of my life. It got hold of me when I was a kid and has never really let go. I still own a telescope, and I still point it at the sky. I know what Brian Cox is on about when he talks about a "sense of wonder."
No matter what you do after studying science, it leaves a mark on you. One of the marks science left on me was impatience with people who pontificate about science without having any idea of what it is. So here is a short work of reference to settle the matter once and for all.
What science is: it is a method of accumulating a consistent body of information about the way the universe works. It doesn't prove right ideas right, but it does disprove wrong ideas wrong. It isn't some kind of religion, or something that has deliberately set itself up against religion, it's just a way of shining a light on the world and consigning descriptions that can be shown to be inaccurate to the waste basket of history.
So how does science actually work?
Surprisingly simple, really. You think up an idea, say, about the shape of the earth: "The earth is flat." Then you try to collect evidence showing that proposition is false: e.g. ships at sea seem to vanish hull first, and new stars appear in the sky when you travel south from Alexandria. (Neither of these observations fits well with the original idea of flatness.) Then you try to come up with a new idea that does fit the observations. It could be that: "The earth is a sphere."
You then just repeat the process over and again, slowly refining the idea each time and getting an increasingly accurate picture of the shape of the earth. Bingo!
But what if your new idea had been: "The earth is a cube"? Well, then that would have created another set of difficulties that clashed with subsequent observations and so enabled this erroneous idea to be done away with too.
By the way, the earth isn't exactly a sphere. Since it rotates, it takes up the shape of an oblate spheroid, i.e. one flattened at the poles and distended at the equator. Even that isn't the most refined description to date: the earth is no more uniform inside than it is outside. In addition, it has a magnetic field and a large satellite pulling on it gravitationally as well as a non-circular orbit around the sun which affects the strength of the gravity field that the Eath experiences. So Earth's shape is altering just a little bit all the time.
The process we call science has over the last 400 years or so addressed countless ideas like this, so that now we have a large body of refined information, and that makes it possible for technologists and engineers to produce helpful items like computer chips and GPS units and medical scanners and all the other good stuff that makes life less miserable, brutish and short.
So let's hear it for science!
No matter what you do after studying science, it leaves a mark on you. One of the marks science left on me was impatience with people who pontificate about science without having any idea of what it is. So here is a short work of reference to settle the matter once and for all.
What science is: it is a method of accumulating a consistent body of information about the way the universe works. It doesn't prove right ideas right, but it does disprove wrong ideas wrong. It isn't some kind of religion, or something that has deliberately set itself up against religion, it's just a way of shining a light on the world and consigning descriptions that can be shown to be inaccurate to the waste basket of history.
So how does science actually work?
Surprisingly simple, really. You think up an idea, say, about the shape of the earth: "The earth is flat." Then you try to collect evidence showing that proposition is false: e.g. ships at sea seem to vanish hull first, and new stars appear in the sky when you travel south from Alexandria. (Neither of these observations fits well with the original idea of flatness.) Then you try to come up with a new idea that does fit the observations. It could be that: "The earth is a sphere."
You then just repeat the process over and again, slowly refining the idea each time and getting an increasingly accurate picture of the shape of the earth. Bingo!
But what if your new idea had been: "The earth is a cube"? Well, then that would have created another set of difficulties that clashed with subsequent observations and so enabled this erroneous idea to be done away with too.
By the way, the earth isn't exactly a sphere. Since it rotates, it takes up the shape of an oblate spheroid, i.e. one flattened at the poles and distended at the equator. Even that isn't the most refined description to date: the earth is no more uniform inside than it is outside. In addition, it has a magnetic field and a large satellite pulling on it gravitationally as well as a non-circular orbit around the sun which affects the strength of the gravity field that the Eath experiences. So Earth's shape is altering just a little bit all the time.
The process we call science has over the last 400 years or so addressed countless ideas like this, so that now we have a large body of refined information, and that makes it possible for technologists and engineers to produce helpful items like computer chips and GPS units and medical scanners and all the other good stuff that makes life less miserable, brutish and short.
So let's hear it for science!
July 24, 2012
Tour de France, Tour de Force.
I have never been much of a fan of competitive bicyling, which is odd, because I am a fan of engineering, and my trusty Brompton folding bike (a miracle of good-sense engineering) is one of the loves of my life.
But I digress.
Apparently, in 1953, (I can't say for sure because I wasn't there) there was an Annus Mirabilis. This is queen-talk for "a jolly good year." All kinds of good things happened, and chief among them - the Queen's Coronation itself notwithstanding - was the death of Stalin and the achievement of Sir Edmund Hillary and Namgyal Wangdi in being, so far as we know, the first men to reach the summit of the world's highest mountain.
Perhaps this London Olympic year will be another Annus Mirabilis, and Bradley Wiggins' mopping up of the French (and others) will be, like the good news that once came down from Nepal, an omen of Great Things. You can't beat a good beating of the French, if you're English.
Well Done, Bradley Wiggins!
But I digress.
Apparently, in 1953, (I can't say for sure because I wasn't there) there was an Annus Mirabilis. This is queen-talk for "a jolly good year." All kinds of good things happened, and chief among them - the Queen's Coronation itself notwithstanding - was the death of Stalin and the achievement of Sir Edmund Hillary and Namgyal Wangdi in being, so far as we know, the first men to reach the summit of the world's highest mountain.
Perhaps this London Olympic year will be another Annus Mirabilis, and Bradley Wiggins' mopping up of the French (and others) will be, like the good news that once came down from Nepal, an omen of Great Things. You can't beat a good beating of the French, if you're English.
Well Done, Bradley Wiggins!
More General Arthur Cigars
In a previous post I mentioned the once popular brand of cigar known as the General Arthur. I thought it a service to my noble readers to quote the ad in full. Its unhurried qualities may impress the mind with a sense of how much more hectored and bullied we are by the hard sell these days. Anyhow here it is:
Every discriminating smoker has
experienced the annoyance of being
obliged to put up with inferior
cigars while traveling. You can
avoid this always and be sure of a
reliable and satisfactory smoke by
taking a box of GENERAL ARTHUR
CIGARS with you when you travel.
This cigar is beyond doubt the
finest domestic cigar ever
produced. It is made by the largest
and best equipped cigar factory in
America by men who have no
superiors for expert knowledge and
skill. It is make from the only
stock of really choice Havana
tobacco in the world. Since the
Cuban war began most of the
so-called "Havana" tobacco has been
raised in Porto Rico, but the
Havana of which the GENERAL ARTHUR
is made was bought before the war
commenced, and held by us to be
used in the GENERAL ARTHUR alone.
Consequently, no matter what you
pay, you cannot secure the equal of
the GENERAL ARTHUR.
If you do not find it at your
dealer's, send us one dollar and we
will forward, prepaid, a dozen
GENERAL ARTHURS, packed in a tin
box.
KERBS, WERTHEIM & SCHIFFER, New York.
Send us a two cent stamp and we
will send you a novel and striking
little folder.
Readers may also be impressed with the price. It just shows how much the dollar used to be worth in terms of buying power - and what other use can a dollar be put to, except perhaps to light one of those mellow General Arthur cigars?
Every discriminating smoker has
experienced the annoyance of being
obliged to put up with inferior
cigars while traveling. You can
avoid this always and be sure of a
reliable and satisfactory smoke by
taking a box of GENERAL ARTHUR
CIGARS with you when you travel.
This cigar is beyond doubt the
finest domestic cigar ever
produced. It is made by the largest
and best equipped cigar factory in
America by men who have no
superiors for expert knowledge and
skill. It is make from the only
stock of really choice Havana
tobacco in the world. Since the
Cuban war began most of the
so-called "Havana" tobacco has been
raised in Porto Rico, but the
Havana of which the GENERAL ARTHUR
is made was bought before the war
commenced, and held by us to be
used in the GENERAL ARTHUR alone.
Consequently, no matter what you
pay, you cannot secure the equal of
the GENERAL ARTHUR.
If you do not find it at your
dealer's, send us one dollar and we
will forward, prepaid, a dozen
GENERAL ARTHURS, packed in a tin
box.
KERBS, WERTHEIM & SCHIFFER, New York.
Send us a two cent stamp and we
will send you a novel and striking
little folder.
Readers may also be impressed with the price. It just shows how much the dollar used to be worth in terms of buying power - and what other use can a dollar be put to, except perhaps to light one of those mellow General Arthur cigars?
Tall and Thin, or Short and Fat?
I am not now, and never have been, a scientist by profession, although I do hold a degree in astrophysics and two post-graduate engineering qualifications. That is enough to make me pretty scary to some people, especially those who know I make my living out of writing historical fiction.
How can one individual be interested in both the sciences and the arts? I sometimes hear them cry.
But to me, this divide seems like an artificial one, and something that arises from the education system. Schools usually make teenagers choose either one direction or the other so as to stand the best chance of getting into university: the pre-college kid who has Maths-Physics-Chemistry is easier to place than one with Maths-Art-Chemistry.
Is this a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing?
We want all people to live lives that are personally fulfilling, but on the other hand highly complex societies such as those we humans tend to live in need customized individuals just as much as ant hills or termite mounds do. And, like it or not, society has to create people who can become soldiers and workers and nursemaids and queens and ten thousand other kinds of specialist.
I realize that Renaissance Man is frowned upon nowadays - what use is he? - but I just can't help thinking that the old idea of a "rounded education" had something going for it so far as making a fulfilled life is concerned. On the other hand, when it comes to stuff like surgery, give me the specialist over the Renaissance Man any day.
However, something like my novel The Sandboy could not have been written by a person of narrow and specific interests. I have tried to keep both the arts and the sciences equally nurtured within me and I'm very glad I did.
How can one individual be interested in both the sciences and the arts? I sometimes hear them cry.
But to me, this divide seems like an artificial one, and something that arises from the education system. Schools usually make teenagers choose either one direction or the other so as to stand the best chance of getting into university: the pre-college kid who has Maths-Physics-Chemistry is easier to place than one with Maths-Art-Chemistry.
Is this a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing?
We want all people to live lives that are personally fulfilling, but on the other hand highly complex societies such as those we humans tend to live in need customized individuals just as much as ant hills or termite mounds do. And, like it or not, society has to create people who can become soldiers and workers and nursemaids and queens and ten thousand other kinds of specialist.
I realize that Renaissance Man is frowned upon nowadays - what use is he? - but I just can't help thinking that the old idea of a "rounded education" had something going for it so far as making a fulfilled life is concerned. On the other hand, when it comes to stuff like surgery, give me the specialist over the Renaissance Man any day.
However, something like my novel The Sandboy could not have been written by a person of narrow and specific interests. I have tried to keep both the arts and the sciences equally nurtured within me and I'm very glad I did.
Moral philosophy - a ray of hope
My post "The Great Scheme of Things" so appalled me, that I was inclined to think more on it.
We do have, most of us, a sense of right and wrong. Religions put this down to God, while those who do not adhere to any religion have recourse to the scientific view that this sense arises from our evolutionary past.
In the same way that we instinctively recoil from potentially venomous creatures such as spiders and snakes, our societies tend to create taboos around actions like incest and cannibalism. Acts worth avoiding in the interests of the greater good were eventually codified into cultural laws such as the Ten Commandments. An aphorism like, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," which is not biblical, I was surprised to discover, has the power to remind us, if not compel us, how best to behave.
Universal education (perhaps I mean universal moral socialization) within a society is expensive, but it is not as expensive as it may seem. It is probably our only protection against the creation of a large, barbaric underclass. Unless we envisage a return to God-oriented societies in the West and the physically repressive measures of the past, that is.
Postscript:
Since I wrote this piece the anniversary of the atrocity committed on Utoya has passed. I happened to be in Norway at the time. (I happened to be in the US when the twin towers came down too, but that's another story.) Another atrocity has been committed in Colorado. Both Anders Breivik and James Holmes (assuming the latter is found guilty) are individuals with broken minds. What broke them is immaterial. The fact that they have proved they are dangerous to others and cannot be trusted to move among the rest of us again, coupled with the certainty that we do not know how to fix minds as broken as these, means that they must be either locked up forever or done away with. I will, in future posts, set out my views on both these options.
We do have, most of us, a sense of right and wrong. Religions put this down to God, while those who do not adhere to any religion have recourse to the scientific view that this sense arises from our evolutionary past.
In the same way that we instinctively recoil from potentially venomous creatures such as spiders and snakes, our societies tend to create taboos around actions like incest and cannibalism. Acts worth avoiding in the interests of the greater good were eventually codified into cultural laws such as the Ten Commandments. An aphorism like, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," which is not biblical, I was surprised to discover, has the power to remind us, if not compel us, how best to behave.
Universal education (perhaps I mean universal moral socialization) within a society is expensive, but it is not as expensive as it may seem. It is probably our only protection against the creation of a large, barbaric underclass. Unless we envisage a return to God-oriented societies in the West and the physically repressive measures of the past, that is.
Postscript:
Since I wrote this piece the anniversary of the atrocity committed on Utoya has passed. I happened to be in Norway at the time. (I happened to be in the US when the twin towers came down too, but that's another story.) Another atrocity has been committed in Colorado. Both Anders Breivik and James Holmes (assuming the latter is found guilty) are individuals with broken minds. What broke them is immaterial. The fact that they have proved they are dangerous to others and cannot be trusted to move among the rest of us again, coupled with the certainty that we do not know how to fix minds as broken as these, means that they must be either locked up forever or done away with. I will, in future posts, set out my views on both these options.
A Carp.
A carp? I hear you cry. No, no. Not the fish. I mean bellyache, bitch, bemoan ... in a word: complain.
We British are supposed to be good at complaining, but we complain in a singularly useless way. An American who is served a bad meal in a restaurant will likely complain to the restaurant and tell them where they were falling down on the job, and Brit will usually complain to his or her spouse during the car ride home, having betrayed not the least dissatisfaction to the waiter, chef or restaurant owner.
This is not moral cowardice or even good manners gone mad. We simply think that it's not our job to go around correcting the performance of bad restaurants. We punish them by simply not going there again, and we hope that in due course the erring business will shrivel up and die.
The French, of course, are excellent complainers. Not for them the constant miserable criticism of the weather - British weather is singularly mild and harmless, so we have developed a fetish over its many fine distinctions. But the French - they find a cause and go for it wholeheartedly, right down to throwing cobblestones through the windows of the local town hall. The last time a Brit threw anything at a town hall was in the reign of Edward the Confessor. And as a result we put up with a lot of misery, injustice and general slackness.
Well, now I have complained about complaining. Is that a first, I wonder?
We British are supposed to be good at complaining, but we complain in a singularly useless way. An American who is served a bad meal in a restaurant will likely complain to the restaurant and tell them where they were falling down on the job, and Brit will usually complain to his or her spouse during the car ride home, having betrayed not the least dissatisfaction to the waiter, chef or restaurant owner.
This is not moral cowardice or even good manners gone mad. We simply think that it's not our job to go around correcting the performance of bad restaurants. We punish them by simply not going there again, and we hope that in due course the erring business will shrivel up and die.
The French, of course, are excellent complainers. Not for them the constant miserable criticism of the weather - British weather is singularly mild and harmless, so we have developed a fetish over its many fine distinctions. But the French - they find a cause and go for it wholeheartedly, right down to throwing cobblestones through the windows of the local town hall. The last time a Brit threw anything at a town hall was in the reign of Edward the Confessor. And as a result we put up with a lot of misery, injustice and general slackness.
Well, now I have complained about complaining. Is that a first, I wonder?
July 19, 2012
General Arthur Cigars
One of my interests is advertising. Since reading a book called "Techniques of Persuasion", which was about brainwashing, I've thought it wise to keep an eye out for techniques that may have been practised on me.
Part of the fun is looking at old ephemeral literature such as magazines and posters which once attempted, in a naive way, what modern agencies do nowadays in a snappier, more sophisticated way.
In my novel "Death Valley Scotty", set in 1905, the eponymous hero smokes a brand of cigar called the 'General Arthur.' I first came across this brand while examining vintage photos of Los Angeles, in which I saw the brand name painted on the side of a building. Subsequent research tracked down several ads from the first years of the 20th Century. Their texts are charmingly un-pushy and have no killer sub-text.
I don't smoke cigars, but if I did I would probably have been tempted to smoke General Arthur cigars by ads like these. Much more so than by modern ads, many of which succeed in annoying me and so creating actual sales resistance.
British readers will know precisely what I mean when I say I could cheerfully strangle a certain mustachioed TV tenor who sings "Go compare ...&c." in an effort to make us buy insurance. I will not buy insurance from that firm, not now, not ever. I will track down their holding company and put that on my blacklist too. And if ever a representative of theirs turns up on my doorstep, there will be blood running in the gutters ...
That's what I mean by sales resistance.
Part of the fun is looking at old ephemeral literature such as magazines and posters which once attempted, in a naive way, what modern agencies do nowadays in a snappier, more sophisticated way.
In my novel "Death Valley Scotty", set in 1905, the eponymous hero smokes a brand of cigar called the 'General Arthur.' I first came across this brand while examining vintage photos of Los Angeles, in which I saw the brand name painted on the side of a building. Subsequent research tracked down several ads from the first years of the 20th Century. Their texts are charmingly un-pushy and have no killer sub-text.
I don't smoke cigars, but if I did I would probably have been tempted to smoke General Arthur cigars by ads like these. Much more so than by modern ads, many of which succeed in annoying me and so creating actual sales resistance.
British readers will know precisely what I mean when I say I could cheerfully strangle a certain mustachioed TV tenor who sings "Go compare ...&c." in an effort to make us buy insurance. I will not buy insurance from that firm, not now, not ever. I will track down their holding company and put that on my blacklist too. And if ever a representative of theirs turns up on my doorstep, there will be blood running in the gutters ...
That's what I mean by sales resistance.
The Low Level Polymath
I was once rudely described (by someone I detest) as a "low level polymath." Now the majority of insults tend to bounce off my rhinocerosian hide, but this barb stuck in me enough to hurt, and I think I know why.
The interpersonal savager in question had made a career of insulting people, and so had gone out fo his way to acquire an arsenal of unpleasant techniques with which to practise his art. The one he loved best was "the arrow that comes closest to the truth." He would attempt to divine the target's prime weakness before custom-shaping his warhead, and that meant looking out for the target's most fondly-held idea about himself.
Now, I've always sort of prided myself on having acquired a hoard of near-useless, but to me interesting, information. So it wasn't the "polymath" I objected to, it was the "low level". Damned with faint praise, then? I guess so. But what sort of a mid-list author would I be if I couldn't handle faint praise, right?
I wonder if what had really hit home was the notion that, if a polymath was someone who knows somthing about everything, then what he had implied about me was that I knew virtually nothing about almost everything, This is not an enviable description, however true it may be, and translated to me as an insult.
But more: if I was a low level polymath, then there must be a hierarchy of polymaths, presumably topped at the giddiest height by Stephen Fry, a man who has repeatedly denied in the coyest manner possible that he knows virtually everything about almost everything, and so craftily forms general opinion to the contrary.
I'd like to state here and now that whatever level of polymathy Stephen Fry has reached, so have I.
So there!
Wow, I feel much better having gotten that off my chest.
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