Arcadia

Arcadia – that place of the Golden Age, the domain of Pan, where incorruptible life emerges as if by magic, and the name of a play by Tom Stoppard. In Arcadia Stoppard toys with the idea that the concepts of chaos theory could have been discovered in the early 1800’s. He develops the ideas of chaos theory through one of the main characters and the play asks some of the eternal questions again: truth, evidence, what are these, by what qualities do we recognise these?

For me the key is in the next quote from Act 1, Scene 4: it sums up my experience of the world since 1981: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you knew is wrong.” Newtonian certainty finally gets the boot when Prigogine publishes The End of Certainty. Gleick publishes Chaos and Hofstadter wins me over to the concepts of holism (first coined by Jan Smuts) when I read Gödel, Escher and Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid after my mathematics professor asks me to take the rest of the semester off to read it (we both gave up on me for a year while I considered what was really important). I return a year later to mathematics, applied mathematics and physics, ready to suffer through the linear and the deterministic, just to get to Schrödinger, Einstein and Planck, to name a few. I was never the same, always keen to work with uncertainty, keen to understand why we cannot predict some things so well, keen to model these complexities.

These days I bask in the Golden Age of our information age discoveries. I marvel at the work of Cilliers, Alexander, Wheatley, Strogatz, Capra, to name a few. All are trying to make sense of complexity and emergence. The only black spot in my Arcadia is the current system of learning in schools that claims to prepare children for this new reality.

It does this, it claims, by expecting of kids to re-invent the wheel, to discover pi, to discover the structure of language, and a miriad of other things that are typically part of the accumulated body of knowledge of humanity. How many of these poor souls will suddenly develop into a Derrida, an Einstein or even Michelangelo? All I know is that this leads to a lot of confused people, people not ready to absorb and question the merits of the thinkers of our time, basically shuting them out from the new age of wonderment. “When almost everything you knew is wrong” has a premsie built into it: we knew something that we took for truth and we discover a new truth to replace it through our keen analysis and synthesis of the current knowledge base. We sometimes walk away from our truth, deliberately discovering beyond ourselves. But by no means can we attain this without walking the path first.

The path of Zen is often described along the lines of the quest of searching for an animal, finding it, taming it and harnessing it towards fullfilment of our needs, only to discover that the animal “is not”. I leave you with that thought and the discovery of Tung-Shan: “The man made of wood starts to sing. The woman made of stone starts to dance. This cannot happen through logic.”

To our children: Arcadiae vias peregrinentur!