The Science of Discworld II

based on appreciating how it constrains our plans and rewards our understanding. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ have no place in Spinozan prayer. That view melds the artisan with the philosopher, the tribal respect for tradition with the barbarian virtues of love and honour.
    And it gives us a wholly new kind of story with a civilising message. Instead of the barbarian ‘And then he rubbed the lamp again … and again the genie appeared’, we have the first king’s son taking on a task, to win the hand of the fair princess … and he fails. Amazing! No barbarian protagonist ever fails. Indeed, nobody ever ultimately fails except evil giants, sorcerers and Grand Viziers, in tribal or barbarian magical tales. However, the new story tells of the second king’s son learning from this failure, and shows the listener – the learner – how difficult the task is. Nevertheless, again he fails , because learning is not easy. But the third son – or the third billygoat Gruff or the third pig, with his house of brick – shows how to succeed in a Spinozan, enlightened world of observation and experience. Stories in which people learn from the failures of others are a hallmark of a civilised society.
    Narrativium has entered our Make-a-Human kit. It makes a different kind of mind from the tribal one, which is all ‘do this because we’ve always done it that way and it works’ and ‘don’t do that because it’s taboo, evil and we’ll kill you if you do’. And it also differs from the barbarian mind: ‘That way lies honour, booty, much wealth and many children (if I can only get a djinn , or a dgun); I would not demean myself, dishonour these hands, with menial work.’ In contrast, the civilised child learns to repeat the task, to work with the grain of the universe.
    The reader of tales that have been moulded and informed by narrativium is prepared to do whatever an understanding of the task requires. Perhaps, in the universe of the story, qualifying for princesses’ hands in marriage isn’t the preoccupation of the average middle-class,but the attitude of the third prince will serve him well down the mine, in the Stock Exchange, in the Wild West (according to Hollywood, a great purveyor of narrativium), or as father and baron. We say ‘he’ because ‘she’ has a more difficult time: narrativium has not been mined and modelled for girls, and the way the feminist myths are shaping it does not seem to address the same questions as the old boy-oriented models. But we can put that right if we realise that narrativium trains by constraint.
    Discworld, although technically a world run on fairy tale rules, derives much of its power and success from the fact that they are consistently challenged and subverted, most directly by the witch Granny Weatherwax, who cynically uses them or defies them as she sees fit. She roundly objects to girls being forced by the all-devouring ‘story’ to marry a handsome prince solely on the basis of their shoe size; she believes that stories are there to be challenged. But she herself is part of a larger story, and they follow rules, too. In a sense, she’s always trying to saw off the branch she’s sitting on. And her stories derive their power from the fact that we have been programmed from an early age to believe in the monsters that she is battling.
    1 Isn’t ‘Bombastus’ a lovely name? Well-chosen, too.
    2 Readers who have not met this felicitous phrase, for reasons of youth or geography, should be told that the three Rs are Reading, Riting and Rithmetic. What this tells us about the educational establishment is unclear, but it could be a joke. The three Rs, not the educational establishment, that is. Though, come to think of it …
    3 Hidden knowledge at that time was spectacularly practical knowledge, exemplified by the Guild secrets and especially by the Freemasons. It was dressed up in ritual, because it was mostly passed on verbally and not written down.
    4 Carers even encourage or berate the child: ‘What’s the magic word? You forgot the magic word!’
    5 Years ago, Jack wrote a book called The Privileged Ape about just this tendency. What he wanted to call it – and should have, but the publisher got cold feet – was The Ape That Got What It Wanted . (When it gets it, of course, it no longer wants it.)
    6 A system of mystic beliefs