The Science of Discworld II

being, serving or being served.
    These management, leadership and aristocracy issues have been handled very differently in different societies. Feudal societies have a baronial class, who are in many respects allowed to remain in their nursery personas by being surrounded by servants and slaves and other parent-surrogates. Rich people in more complex societies, and high-status people in general (knights, kings, queens, princesses, Mafia bosses, operatic divas, pop idols, sports stars) seem to have set up societies around them that pander to their needs in a very child-pampering way. As our society has become more technical, more and more of us, right down to the lowest status levels of society, have come to benefit from the accumulating magic of technology. Supermarkets have democratised and validated the provision of all we could want to each of our child-natures. The child-magic has been appropriated by more and more adults, through technology, and the legitimate kind, the ‘wonder of nature’ magic, has lost out.
    In the mid-seventeenth century there was a philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who derived from the synthetic Renaissance position, and from his criticism of Descartes’ publications, a wholly new view of causality. He was one of several figures who bridged the Renaissance and helped engender the Enlightenment. He developed his critical view of his own Jewish cultural authorities into a new rational view of universal causality. He rejected Moses’ hearing God’s voice, and angels, and lots more ‘occult’ thinking, particularly early cabbalism; 6 he took the naïve magic out of his own religion. He was a lens-grinder, an occupation that requires the persistent checking of performance against reality. So he put in the artisan’s view of causality, and he tookout the magic of God’s word. The Jewish community in Amsterdam excommunicated him. They’d learned about that from the Catholics, but it didn’t translate very well into Jewish practice, even of those times.
    Spinoza was a pantheist. That is, he believed there is a little bit of God in everything. His main reason for believing this was that if God were separate from the material universe, then there would be an entity greater than God, namely, the entire universe plus God. It follows that Spinoza’s God is not a being , not a person in whose image humanity can be made. For this reason, Spinoza was often considered to be an atheist, and many orthodox Jews still view him that way. Despite this, his Ethics makes a beautiful, logically argued case for a particular type of pantheism. In fact, Spinoza’s viewpoint is almost indistinguishable from that of most philosophically inclined scientists, from Newton to Kauffman.
    Before Spinoza, even his supposed predecessors like Descartes and Leibniz had God moving things in the World by the power of his Voice: magic, child-thinking. Spinoza introduced the idea that an overarching God could run the universe without being anthropomorphic. Many modern Spinozans see the set of rules, devised, described or attributed by science to the physical world, as the embodiment of that kind of God. That is to say, what happens in the material world happens that way because God, or the Nature of the Physical World, constrains it to do so. And out of that come ideas resembling narrativium instead of magic and wish-fulfilment.
    A Spinozan view of child development sees the opposite of wish-fulfilment. There are rules, constraints, that limit what we can do. The child learns, as she grows, to modify her plans as she perceives more of the rules. Initially, she might attempt to cross the room assuming that the chair is not an obstacle; when it doesn’t move out of her way, she will feel frustration, a ‘passion’. And throws a paddy. Later, as she constructs her path to avoid the chair, more of her plans will peaceably, and successfully, come to fruition. As she grows and learns more of the rules – God’s Will or the warp and woof of universal causation – this progressive success will produce a calm acceptance of constraints: peace rather than passion.
    Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe is a very Spinozan book, because Spinoza saw that we do indeed make our home, with the reward of peace and the discipline of passion and its control, each of us in their own universe. We fit the universe as a whole, we evolved in it and of it, and a successful life is