The Science of Discworld II

the Moon changes its shape, let alone why or where the pole star is. Yes, all right, you do, and it’s not surprising. Others don’t, and don’t think what they don’t know is worth knowing.
    They have a vague feel for a few of the constellations, especially the Big Dipper (or Great Bear), but they don’t know that those stars are not near to each other, but merely appear to be in that formation when viewed from Earth, and then only for a short time, astronomically speaking. Most people don’t entertain astronomical thoughts, so why are the stars so heavily involved in our most potent stories? Perhaps because, in our nursery stories, the celestial sphere gives a context, a primitive animistic one in which Moon and Sun take protagonist parts? We don’t find that persuasive. Perhaps it is because the power of the stars entered our cultural stories back in the time when everyone could see the clear night sky, and has hung on. Or perhaps it is the jargon of the Zodiac-mongers, with their gypsy fortune-teller use of language to give received certainty to the most nebulous of prophecies. We’ve never heard anyone say, after reading the newspaper’s astrology columns, ‘Right, then, they’re totally wrong today, no more astrology for me!’
    There are others playing the same card, from Pyramidologists to Ancient Astronaut promoters to Flying Saucers Will Save Us visionaries to Rosicrucians. Regular UFO enthusiasts and Loch Ness monster photographers are much less dangerous. We focus on the prophets: those who, like followers of Nostradamus’s prophecies or astrology, must believe that all the little contingencies add up to a grand pattern of the human future and that Fate rules us all.
    This is the tribal interpretation of the feeling of free will: it is anillusion, for God already knows our futures. Kismet (the word comes from the Turkish ‘qismet’ and Arabic ‘qisma’) rules. Moreover – a neat twist that gives power over people as well as their money – whether you will be a beetle or a king in the next turn of the cosmic wheel is determined by the balance that you have achieved in this life. This is equally out of your control, in practice, but you can escape to an inner life, making it as far as possible irrelevant to the vicissitudes that attack your outer self, and thereby avoid beetlehood in your next incarnation.
    That apparent escape again depends on our ability to construct stories about our future. Here, our future divides, with the soul taking one direction under our own control and freed from the control of powerful others, while the body is manifestly bowed by slavery, starvation, or torture. Hundreds of millions have found comfort in that apparent control of their futures, following the story of their spiritual selves and denying the pains of the material self.
    In the Buddhist literature and practice, something close to that transcendence seems to be achievable. If you believe in fate, or the nearby concept of karma, then wisdom can consist only in foreseeing events, training your spiritual self to accept what happens, and teaching others to do the same. Some authority will provide your map of material events, but your destiny cannot be avoided by fighting it. Your only option is to lead a disciplined spiritual life, guided by stories of previous successes in this quest, notably the Buddha, and to entertain hopes of leaving the Wheel of Life altogether, to exist as a spiritual presence with all ties to the material severed.
    This nirvanic view of heaven is not for those who enjoy the material ride too much to want to get off the bus. And the paradoxical nature of the prophetic predictions – of all prophetic predictions – is disturbing. There is no way at all that a deterministic Earth can be accommodated by today’s view of what planets are like, and most of today’s more sophisticated religions have no room for an immanent God, tinkering with each life, and its context, to achieve its destiny. Those that do have room for immanence encounter real problems with modern technology, whose basis lies in ways-of-the-universe modelled by science, not by djinns or the whim of a deity or deities. Andalthough we may, with Fredric Brown, be amused that when the djinni that worked the electric light and the radio came out on strike, the steam-power genies came out in sympathy, we enjoy this animistic fantasy as fuel for