The Ascent of Man (40 page)

In the latter part of his life, John von Neumann carried this subject into what I call his second great creative idea. He realised that computers would be technically
important, but he also began to realise that one must understand clearly how real-life situations are different from computer situations, exactly because they do not
have the precise solutions that chess or engineering calculations do.

I will use my own terms to describe John von Neumann’s achievement, instead of his technical ones. He distinguished between short-term tactics and grand, long-term
strategies. Tactics can be calculated exactly, but strategies cannot. Johnny’s mathematical and conceptual success was in showing that nevertheless there are ways to form best strategies.

And in his last years he wrote a beautiful book called
The Computer and the Brain
, the Silliman Lectures that he should have given, but was too ill to give, in 1956. In them he looks at the brain as having a
language in which the activities of the different parts of the brain have somehow to be interlocked and made to match so that we devise a plan, a procedure, as a grand overall way of life – what in the humanities we would call a system of values.

There was something endearing and personal about Johnny von Neumann. He was the cleverest man I ever knew, without exception. And he was a genius, in
the sense that a genius is a man who has great ideas. When he died in 1957 it was a great tragedy to us all. And that was not because he was a modest man. When I worked with him during the war, we once faced a problem together, and he said to me at once, ‘Oh no, no, you are not seeing it. Your kind of visualising mind is not right for seeing this. Think of it abstractly. What is happening on this
photograph of an explosion is that the first differential coefficient vanishes identically, and that is why what becomes visible is the trace of the second differential coefficient.’

As he said, that is not the way I think. However, I let him go to London. I went off to my laboratory in the country. I worked late into the night. Round about midnight I had his answer. Well, John von Neumann always
slept very late, so I was kind and I did not wake him until well after ten in the morning. When I called his hotel in London, he answered the phone in bed, and I said, ‘Johnny, you’re quite right.’ And he said to me, ‘You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I’m right? Please wait until I’m wrong.’

If that sounds very vain, it was not. It was a real statement of how he lived his life.
And yet it has something in it which reminds me that he wasted the last years of his life. He never finished the great work that has been very difficult to carry on since his death. And he did not, really because he gave up asking himself how other
people
see things. He became more and more engaged in work for private firms, for industry, for government. They were enterprises which brought him
to the centre of power, but which did not advance either his knowledge or his intimacy with people – who to this day have not yet got the message of what he was trying to do about the human mathematics of life and mind.

Johnny von Neumann was in love with the aristocracy of intellect. And that is a belief which can only destroy the civilisation that we know. If we are anything, we must be a democracy
of the intellect. We must not perish by the distance between people and government, between people and power, by which Babylon and Egypt and Rome failed. And that distance can only be conflated, can only be closed, if knowledge sits in the homes and heads of people with no ambition to control others, and not up in the isolated seats of power.

That seems a hard lesson. After all, this is a world
run by specialists: is not that what we mean by a scientific society? No, it is not. A scientific society is one in which specialists can indeed do the things like making the electric light work. But it is you, it is I, who have to know how nature works, and how (for example) electricity is
one of her expressions in the light and in my brain.

We have not advanced the human problems of life and
mind that once occupied John von Neumann. Will it be possible to find happy foundations for the forms of behaviour that we prize in a full man and a fulfilled society? We have seen that human behaviour is characterised by a high internal delay in preparation for deferred action. The biological groundwork for this inaction stretches through the long childhood and slow maturation of man. But deferment
of action in man goes far beyond that. Our actions as adults, as decision makers, as human beings, are mediated by values, which I interpret as general strategies in which we balance opposing impulses. It is not true that we run our lives by any computer scheme of problem solving. The problems of life are insoluble in this sense. Instead, we shape our conduct by finding principles to guide it.
We devise ethical strategies or systems of values to ensure that what is attractive in the short term is weighed in the balance of the ultimate, long-term satisfactions.

And we are really here on a wonderful threshold of knowledge. The ascent of man is always teetering in the balance. There is always a sense of uncertainty, whether when man lifts his foot for the next step it is really going
to come down pointing ahead. And what is ahead for us? At last the bringing together of all that we have learned, in physics and in biology, towards an understanding of where we have come: what man is.

Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures. You cannot possibly maintain
that informed integrity if you let other people run the world for you while you yourself continue to live out of a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs. That is really crucial today. You can see it is pointless to advise people to learn differential equations, or to do a course in electronics or in computer programming. And yet, fifty years from now, if an understanding of man’s origins, his
evolution, his history, his progress is not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, we shall not exist. The commonplace of the schoolbooks of tomorrow is the adventure of today, and that is what we are engaged in.

And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into – into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely
profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing
together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.

It sounds very pessimistic to talk about western civilisation with a sense of retreat. I have been so optimistic about the ascent of man; am I going to give up at this moment? Of course not. The ascent of man will go on. But do not assume that it will go on carried by western civilisation as we know it. We
are being weighed in the balance at this moment. If we give up, the next step will be taken – but not by us. We have not been given any guarantee that Assyria and Egypt and Rome were not given. We are waiting to be somebody’s past too, and not necessarily that of our future.

We are a scientific civilisation: that means, a civilisation in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial.
Science
is only a Latin word for knowledge. If we do not take the next step in the ascent of man, it will be taken by people elsewhere, in Africa, in China. Should I feel that to be sad? No, not in itself. Humanity has a right to change its colour. And yet, wedded as I am to the civilisation that nurtured me, I should feel it to be infinitely sad. I, whom England made, whom it taught its language and its
tolerance and excitement in intellectual pursuits, I should feel it a grave sense of loss (as you would) if a hundred years from now Shakespeare and Newton are historical fossils in the ascent of man, in the way that Homer and Euclid are.

I began this series in the valley of the Omo in East Africa, and I have come back there because something that happened then has remained in my mind ever since.
On the morning of the day that we were to take the first sentences of the first programme, a light plane took off from our airstrip with the cameraman and the sound recordist on board, and it crashed within seconds of taking off. By some miracle the pilot and the two men crawled out unhurt.

But naturally the ominous event made a deep impression on me. Here was I preparing to unfold the pageant
of the past, and the present quietly put its hand through the printed page of history and said, ‘It is here. It is now.’ History is not events, but people. And it is not just people remembering, it is people acting and living their past in the present. History is the pilot’s instant act of decision, which crystallises all the knowledge, all the science, all that has been learned since man began.

We sat about in the camp for two days waiting for another plane. And I said to the cameraman, kindly, though perhaps not tactfully, that he might prefer to have someone else take the shots that had to be filmed from the air. He said, ‘I’ve thought of that. I’m going to be afraid when I go up tomorrow, but I’m going to do the filming. It’s what I have to do.’

We are all afraid – for our confidence,
for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilisation, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER
THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER
FIVE

CHAPTER SIX