Restating the Obvious

Book Review XVII: The Night Is Large

The prolific and wide-ranging journalist Martin Gardner has published several collections of essays, but "The Night Is Large" appears to be a selection aimed at reaching people who wouldn't open his autobiography, "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener."

The first half, roughly, is the skeptical Gardner that we have enjoyed for many decades. Here are essays on cosmology, mathematics and, unusually, politics. He has a bit of fun with Arthur Laffer and his silly curve.

Unlike those old reliables at whom Gardner has jeered so many times, like Conan Doyle and Freud, Laffer didn't have any staying power and the essay is of only historical interest, and not too much of that.

Gardner also has his enthusiasms, for Lord Dunsany (but no essays on him here), Lewis Carroll, G.K. Chesterton and Oz.

The enthusiasm for Chesterton is puzzling. No one out of his teenage years could take him for anything but a superficial logic chopper, clever but not nearly as clever as H.H. Munro; and any schoolboy can work out the jumps he makes.

Gardner does not care about the jumps. The last part of the book is an extended excursus on Gardner's own fideism and (idiosyncratic) Platonism. If faith in some sort of deity and Platonism seem incongruous with Gardner's other role as skeptic and exposer of hoaxers, he is well aware of it. He even includes a mock review of one of his own books in which he derides his own writing.

That a number of readers did not get the joke ought to have warned Gardner of something.

The Platonism is, just barely, congruous with Gardner's life as a mathematician (student of, not original thinker), although more subtle minds have understood that the occasional fact that a mathematical system dreamed up as pure intellectual endeavor later turns out to have practical use in describing the material world is not an indicator of metareality. (Non-Euclidean geometry is the commonest example.)

It does not follow that every well-reasoned abstract mathematics will eventually match some aspect of the material world, which is why the Cal Tech mathematician Eric Temple Bell called it the queen, not king, of the sciences. (Gardner knows Bell as a science fiction writer but not, apparently, as a mathematician.)

The fideism is just silly. After many, many pages of explanation, he admits that he believes in some sort of god because it makes Martin Gardner feel good. But it does not make me feel good (other than providing a brief horselaugh at Gardner's naivete) and knowing that it makes Martin Gardner feel good does not enhance my life in any way. Gardner would have done better to keep this to himself; however, getting it off his chest does appear to be the main purpose of the collection.

Gardner's many essays on philosophy are useful, if tedious, as fairly clear explications of what some modern philosophers have written about. To a materialist, most of them have a terminal flaw: In trying to concretize some abstraction, he uses thought-experiments. A large fraction of these take the form: "Assume a condition that (so far as we know) cannot exist in the material universe; what would happen then?

To a materialist, the answer is always the same: Nothing, because the initial conditions can never occur.

In the end, Gardner opines that if people are truly impressed with the universe they apprehend, they must reach for some numinous (i.e., ghostly) back story. This is not correct. A thoroughgoing materialist can be every bit as impressed by the bigness and the littleness and the complexity and the simplicity of the universe as the woolliest-brained mystic -- as Gardner tends to become when he muses.

He is too greedy. For some of us, the universe is quite enough to deal with, without worrying about what may be going on unseen behind the curtain.

In the final pages, Gardner sounds very little different from Ram Dass, demanding that we be here now.

To which a materialist (and Gardner in his harder-headed moments) would ask, What are my other choices?