The Golf-Ball Potato Crisp : on scepticism as a duty

(S06E01, broadcast 23^rd and 25^th October 2009)

"In praise of scepticism"

What do I know? Montaigne asked himself, and in answering that question during the course of several volumes of great essays he touched on many subjects. But he never touched on the subject of the golf-ball potato crisp. As far as I know, this essay I am writing now is the first ever devoted to the subject of Montaigne’s relationship to the golf-ball potato crisp, and my essay starts from my certain knowledge that he never ate one. Or anyway my almost certain knowledge. There’s a difference, which I shall try to bring out.

But more of the golf-ball potato crisp in a moment. Let’s get back to Montaigne, and his attitude to knowledge. He was a sceptic. He didn’t want to take things just on trust. As it happened, there were lots of things he did take on trust. If he liked the sound of an ancient legend, he would refer to it as if it must have been true. He thought astrology had something to it, and his position on the religious quarrels of his own time was that all this Lutheranism could undermine the Church and lead to atheism, substance abuse and the contemporary equivalent of reality television.

From our viewpoint, he often doesn’t seem very sceptical at all. But at the time, he seemed sceptical enough to excite a whole generation of readers with the idea that some falsehoods might masquerade as facts, and that an enquiring, critical attitude was the one to have. Shakespeare was only one of his many readers who caught fire at that idea. Shakespeare knew Montaigne’s writings inside out. They helped set the standard for the way our greatest playwright separated what he knew from what he didn’t know. But not even Shakespeare had an opinion about the golf-ball potato crisp, because it had not yet arrived in the world.

Or it had probably not yet arrived in the world. There may well have been, at the time, some form of sliced and roasted potato, specially prepared for the king, that you could have called a crisp. And there was possibly some primitive form of French golf already in existence, in which a ball of some kind was hit with some kind of stick towards some kind of hole, while Peter Alliss, then in his first days as a commentator, said something like, ‘Typically delicate stroke there from the Duke of Guise. Finely judged. Taking full advantage of the new oblong ball, and it does roll much straighter than the old square one.’ But the chances against the existence of an actual golf-ball potato crisp were overwhelming, because it needed a particular conjunction of circumstances.

The golf-ball potato crisp had to wait until our own time before it could come into being. What you must have is a golf course, and, nearby to the golf course, a potato field in which potatoes suitable for making crisps are mechanically harvested, and part of the mechanism must be an enormous machine that sorts through the plucked-up potatoes and removes any stones or other roughly potato-shaped objects that are not wanted. Apparently this machine, though highly sensitive to the presence of foreign objects, is not yet sensitive enough to detect a golf ball that has flown in from the adjacent golf course and settled among the potatoes.

The mistakenly harvested golf ball goes to the crisp-making factory along with the correctly harvested potatoes, and in the factory it encounters another machine which, also unable to tell a potato from a golf ball, slices the golf ball as if it were a potato. Apparently a golf ball yields precisely eighteen slices. All eighteen slices of the golf ball, along with the thousands of slices of potato, go into the cooking process and emerge at the other end as something hard to distinguish, visually, from crisps. Indeed statistics indicate that some people, when they chance across a golf-ball crisp in a packet of potato crisps, eat it, thinking, well, that one was a particularly crunchy crisp. Why don’t you try one, darling? They’re the ones with the dimpled edges. Really, really chewy.

I am not certain whether I myself have never done this. Famous in my family for eating anything, I usually think something is all right if I can actually swallow it. But some people have complained, with the result that the more responsible crisp manufacturers are now faced with the task of further developing the initial potato-sorting machine, the one out in the field, so that it can detect a golf ball. The machine might need visual sensors, so it can read. If the object bears the brand name Tiger Woods Ultraflite Thunderball Mk 56, plus a short paragraph explaining how it was designed to be simultaneously long off the tee and responsive on the green, the machine will toss it back onto the golf course.

Such a development is not only possible, it is likely, in line with the standard progression by which the unforeseen deleterious effects of technology, once they are detected and protested against, are cured by further technology, just as it was the cleaning up of industry, and not the abandonment of industry, that brought fish back to the Thames. If anyone said the infestation of packets of genuine crisps by golf-ball crisps was unstoppable, I would be sceptical, just as I would have been sceptical about the existence of a golf-ball crisp until I was presented with solid evidence.

Indeed, as I have suggested, I would probably have remained sceptical even after I ate one, thinking it to be the kind I like best, with a bit of tough skin in it for extra texture. But once I heard the facts — from my son-in-law, who has important contacts within the potato-crisp industry — I altered my opinion. What remained constant was my scepticism, which is surely, as a human attitude, more valuable than gullibility. In fact, in everyday life, everyone is sceptical. Even if they believe that the supreme being is watching over them personally, they still want to read the fine print before they sign their house away.

In Montaigne’s day you could get into terminal trouble for taking scepticism too far, which is probably one of the reasons why not even he pushed it on the subject of religion. Since then, a sceptical attitude has been less likely to get you burned at the stake, but it’s notable how the issue of man-made global warming has lately been giving rise to a use of language hard to distinguish from heresy-hunting in the fine old style by which the cost of voicing a doubt was to fry in your own fat. Whether or not you believe that the earth might have been getting warmer lately, if you are sceptical about whether mankind is the cause of it, the scepticism can be enough to get you called a denialist.

It’s a nasty word to be called, denialist, because it conjures up the spectacle of a fanatic denying the Holocaust. In my homeland, Australia, there are some prominent intellectuals who are quite ready to say that any sceptic about man-made global warming is doing even worse than denying the Holocaust, because this time the whole of the human race stands to be obliterated. Really they should know better, because the two events are not remotely comparable. The Holocaust actually happened. The destruction of the earth by man-made global warming hasn’t happened yet, and there are plenty of highly qualified scientists ready to say that the whole idea is a case of too many of their colleagues relying on models provided by the same computers that can’t even predict what will happen to the weather next week.

In fact the number of scientists who voice scepticism has lately been increasing. But there were always some, and that’s the only thing I know about the subject. I know next to nothing about climate science. All I know is that many of the commentators in newspapers who are busy predicting catastrophe don’t know much about it either, because they keep saying that the science is settled, and it isn’t.

There is no scientific consensus. There are those for, and those against. Either side might well be right, but what should be clear is that if you have a division on that scale, you can’t have a consensus. Nobody can meaningfully say that ‘the science is in’, yet this has been said constantly by many commentators in the press until very lately, and now that there are a few fewer saying it there is a tendency, on the part of those who do say it, to raise their voices even higher, and harden their language against any sceptic, as if they were protecting their faith.

Sceptics, say the believers, don’t care about the future of the human race. But being sceptical has always been one of the best ways of caring about the future of the human race. For example, it was from scepticism that modern medicine emerged, questioning the common belief that diseases were caused by magic, or could be cured by it. A conjecture can be dressed up as a dead certainty with enough rhetoric, and protected against dissent with enough threatening language, but finally it has to meet the only test of science, which is that any theory must fit the facts, and the facts can’t be altered to suit the theory.

The golf-ball crisp might look like a crisp, and in a moment of delusion it might taste like a crisp, and you might even swallow it, rather proud of the strength it took to chew. But if there is a weird aftertaste, it might be time to ask yourself if you have not put too much value on your own opinion. The other way of saying ‘What do I know?’ is ‘What do I know?’ That shade of different meaning wasn’t there in Montaigne’s original language, but it is in ours.

Postscript

If you’ll allow a metaphor so horridly mixed, the golf-ball potato crisp was a red herring. By such means, I hoped, I would be able to sneak up on the forbidden topic of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, sometimes referred to as CAGW by writers who supposed their readers were insufficiently bored already. Because my brand of scepticism about the claims of the alarmists was still widely regarded as criminal indifference to the future of the Planet, it seemed wise to avoid tipping off the audience at the top of the show. Lull them first and needle them later. But it was a mistake, I discovered, to say that one knew next to nothing about climate science, because people who knew less than nothing, but who nevertheless had intuitive powers to predict the coming catastrophe, took one’s confession not as a sign of modesty, but as proof of the malevolence behind any attempt one might make to express an opinion differing from the opinion they supposed to be prevalent in the scientific world.

In actual fact, the scientific world had been divided on the subject from the beginning, and the division had by this time become apparent to anyone with a wider source of information than that provided by the mainstream media. For reasons of its own, however, the BBC, although it didn’t have to, had decided to copy some of the more upmarket outlets of printed news and opinion — in Britain, these were most conspicuously the Guardian and the Independent — in handing over the whole field of science to a science correspondent. If it was editorial humility that led to such delegation of responsibility, the result was orthodoxy in each case, and nowhere was the orthodoxy more rigidly imposed than at the BBC. This tiny broadcast was the very first case of the BBC letting someone on the air alone to put a differing view, and it was certainly not the prelude to a flood. Until the so-called (dumbly called) Climategate scandal broke at the University of East Anglia in November, cases of heresy expressed unfettered on the airwaves remained very rare, and after Climategate they became only slightly less rare, because the BBC, though forced, like the mainstream media as a whole, to report a news event, was slow to admit the implications.

Slowness was understandable, since one of the implications was that in their coverage of Climate Change (to give a poltergeist the dignity of capitalized initials) they had been wasting their time, and everybody else’s, for years on end. Nevertheless, even though the script for this broadcast aroused consternation when I submitted it, I was allowed on the air. In this instance as in so many others, Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4, was prepared to back the contributor against the full weight of the building he was sitting in. But the message did come filtering down the stairs that I might do better to back off for a while, and talk of other matters. Meanwhile, in the outside world, things were starting to boil. I was only one of the tiniest bubbles, but the reaction of the Guardian’s Climate Change pundit George Monbiot was indicative. He said that the only reason I could hold such opinions was that I was an old man who didn’t care what happened to the Planet. Well, he was right about the first part of the description, but the day will come when he himself realizes that the second part proved he had little insight into how an old man feels about the world when the time draws near that he must leave it.

There was no point, though, in fighting back on the level of personality, because one could only be cooperating in a conspiracy to bore the public. Quite early on, the climatologists had made their eventually decisive mistake: they had turned the supposed difference of views — or difference of supposed views — into a plebiscite. This counting of heads was a competition they were bound, in the long run, to lose, because the matter would eventually turn on the exercise of critical reason; their opponents, under no obligation to prove a negative, had only to go on asking for proof.

The sceptics made just as big a mistake in supposing that when the position of the alarmists collapsed, everyone would suddenly turn sane; that the newspapers and television channels would automatically resume their erstwhile positions as arenas for debate; and that governments would stop spending the public’s money on hopelessly expensive and inefficient alternatives to the cheap power we already had. Eventually that became the next debate, and once again it was almost impossible to hear it happen. But just because it was so dauntingly clear that people living near a wind-farm in the making would soon be reduced to re-inventing smoke signals and the talking drum was no reason to think that common reason would soon prevail. There was just too much money in building the wrong thing. The money amounted to a tax on the poor; a fact which should have put the left on the alert; but the left, no longer worthy of its name, had long ago fallen silent.