I found myself walking by the Louvre last week. First, I noticed the predictable yet elegant symmetry of the freshly burgled palace. This led me to consider the naivety of distinguishing patterns in the following four questions:
1. Grand Projet or Folie de Grandeur?
2. Churchill’s distinguishing Napoleon’s export of rational values from Hitler’s dictatorship: an apologist for war?
3. Revolutions just upgrade absolutism?
4. The constitutions and superstates born out of The Age of Reason – from the USA to the EU – are too instructive to evolve?
All these points are evidentially insufficient; and generalist. Very occasionally, a discovery re-enforces an innocuous but certain truth and becomes a junction in human understanding. Back in the early 1980s, my headmaster, W.P.C. Davies, semi-officially known as ‘Beef’ (he had been a British rugby Lion in the Fifties) devoted his entire address at a morning assembly to this opaque definition: a pattern is a set of instructions.
This was the only time I saw the modesty of the great man give way to the sort of word-specific scrutiny that remains a hallmark of an Oxbridge education. Science didn’t come into his explanation of the true meaning of ‘pattern’. The memory is unique because Davies gave no contextual backdrop; nor did he relate any behaviour he was trying to instil in his pupils – the mini-lecture came and left, never to be mentioned again.
Perhaps Mr. Davies did not sense the need to contextualise; after all, the definition speaks for itself – pattern = set of instructions. As one might expect from a clergyman’s son born before the war, he read inspiring texts to us every evening, including a biography of Albert Schweitzer, and a Nevil Shute novel about fleeing France in 1940. But he never explained why he had chosen them. He knew the Rev W. Audry who came to preach sermons with allegorical snippets from the world of his literary creation, Thomas the Tank Engine.
A catalyst to his talk about instructions may have been our enthusiasm at programming the two computers owned by the school. There was a pattern-like repetitiveness to the Basic lines of code. There were no operating systems then, so we had to type it all in, with no mistakes. Beef also set us a ‘copying exam’ where we had an hour to copy a text with no mistakes. We were also taught to calculate in binary. This was the very start of a digital handover, where medieval disciplines that preceded printing mixed with raw computing.
Nevertheless, it was only at his memorial service, many years later that I finally put two-plus-two together. Phil Davies, as he was known to the rugby world, had been up at Cambridge reading Chemistry when Watson and Crick identified the genetic patterns in the double helixes of the genome. Perhaps this explained the calm but fervent surety of a man vitalised by being so close to one of the major breakthroughs in human understanding; a breakthrough, whose impact was yet to be felt – in the early 1980s the genome was still two decades from being fully mapped (and Thomas and Friends years away from being serialised, with Ringo Starr as narrator).
Did the discovery of DNA affect man’s fallibility? Well, that great pillar of Cartesian thought – cogito ergo sum – still holds, but not in a bloody stranglehold of revolutionary radicalism. We are born with unique instruction manuals to a system of reasoning that is already hard wired within us. How, then may we show the independence of thought required to be cognisant? Are we slaves to our genes?
Thankfully our lives are governed by few true patterns. The remarkable Napoleonic standardisations were borne out of the Enlightenment principle that uniformity is an expression of reason. Many Napoleonic constructs are compromised in their attempts to over-standardise – down to the last EU compliant kitchen sink. Instructions lack the benefits to enterprise of Anglo-Saxon, controlled disorder.
Meanwhile, the French disguise the antithesis to reason. Find a hedge within the Peripherique of Paris that is not pleached. And this is in a country whose presidents are jailed and Crown Jewels burgled – with a cherry picker. Chaos is good in small doses. The randomness of human interaction introduces disparate gene pools, strengthening others in the process. Close analysis reveals fewer recurring patterns than meets the naked eye. History does not repeat itself; our late Queen famously asked a gathering of economists why none of them saw the great banking crisis of 2008 coming.
So my story is positive. The progressive application of reason continues to draw humanity away from the savagery of nature. Moreover, we are inventing all sorts of ways to use and repurpose genetics. This may be the story of our children’s lifetimes, with fabulous outcomes, particularly in regenerative medicine. Perhaps my headmaster understood the implications of life revealing its hidden pattern for us to manipulate, and indeed, he lived to see it. But he was no futurologist. The philosophical manner in which he imparted his key definition will remain the most definitive memory from my schooling, and a flawless example of unbiased teaching.
Charles Bonas, Bonas MacFarlane Education
More on patterns
The note below is a non-ai derived outcome of a recent evening of fact collecting. It followed on from an observation about the common ancestry of President Lyndon Johnson and the British prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home.
Is this from Roger Irrelevant or is there something approaching a pattern, whose instructions may reveal an interesting differentiator?
In 1964, the leaders of a vast area of the planet could all claim names and/or direct ancestry from a section of the underpopulated Scottish lowlands and Northumbria.
– Lyndon Johnson was the President of the USA. His direct ancestors came from Dumfriesshire.
– Alex Douglas-Home was the Prime Minister of Britain. He came from Berwickshire.
– Richard Seddon was the Prime Minister of New Zealand. His mother also came from Dumfriesshire.
– Robert Menzies was the Prime Minister of Australia. His grandfather came from Renfrewshire
– Clive Crosbie Trench was the Governor General of Hong Kong. Crosbie is a town in Ayrshire.
– Ian Smith was the Prime Minister of Rhodesia. His middle name was Douglas; his father grew up in Northumberland and he grew up in South Lanarkshire.
– Lester Bowes Pearson, the Prime Minister of Canada and the late Queen Elizabeth II were direct descendants of the coal enriched Bowes family, from Northumberland.
– Malcolm MacDonald was the last Governor General of Kenya. He was born in Lossiemouth, on the Moray Firth so doesn’t quite make the cut. But still a Scot, of course.
These Prime Ministers all had close familial links to a ribbon of small, remote lowland farming towns; and their careers and networks were mostly all separate from one another
And in 1974. again the US and the UK had leaders with Border family origins – Richard Nixon and Harold Wilson.
What – if anything – does the outcome have to do with:
(a) Education;
(b) Religion;
(c) Border culture;
(d) Sean Connery?
Answers on a postcard, please. Conjecture to follow.