Science of Discworld III

self-advancement have atrophied.
    Does this matter?
    Indeed it does. Perhaps Owen Harry, who had himself risen from a poor Welsh beginning near Cardiff’s Tiger Bay to become a very young chief technician in Jack’s zoology dept at Birmingham University, and later became a senior lecturer at Belfast University, put this best when he described its main negative consequence as ‘a lack of sergeants’.
    There is a story about officer training and examination in the British Army in the 1950s. One of the most important questions was ‘Howdo you dig a trench?’. The correct answer was ‘I say “Sergeant, dig me a trench!”’ Sergeants are people who organise the doing . They are not experts in what to do, or when: that’s the prerogative of officers, who theoretically constitute the brains of the organisation. Officers decide what has to be done, but don’t know how to do it. Sergeants don’t actually do things, either, except occasionally when they have to. Their role is to organise squads of ignorant men, often incompetent, but well trained to obey orders, so that they cooperate effectively. Sergeants are the layer that makes cooperation effective: they know how to get things done. Privates know how to do what they’re told, and are trained not to do anything else.
    We didn’t say efficient; it’s a common mistake to see efficiency as something to be striven for. Efficiency is a concept borrowed from engineering and physics, a measure of how much you get out for how much you put in. Sergeants are in some respects the least efficient way of getting things done; they have a tendency towards repetition and sarcasm, confident that a few of their recruits will graduate from basic training with some degree of competence. But sergeants are very effective, and the system they are part of is very robust.
    Darwin and Wallace, Spencer and Wells, all came up through a system that was very robust in this way. All of them, different as they were, knew that writing books was a prime way of affecting the society around you. There was no television, no films, and only a fraction of people went to the theatre or the opera … mostly to music hall and pantomimes around Christmas. Dickens, Kingsley, the Brontë sisters, and Thomas Hardy made people – lots of people – think new thoughts and lead new lives. The working men’s clubs and their links with the public libraries brought reading skills to a higher level than ever before.
    So this audience was ripe for persuasive texts that could take them out of simple biblical knowledge into new theologies, even into atheism. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, promoted Darwinism as theantithesis of a God-made world. From the aspiring middle class of Victoriana grew our modern secular age, with God relegated to the plaything of a few of the less modern clergy. Modern clergy don’t believe in a twelve-foot Englishman up there in the sky, with Heaven as an eternal Buckingham Palace garden party. Particularly from those French philosophers who continued sophisticated theological criticism in lineages derived from Voltaire, our clerics learned to do without that strong Victorian style of Christianity. That form of Anglicanism, confident that God really was looking after the English, didn’t need to embarrass itself with overt prayers. The rituals would suffice (provided they weren’t noisy like the Welsh, or showy like the Catholics).
    We have lost strong simple religion, we have lost academic excellence, we have gained a secular society that maintains the heterogeneity that made it so robust in Victorian times and later. However, we are now pursuing policies, particularly in education, that fail to provide society with all those able people who built the Victorian and Edwardian edifices, both material and theoretical.
    There are routes away from this pessimism. In The Science of Discworld II we referred to humans as Pan narrans , the storytelling chimpanzee. Our overall message was that humans need to make stories to motivate themselves, to identify goals, and to distinguish good from evil.
    Here we go a step further.
    Technological and Civilised Man, we believe, must become Polypan multinarrans , 5 to extend the metaphor rather further. Human beings must become ever more diverse, valuing and enjoying each other’s differences rather than fearing them or suppressing them. And mere explanation is not enough. To gain understanding, a useful working philosophy as appropriate for