Do You Think You're Clever? (13 page)

(Geography, Oxford)

On a practical, everyday basis, it makes no sense to challenge the existence of California, even if you’re not there
to experience it directly. You can cross-check its existence from many different sources – some eminently trustworthy, such as important reference books and atlases, some perhaps less trustworthy, such as, say, your next door neighbour. There are not just written accounts, but photographs as well of places within California and photographs of the entire state from space, not to mention all those Hollywood movies, California raisins and bottles of rosé wine.

What’s crucial is that every source you try will usually confirm that California exists. It’s highly unlikely that any source at all will say California does
not
exist. What’s more, you could ring up someone in California and ask them to confirm that it’s still there. In fact, from your knowledge of the rest of the world, you could probably be pretty confident that there was at least something in that space between the Pacific and the American midwest.

Of course, it might all be an incredibly elaborate subterfuge – a worldwide conspiracy designed to fool you into believing in California, for instance, or an elaborate holographic mirage that even ‘visitors’ and ‘residents’ in California are completely convinced by. Or you might just be delusional. But with such multiple, varied sources of information, the odds are so completely stacked in the favour of California’s existence that for all practical purposes you can assume it exists – until you have evidence to the contrary.

Philosophers have always had a problem with how we know things, and it seems there is nothing, logically, that we can really be certain of.
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Even Descartes’ famous bottom line, ‘I think therefore I am’, has been shown subsequently to be flawed. So of course you cannot ever be completely certain of California’s existence, even if you are there to experience it directly. However, most people would accept Plato’s less absolute idea of knowledge, explained in his dialogue
Theaetetus
, as ‘justified true belief’.

Plato argued that there are three elements involved in knowing something. First that the fact is actually true; second that you believe it to be true; and third that you are justified in believing it to be true. So if California does exist (and its existence is not questioned here), then you can say that you know it exists if you believe it does exist and are justified in that belief. The justification comes from the overwhelming weight of evidence demonstrating its existence, and the discovery that every method you could conceive of disproving its existence will fail.

Justification usually comes from three sources: empirical (the evidence of the senses), authoritative testimony and logical deduction. In asserting that you know California exists, you are relying almost exclusively on authoritative testimony, since you cannot be there and see for yourself and you can logically deduce its existence only in a very loose way.

The great Austrian-British science theorist Karl Popper (1902–94), however, argued that justification isn’t enough, and that scientific theories and other claims to knowledge should always be rationally criticised. What is important, Popper argued, is that a claim must be falsifiable – that is, a claim can be accepted as knowledge only if it’s possible to show that it’s false. Thus a belief in God can never be knowledge because God’s existence cannot be disproved. Good scientific theories can be, and scientists must always strive to disprove them – and you should work from the assumption that they are probably false. In other words, if you follow Plato’s reasoning, the best claims to knowledge are those that are likely to be true; if you follow Popper, the best claims are those that are least likely to be untrue. So, by Plato’s book, you can say you know California exists from the weight of authoritative testimony that shows that it does. By Popper’s, you can merely say that you can find no evidence that it does not.

While it’s always wise to question one’s assumptions, and Popper’s arguments for continual rational criticism are powerful, it’s simply impractical to question everything, and the reality of California is something it’s not worth questioning. Say you wanted to take a trip to Hollywood. You might not know for certain that California exists, but if you refuse to get on the plane until you do know, you’ll spend your entire life in the airport lounge. No one will catch you out being wrong, but, my goodness, you’d soon get bored with tasteless snacks and the mind-numbing muzak!

(Medicine, Oxford)

Traditionally, people were declared dead when their hearts stopped beating, their blood stopped circulating and they stopped breathing. So doctors would listen for a heartbeat, or occasionally conduct the famous mirror test to see if there were any signs of moisture from the potential deceased’s breath. In popular parlance, when people’s hearts stop and they breathe their last, they are dead. But in the last half-century, doctors have proved time and time again that they can revive many patients whose hearts have stopped beating by various techniques such as cardio pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and fibrillation. So a patient whose heart has stopped can no longer be regarded as dead. Instead, they are said to be ‘clinically dead’. Someone who is only clinically dead can often be brought back to life.

The limit to resuscitation is that when the heart stops, the lack of blood circulation immediately begins to dam
age the body – especially the brain. Normally the brain can only survive without severe damage for less than three minutes after circulation ceases – although if the patient is very cold it can survive much longer, especially if the patient was very, very cold before their heart stopped. The longest documented survival was of an infant child who stayed submerged beneath the icy waters of a frozen lake for 40 minutes, and recovered completely. Some clinicians think that extreme cold may enable children to survive without brain damage up to an hour after clinical death.

Once the brain is badly damaged, however, there is no hope of revival, so many legal definitions of death focus on brain death – although some religious groups prefer the traditional version. By brain death, doctors usually mean the cessation of all brain activity due to the destruction of neurons from the loss of blood circulation. The problem is to determine when this happens. Doctors now accept that death is a process in which various bodily functions gradually shut down rather than a single event, so there is no one moment of death.

However, it’s often crucial to ascertain the exact moment of death. For instance, if the deceased is an organ donor, the donor organs must be removed from the body as early as possible after death, since most are quickly damaged once circulation stops. So doctors conduct a physical examination to check for absence of signs of brain function. Tests differ, but they focus essentially on absence of response to pain and absence of any reflexes in the cranial
nerves, the nerves that lead direct to the brain from senses in the head such as the eyes. They test, for instance, if the pupils respond to changes in light intensity or if the patient blinks when the eyelids are touched.

Tests like these are good enough for a doctor to be confident that the patient is dead, but a second doctor must confirm the results, and sometimes there must also be no signs of electrical activity in the brain recorded by two EEGs (electroencephalographs) for 24 hours before the patient can be declared legally dead.

Complications arise, however, because many conditions can mimic brain death, such as drug and drink intoxication and coma from traumas. So there is considerable confusion and controversy over a patient who shows no clear sign of brain activity yet retains blood circulation – even if that is artificially maintained. Particularly distressing and confusing are persistent vegetative states in which, to all intents and purposes, brain activity seems to have ceased, yet the blood is circulating, the patient is breathing and the eyes are open but just not taking anything in. Many news stories have focused on grieving families who ask for life support to be withdrawn from coma victims in a persistent vegetative state who show no signs of ever regaining consciousness, yet cannot be declared legally dead. Gunshot victim Gary Dockery suddenly awoke in 1996 and started speaking normally after eight years in a vegetative state, but his recovery proved short-lived. He lapsed into silence after just 24 hours and died less than a year later.

Circumstances like this aside, there are some situations in which it’s absolutely clear that a person is dead, particularly when violence is involved. The media also talk about how victims of accidents and violence die ‘instantly’. That is rarely quite true if the body remains intact, though. Some believe that even decapitation victims may remain conscious for some seconds after their head is removed, for instance. Only if the body is completely destroyed in an instant will death also be completely instantaneous. Otherwise, it’s a gradual process – either very rapid, or much slower. However, once your corpse has been cremated or your buried cadaver has been victimised by worms, you can be pretty certain that at least your physical body is dead …
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(Modern and Medieval Languages, Cambridge)

Yes, perhaps the greatest writer of the last hundred or so years. Only Ibsen and Shakespeare have a status equal
to Chekhov as a dramatist, and some of his short stories, particularly
The Lady with the Dog,
are among the greatest little masterpieces of the genre. What was extraordinary about Chekhov was the remarkable skill with which he conjured the inner life of people in both his stories and his plays.

Before Chekhov, most stories moved forward through events. Things happen to characters, and they react to them, and the stories tend to end with a neat flourish – lovers united, friends divided and so on. But in Chekhov nothing much ever happens. Things might, but somehow they never quite do. In
Uncle Vanya
, Yelena and Astrov might have an affair, but they don’t. Vanya might shoot Serebryakov, but he doesn’t. In
The Lady with the Dog
, we feel almost certain that Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, even after waiting so long, will not finally live happily together ever after. The plays and stories all tend to peter out as if we’ve somehow missed something. There is never any satisfying climax. And yet this does not seem undramatic. What is unsaid, what is undone, is so much more powerful and emotive than any more sweeping, eventful story.

Chekhov’s great skill is in portraying the character’s inner tug of emotions through what they don’t say and what they don’t do. When Sonya and Vanya resume their routine work at the end of
Uncle Vanya
, for instance, they say little and just get on with life again as if nothing has happened and nothing will ever happen. Yet the tragedy of their loss – and the certainty that they will never escape
their small lives – is palpable. The stories resonate deep within us in a way that superficially bigger stories rarely do because they feel so close to our sense of life – how we all have much larger inner lives and hopes than we can ever express or enact.

Chekhov is astute enough to realise that this failure to bring our deepest dreams to reality appears absurd and almost comic, which is why he described his plays as comedies even though they seem to be about lives steeped in failure and futility. Few writers are able to create with such subtlety the humour of someone’s absurdity at the same time as the poignancy of the flaws that make them so comic.

The extraordinary thing is that by diminishing the events that happen to the major characters, Chekhov enlarges the role of the minor characters. In
The Three Sisters
, for instance, the loneliness of the comic Kulygin is as affecting as that of Olya, Masha and Irina. Minor characters are not there to help the plot along, but to create a complete emotional inner world in which everyone is both linked by similar aspirations and divided by a huge gulf in communication.

Telling a story on stage not through events but through the inner lives of characters was such a dramatic innovation that at first people just didn’t get it. Earlier in the nineteenth century, Henrik Ibsen had shaken the theatre world by moving drama away from big historic and romantic stories about heroic figures to naturalistic dramas about ordinary
domestic situations and disputes. Yet Ibsen’s plays are still driven along by what people say or do. Chekhov shifted the ground so dramatically towards characters’ inner lives that it demanded a whole new way of acting.

When
The Seagull
was first staged at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 17 October 1896, the result was disastrous. Acted in the conventional way, it just seemed like a really bad play with absurd characters and no real plot. The audience booed and Chekhov resolved never to write for theatre again. Fortunately, the theatre director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko recognised Chekhov’s potential and persuaded his colleague Constantin Stanislavsky to direct it for the Moscow Arts Theatre.

In directing the play, Stanislavsky developed an entirely new method of acting in which actors tried to bring the ‘subtext’, the unspoken inner life of the characters, into being, by focusing not so much on what the characters say, but what they want to say – their ‘intention’. Stanislavsky was trying to create a stage process in which characters were both intensely naturalistic and psychologically real – a process which demanded huge attention to even minor details. Chekhov hinted that the checked pattern of the trousers of Trigorin, the writer in
The Seagull
, mentioned only in passing, is one of the keys to an actor finding the truth of the character.

Restaged by Stanislavsky in 1898,
The Seagull
suddenly took flight and Chekhov went on to write three other great
plays –
Uncle Vanya
,
The Cherry Orchard
and
The Three Sisters
– which have ensured him his place in theatre history. Stanislavsky’s System of Acting proved hugely influential during the twentieth century and was the inspiration for the American Method acting style which allowed actors to bring such psychological realism to film roles especially. The intense, naturalistic style of acting we have come to take so much for granted in film, where everything is viewed in close-up, owes everything to Chekhov’s plays, via Stanislavsky and the Method. Without it, actors would still be declaiming like Olivier and Gielgud.

There is something deceptively simple about Chekhov. When characters speak they speak in such mundane language, in such banalities, and the events in the plays are often so trivial, that it seems as if the plays must be easy to write. Vladimir Nabokov wrote of Chekhov’s ‘medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions’. But that is exactly how things need to be, because that is what traps the characters, and the great poetry in Chekhov’s work lies in the unsaid, the linking web of emotions that underpins the surface banalities. It might seem easy, and yet no one since has achieved the same thing. Chekhov’s four great plays and his handful of short stories stand as an unequalled pinnacle of psychologically real, profound storytelling.