“But that still doesn’t tell me how you arrive at these customs, or empirical formulas for conduct, or whatever you care to call them.”
“Much as you perfected the art of ballistics. By a willingness to junk theories that didn’t fit the facts. For example, the churches, by and large, set their faces against divorce. Divorce was a ‘sin’. No attempt was made to study marriage and divorce objectively, divorce was ‘sin’ by divine revelation and that settled it. It is almost inconceivable the amount of harm that was done by that one false generalization alone. By rejecting the dogmatic viewpoint and examining the problem in its environment we reached quite different conclusions. In the 2086 environment divorce is not a ‘sin’, although it is possible to conceive different social patterns in which divorce would be ‘sin’. Consider again the subject of clothing as a taboo. Again a dogmatic generalization for social conduct decreed that it was ‘wrong’, ‘dishonorable’, ‘immodest’ to appear unclothed. Original sin was involved, complicated aesthetic ideas were given a false objective reality, and so forth. An amazing mass of philosophical nonsense was written on this one taboo alone by people who would never think of taking off their clothes in the presence of others in order to see what it felt like. Their faces were resolutely set against such irreverent experiment, even as the scholasticists of the Middle Ages refused to watch any experiment which threw doubt on the perfection of Aristotle’s Mechanics, and yet the experiment was always available and easy to perform. In 2086 from purely experimental considerations, the clothes taboo is destroyed. It does not appear in our code of customs, and one may dress or not as convenience and personal aesthetic taste indicates.
“Again, take politics. For centuries philosophers attempted to formulate the perfect state, reasoning from their own unexamined prejudices, which they usually assumed to be divine revelation. In 2086 we consider that the ‘perfect state’ is a meaningless sound having no objective reality. Instead we set up a political system to achieve whatever we wish to accomplish in 2086. We have no notion that it would have suited 1000 A.D. nor that it would suit contemporary Europe nor that we will leave it unchanged in the future. But we do believe that we have evolved a technique by which we can make the state serve our purposes in any age.”
She glanced at the chronometer. “I have other things that I must do now, and I believe that you should think over and develop for yourself any new ideas from this talk. Bye bye!”
VIII
These exercises in realistic thinking continued in various ways. Perry found himself unable to distinguish between activities which were a part of his treatment, events simply intended to entertain and thereby keep him happy in his environment, and activities which he had selected for his own edification or fulfillment. Early in his stay he had expressed a desire to continue with his study of modern mathematics. He was given every facility to do so, but in time lost interest in the face of other activities and, especially, his rapidly growing friendship with Olga. He was surprised to receive a call from Hedrick who urged him to pursue his mathematical studies to the limit and, if possible, to develop some new aspect of the art. Perry inquired if this were standard psychiatric procedure. Hedrick hastened to reassure him, “Not at all, not at all, but if a person under treatment has a mathematical pre-disposition the development of that bent may be used very handily to clear up his particular difficulty. Yours is a case in point. You think very admirably in the field of physics in which your terms are almost entirely mathematical. You are able to make useful predictions and are able to avoid fallacious identification of terms. You are able to appreciate and even invent little mathematical jokes based on a deliberate confusion of terms. You can ‘prove’ to me that one plus one equals one or air cars won’t fly, for our mutual amusement. This does you no harm because you have deliberately confused certain terms and used them with different meanings in the same problem in order to achieve a willfully ludicrous result. When your thinking in social relationships reaches the same order of development, you will no longer be tortured by the emotional upsets that impelled you to consult us.”
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