I just finished my philosophy degree and decided all philosophy is nonsense… but just when I thought I was out, moral philosophy dragged me back in.

I heard some people arguing over moral realism and subjectivism…

Moral realism says moral truths are discovered through human reason, rather than invented by society (SEP). For most moral realists, Good comes from God. Others say that morals just exist in the world the way arithmetic exists in the world (SEP). We didn’t invent the rules. They were here all along.

Moral relativism (SEP) says morals are true within a social group, but they change as the culture changes; Subjectivism (SEP) takes this further and says morality depends on your personal opinion: there are no absolute rules of right and wrong. You might prefer that people don’t kill each other, but others might have a different point of view.

I think evolution has something to say about morality.

Some moral values exist in all cultures, but they evolved as we evolved. For example, kin selection gives humans a responsibility to care for our children (SEP). These are not rules we made up for ourselves, and they did not come from God. They did not exist until evolution decided what was best for us(wiki).

And it’s not just humans who follow kin selection rules.

Orangutans care for baby orangutans, and worker bees care for baby bees (Penn State). Other animals don’t care for their young at all — some fish just lay their eggs and swim away — but like us, they are doing what evolution decided was best for them (SEP).

The basic idea behind kin selection is simple. Imagine a gene that encourages an animal to share its food with its family. Everyone in a family will likely have that gene, and if one member is hungry, others will share, and all are more likely to survive because sharing their food improves their evolutionary fitness. Animals without the gene behave selfishly, and their young are less likely to have food. They go hungry and are less likely to survive. Kin selection favours families that share.

Kin selection was developed into a formal theory by William Hamilton. Hamilton showed that kin selection is worthwhile if the benefits exceed the cost.

Altruistic behavior is worthwhile when the relatedness (r) multiplied by the benefit (B) is greater than the cost (C), expressed as rB > C

Hamilton’s Rule

Donors and recipients are more likely to share genes if they are closely related (SEP), and sharing goods with family members makes the altruism gene more likely to survive.

Richard Dawkins takes this gene-centric idea further in The Selfish Gene. While moral realism says moral truths exist independently of history, these truths can be explained as survival strategies given to us by natural selection.

Reciprocal altruism is a similar rule and involves doing a favour knowing the favour will be returned, but it does not depend on family relationships the way that kin altruism does (Trivers). For example, a vampire bat will care for another bat’s baby while she goes off to suck someone’s blood, and the grateful mother will return the favour next time around (SEP). There is little benefit to sharing with non-altruists, so non-altruists are less likely to survive, and the animals in the next generation are more likely to be altruists.

Altruism is not restricted to one-on-one kindness; some animals will risk their lives to save others. Vervet monkeys alert their fellow monkeys to predators, and they have even developed different calls for different kinds of predators. Vervets can tell leopards from snakes and eagles, and their calls tell other monkeys whether to run up the tree or down it. This variety of altruism doesn’t even require shared genes to be profitable; the benefits of saving a fellow monkey justify the risk of being attacked (SEP).

We might say that altruism as a moral principle has been around since before humans came along, but nonetheless, it hasn’t always been there. It evolved over time.

In addition to the morals that evolution has given us, we humans have figured out some rules for ourselves, though moral realists tell us they are objectively true, and religious believers say they came from God.

For example, the Book of Exodus has rules against stealing, murder and coveting thy neighbour’s ass. Most civilisations have these rules, though, even if they have had no contact with God. If we are to say they came from God, we have to explain where other godless societies found them.

Religions say God gave us these rules long before they were written down in the Bible, but moral realists would say we have always had them. Derek Parfit argued that moral truths are objectively true, independently of any human desires (SEP). When we say it is wrong to torture children, it’s just wrong, regardless of what we think. Similarly, we don’t have to argue why the area of a circle is πr²; it just is, and morals aren’t something we came up with; they just are.

Like Derek Parfit, Peter Singer came to believe that moral truths are self-evident and need no explanation (YouTube). Parfit and Singer claim that when we make moral assertions, we are reporting facts about the world, while subjectivists say morals aren’t even facts; they are just ways of expressing our preferences. Morals are neither true nor false any more than it’s true or false that chocolate ice cream is nicer than strawberry ice cream; we just choose the one we like best.

Taking this even further, emotivist A.J. Ayer would say that when we say something is immoral, we aren’t even sharing a preference; we are just sharing an emotional reaction. A subjectivist might say, “I believe that stealing is wrong”; but an emotivist would say this is nothing more than saying “Boo to stealing!” [SEP]. When people disagree over a moral decision, they are not contrasting opposing opinions; they are simply expressing their emotions.

Our moral attitude to slavery poses a challenge to the various theories of morality. Most of us agree that slavery is wrong, but why might that be?

Moral realists say the rules against slavery are just part of the fabric of reality. It makes no difference whether a person, culture, or legal system agrees it is wrong; it is wrong anyway. Slavery is wrong in the same way that a mathematical truth or a physical law is true. We did not decide they are true; they have been like that all along. However, slavery has been front and centre in almost every civilisation for thousands of years.

The morality of slavery was argued in the decades before slavery was abolished, and both advocates and abolitionists used passages from the Old Testament to argue their case. Abolitionists claimed slavery was punishable by death (Exodus 21), but a few books later, the bible says that slavery is just servitude — and it’s normal to have servants (Leviticus 25).

But it turns out, those rules only apply if you are making slaves of Hebrews. It’s a different rule for strangers.

Moreover you may buy the children of the strangers who dwell among you, and their families who are with you, which they beget in your land; and they shall become your property. And you may take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them as a possession; they shall be your permanent slaves.

Leviticus 25

The Hebrews may have been moral realists, but Jewish believers haven’t always followed the same rules, and their rules are different to ours.

Christians started well, and slavery decreased in the early years (wiki), but Catholics in Spain and Portugal became very efficient slave traders. Portugal was the largest slave-trading nation in history, and Pope Nicholas V gave them authority to conquer and colonise West Africans to become more efficient traders (College of Charleston).

The Pope issued a mandate to King Alfonso V, and instructed him … to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever … and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.

Papal Bull of 1455

William the Conqueror banned the slave trade in England in the eleventh century (History Extra), but it was not until the Somerset v. Stewart Case in 1772 that slavery formally became illegal. When one slave-owner brought his slave home to England, his slave, James Somerset, escaped and was later recaptured (wiki). Somerset’s friends appealed to court, and the Chief Justice declared that slavery “is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” (English Heritage). Somerset was set free.

While Spanish slave owners could take their slaves home with them, British slave owners had to leave them across the ocean.

While Chief Justice Mansfield declared that slavery in England was illegal, he made no judgment as to whether it was immoral, and slaves continued to be bought and sold, as long as they weren’t bought and sold in England. The slave trade became one of the greatest atrocities of the last several centuries, but the everyday man on the street was not involved; all the money went to royalty and the rich. Even the Church of England made a few million quid out of it (CofE).

If we are going to claim, as moral realists might, that rules against slavery are part of the fabric of the universe, we should note that slavery was around for thousands of years before someone uncovered the rules. Even then, the ruling classes and the church had little to say about it.

Perhaps the moral status of slavery was not guided by religion or other sources of moral realism after all, and a more subjective view merely decides which rules are most profitable.

Britain was one of the first countries to ban the slave trade in 1807, and other countries followed. But what took them so long?

Slavery in America is probably the moral crime that we are all most familiar with. American revolutionaries fought for their liberty in 1776 while 20% of the population was in chains. These honourable fellows — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — pursued Domestic Tranquillity and the Blessings of Liberty, and at the same time, owned hundreds of slaves between them.

Jefferson is an interesting case because he was a moral realist (Monticello) who believed that slavery was wrong. He believed Blacks to be morally equal to other Americans, and to have the same rights. He worked hard to eradicate slavery, and yet owned hundreds of slaves himself (SEP). Perhaps, rather than a moral realist, Jefferson was an emotivist who would say “Boo to slavery!” when he was at work, and “Hooray to slavery!” when he got home.

Where a moral realist would say that slavery is wrong by some universal standard, subjectivists would judge it based on their personal feelings or the opinion of society. Attitudes have changed over time, and our attitude to slavery reflects our current feelings and not some eternal truth.

It could be argued that subjectivists’ criticism of slavery is weak because it has nothing to say about the same moral crime in history. But, it seems to me, this is the only moral stance that explains our modern, passionate opposition to slavery while accepting that earlier civilisations found it acceptable. Even the Christians who campaigned so hard to end slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries had different beliefs from the Pope who granted the right to enslave West Africans 400 years before them. It wasn’t until 1917 that the Catholic Church said the “sale of humans into servitude” was a crime (1917 Code of Canon Law). When we claim that religion is the source of our morality, we need to explain why the rules changed so often (Women’s Ordination Campaign).

Subjectivism does leave us with a problem when different cultures have conflicting moral standards, and we are unable to address it. Female Genital Mutilation, for example, is almost universal in Sudan and Somalia, and the most we can do is express our displeasure by saying, “Boo to Female Genital Mutilation!” Subjectivism encourages us to respect the opinions of other cultures, but perhaps subjectivists can collect their displeasure and oppose what they perceive as moral injustice, just as France did when it banned burqas.

While it may be true that we believe the moral rules regarding rape, slavery and murder should be universal for humans, these rules must have come from somewhere. The Catholic Church says that they came from God, while Parfit and Singer said they are just part of the fabric of reality.

Darwinists would say that morality is a mix of rules chosen by evolution to help us to thrive. There is no realism. We might think evolution is just discovering the rulebook written by God, but we must still wonder why it took us so long to find it.

It seems to me that subjectivists have the best claim on the source of morality. It’s easy to dismiss because it allows different societies to choose different sets of rules, but societies choose them regardless of what moral realists have to say. Societies choose their own set of moral rules to match their own cultural habits, and as cultures across the world converge, we can only hope they choose a set of moral rules that we all approve of.

None of us knew much about the topic, and we started by not agreeing about much at all. We began by talking about what we meant by reality, and we immediately disagreed over that, too. Can something be real if you can’t see it or touch it? Is an agreement with your friends a reality? We agreed that things need to exist to be real — chairs are real, but unicorns are not — but do you need to experience them? We disagreed over that. We know chairs are real because we can touch them. But electrons? I’ve never experienced one. Or llamas.

Someone suggested that perhaps there’s a civilisation that has never seen a chair. Would chairs be real for them? We decided that the chairs would still exist, even for people who don’t know what they are. We can show them a chair and say, “This is a chair,” and they’ll say, “Oh, yes. A chair.” They’ll understand that chairs were real even before they saw one. 

So chairs are still real, and unicorns are still not real. Because… why? I’m not sure. What if we just haven’t seen a unicorn yet? When did the unicorn become not real?

Someone suggested that an opinion like “this cup of tea is delicious” represents reality for the person who holds it, but we didn’t agree on that. One extreme said the opinion represents reality for the person who holds it, even if others disagree. Others said that a single person can’t create reality just by having an opinion, but perhaps if everyone agrees… perhaps that makes it real. Another said opinions don’t represent reality at all. Physical things like chairs are real. Opinions are not.

It’s not always useful to think of things as real or not real, and some things are more real than others. We came up with a scale that captures how real something is. The scale goes from “this thing is definitely real” to “that thing is definitely not real”, with lots of ground in between. We agreed that physical things exist at one end of the scale, and imaginary things go at the other end. But what about ideas like “this tea is delicious”? Where do they fit in? And what about money? Or the law? Are they real, or are they just things that some humans just came up with?

Here’s our scale.

So, coins and notes are real, but is the money they represent real? We can see coins, but coins won’t be around for much longer, and then the currency will only exist on computers. Are things on computers real? What about Donkey Kong Jr.? Currency is only real now because we agree that it’s real. Does it remain real when we lose confidence in it, and it goes away? The Zimbabwean Dollar and the Yugoslav Dinar lost their value and disappeared from circulation. Are they still real? At what point were they no longer real? (We didn’t agree on any of these points)

Laws are tricky, too. What if we don’t agree on whether a law is correct? Does that law still exist? Some people just ignore some laws. For example, there’s a law against using your phone while driving, but most people ignore it. Is it still a law if no one follows it?

It was about now we decided that whether something is real does not mean it needs to exist in reality — one’s an adjective, and one’s a noun. We also decided that there are separate categories of ”fact” that can represent reality. Some facts represent physical things in the world, while others represent things in our minds or things we have agreed on between us. They are both real, but they mean different things.

I did a little reading this morning to see what the proper philosophers say about it. John Searle’s summary of the two kinds of reality agrees with what we came up with. Clever us!

Searle defines brute facts as realities that exist independently of society, language, or thoughts, while institutional facts are realities that exist when human communities collectively agree about them.

Brute facts are true whether humans acknowledge them or not. They include natural phenomena like the laws of physics, mountains, hydrogen atoms, or snow on a mountain.

Institutional Facts are built on human agreement. They require human institutions, culture, and collective agreement to exist and include things like love, laws and money.

We came up with the same categories of reality; we just had different names for them.

Back in the Stone Age, humans built huts and caves, but they are all gone now. We agreed they were real back then, but are they still real now that they are gone? I think they are real, but we didn’t agree on that.

There are even ideas that we all agreed exist, even if we don’t agree whether their reality is a brute fact or a human agreement. For example, we humans see colours out in the world, but do colours really exist out there, or are they something that humans create in our brains when light rays enter our eyes? Other animals can see colours too, but they see different colours from us. Are their colours still real?

And what about numbers? Is maths a brute fact or an institutional fact? Do numbers exist independently of humans, or are they just something we agreed on? The square root of 144 is 12, but is that something we invented? What about negative numbers and imaginary numbers? I don’t think they existed before we came up with them. Others disagree. Plato believed that mathematical concepts (according to Gemini), like circles, triangles, and numbers, are eternal, unchanging truths in a separate realm, but Aristotle rejected Plato’s realm and said mathematical objects have no independent existence. Mathematics is just something that humans do.

Even within the category of physical things, we still had some dispute about what belongs to reality. Chairs exist, sure, and carbon atoms, but what about quantum particles? There’s definitely something there, and we know what they do, but we don’t really know what they are. Do they really exist, or are they just something we have agreed on? 

“Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment.”

— Richard Feynman

There were other areas of dispute.

Are ethics real? And do they come from human agreement like institutional facts are supposed to? For example, all mammals care for their babies. Searle said that it’s only an institutional fact if humans came up with it, but evolution gave us the rule to take care of our babies about 200 million years before humans came along, so maybe that one is a brute fact. There are plenty of other rules and morals where it’s ambiguous when or whether we invented them. We disagreed noisily over whether slavery was immoral for the five thousand years before we agreed that slavery was immoral. Perhaps there are moral rules that exist, even if we haven’t agreed on them yet.

Does god exist? Most people are sure that either He does or that he doesn’t. Perhaps we will only know the true reality when we go off to meet our maker.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 provides a different kind of challenge. Does Beethoven’s 5th come and go, depending on whether someone is playing it? Or is it there all the time? Does it only become real when an orchestra is playing it in a concert hall? What if someone is just playing the intro on a violin? What if it’s just on a CD or if the score is written on a music sheet? Do they all count as Beethoven’s 5th? We agreed the symphony is real, but we don’t agree on what makes it real or even when it’s real.

I’ve never given the topic of reality much thought, but we had a cool mix of new people and old people at our table last night, and it was a pleasure to discuss it. We still didn’t agree on much by the end, but we ended up closer than we began. It was a great discussion.

We go to the pub for Café Philo every month. Some of us have been coming month after month, and some are coming for the first time. There’s no expectation that we will agree on anything, but as long as we get our thoughts out there, it’s all good.

Leave a comment below if there is something you disagree with.

Arguments about religion address two different flavours of God:

• The God from scripture shares love and turns water into wine.
• The philosophers’ God creates puzzles that test our reasoning.

The arguments over the philosopher’s God have popped up on the internet again, and they mean even less to me this time around.

One philosophical argument is the fine-tuning argument, which claims that the composition of the universe is fine-tuned to make life possible. If a small number of constants such as the strength of gravity or the charge of an electron were just a little different, life could not exist.

According to many philosophers, it’s unlikely the constants could have been arrived at randomly, so God must have chosen them.

There are several arguments against this.

The multiverse hypothesis says there are many different versions of the universe, and each one has a different set of values for the constants. We just happen to live in the one that has the constants we need. We just got lucky.

Another argument says there is no reason to suspect the constants could have different values at all. We just call them constants. Perhaps they really are constants. Perhaps they “just are”, and there’s no reason to think they could be anything else.

Richard Dawkins says that even if we know those constants come from God, it still leaves us wondering where God comes from. If the universe can’t come from nowhere, then neither can God.

There are several such philosophical arguments. The cosmological argument, for example, says every event must have a cause. An infinite chain of causes is impossible, so there must be a first cause. That first cause is God. But as with the fine-tuning argument, we are still left asking who caused God.

For many of these philosophical arguments, you are more likely to find them persuasive if you already believe in God. If you don’t believe in God, these arguments won’t convince you.

I don’t find these arguments persuasive, but that’s OK. I don’t feel any need to accept the fine-tuning argument or to reject it, and I’ll just wait until we have evidence either way. Until then… whatever. They don’t affect my everyday life, and I don’t need to agree or disagree. Just let me know when you find some proper evidence.

Arguments for the Christian God are more interesting.

I’m still not persuaded they are true, but they make for a good story. I enjoy stories from the Bible — just as I enjoy The Iliad or The Lord of the Rings. I read them often. I am reading The Gospel According to St. John at the moment. Cool stuff.

Are the stories from the Bible (or the Ramayana or the Koran) true? I doubt it, but that’s OK. They are good stories, and I enjoy reading them.

Growing up in England in the 1970s, hardly any of my friends believed in God, but school and society told bible stories every day. We went to church for births, deaths and marriages; we said the Lord’s Prayer every morning and sang Carols at Christmas.

In those times, we checked the religion box on every official form. Need a new passport? Church of England. Need to refill your prescription? Church of England. The government back then needed your religion like they need your ethnicity and gender identity today.

California was very different. If you were Christian, your kids went to church. If you weren’t Christian, your kids missed out on the centrepiece of Western Civilisation. My kids never sang The Lord’s My Shepherd or dressed as Mary and Joseph in a stable for the Christmas play.

Religion in England in the 1970s was a part of life, but no one required you to believe anything. It was different in America.

Coming home to England after 25 years in California, religious society is more like America’s. The law still requires schools to echo Christian tradition and hold daily prayer, but barely any do. Most people get married in a registry office, and it’s cheaper to get cremated.

There are too many people from other religions now and too many who don’t care. I think that’s a shame.

Most of us would probably agree that dying is the worst thing that can happen to us. Being alive is always better than being dead.

But wait! While death is pretty bad, it’s not as bad as being tortured. You probably don’t want to watch your children get murdered either. Maybe dying is not the worst thing that can happen.

Dying is not the same as being dead, though. You are still alive while you are dying. Dying can drag on and on, bringing pain while your organs shut down. Once you are dead, your pain will be gone — but your pleasures will be gone, too. You won’t have any awareness of being dead, and you will be dead forever (Belshaw). But before you have to die, you have to live, and that’s where we’ll start.

How long do you want to live?

Dying young is the saddest time to die. Someone who has been around a long time will usually be more prepared to die than someone who just turned twenty. But how long will be long enough?

Philosopher Bernard Williams says that most of us would prefer to live forever. Some people would be happy to just sit and look out of the window for an infinity of years, and Williams calls this just living. But while just living is good enough for many, the rest of us need more excitement to make life worthwhile. But how much excitement?

Imagine you are Eric Clapton and you are pretty good at playing the guitar. You know quite a few rock songs and can play them well. If you practice for a few more decades, maybe you can learn to play all the songs. But eventually, you’ll get bored with playing the guitar. Maybe you can learn something else? Try the piano? Drums? They’ll all get boring after infinite days. Painting? Science? Cooking? Visiting Polynesian Islands? The list is finite, and you’ll eventually be bored with all of them. You’ll end up just living, and who wants nothing but just living for the rest of time?

Williams says we pursue some desires, like eating when we are hungry or sleeping when we are tired, just to stay alive. Other desires, like raising a child or achieving a lifelong ambition, give our lives meaning. But when we are done with all those, living forever doesn’t sound so appealing. Satisfying the same desires forever is no longer desirable.

The arguments so far are hypothetical. We don’t really have the option of living forever to satisfy our desires. In the real world, we have our three score years and ten —and maybe just a little bit more — but is that long enough? Learning the guitar and raising those grandchildren fits into an average lifetime. You could even visit Tahiti or live in Manhattan, too. But once you get past eighty, visiting Tahiti seems less appealing, and eventually, just living will be all that fills your days.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

— Psalm 90, KJV

Epicurus says we should not fear death because we won’t even be there. Lucretius, too, asks: if we aren’t afraid of the time before we were born, why should we be afraid of the time after we die? What is there to be afraid of?

These arguments from Epicurus and Lucretius say we should not be afraid of death, but they say nothing about how much we can enjoy being alive. Even if being dead isn’t so bad, we’ll miss out on the things that make us happy.

The most important thing is to enjoy your life—to be happy—it’s all that matters.
— Audrey Hepburn

But being happy doesn’t last forever. As we get older, our ability to enjoy life’s pleasures declines. We get sick and endure pain. Our bones get weak, and our senses fade. Eventually we might decide that dying wouldn’t be so bad (Williams). But how do we balance the good things against the bad things? How should we choose when to die?

Thomas Nagel has a little thought experiment for us. Imagine that every Monday, after your cup of coffee, you are given a choice: you can live one more week, or you can die painlessly in a few minutes. Nagel says he would always choose to live another week. What would you choose? Would you make the same choice forever?

According to Williams, it’s nearly always too early or too late to die. The simplest solution is to do nothing and just accept the day that death arrives. If we are lucky, we’ll die just before it becomes unpleasant to stay alive. Tacitus had something to say about that.

Tu vero felix, Agricola, non vitae tantum claritate, sed etiam opportunitate mortis.

[You were truly lucky, Agricola, not only in the brilliance of your life, but also in the timing of your death.]

— Tacitus

But what if you are not lucky?

We’ve talked about those who die in their 20s — non vero felix! — but what about those who live to eighty or ninety? I expect it’s always too early for some — many will want to watch their grandchildren grow, or walk in the park with an elderly sweetheart — but what about when that is all over?

Just living will be enough for some, but not for me. I have my early death booked already, even if I haven’t picked a date yet. Whether that involves a trip to Switzerland, some opium poppies or an uninvited visitor in my brain, I’d prefer an early departure to just living.

Betty said she prayed today
For the sky to blow away
Or maybe stay
She wasn’t sure

— Nick Drake

People die in many different ways. Which way would you choose, if you could choose? The easiest option is to live until you are 90 and then let nature take you away — but that’s not what I would choose for myself.

Many would rather die suddenly, with no expectation that the end is coming. Maybe you are flying over the Alps, and the captain announces that you are going to crash. You have a little time to say your prayers. You can even call your wife and tell her you love her, but you won’t be coming home. Even better, perhaps the plane explodes before you even know what’s going on. You have no time to regret all the things you haven’t done yet, and no time to be afraid of the death that will take you away. You are just gone. If this one’s your favourite, you could learn rock climbing or white water kayaking.

Too many people have to face a horrible disease that keeps them around for a few days… or months… or years. Or maybe the disease is not so horrible; it’s fatal, but without the excruciating pain. You don’t know exactly when death is coming, but you know it is coming, and you have time to teach your family to pay the electricity bill, test the smoke alarms and organise their taxes. You’ll have lots of hugs and kisses before you go, and you’ll eventually drift off into sleep and won’t wake up. This one sounds good to me. This is the one I would choose.

But what if that horrible disease really is horrible? Lots of pain. Drooling. Anal leakage. You’ll suffer in bed for weeks and months while your wife and family take care of your bedsores and change your bedpan. When you finally reach the end, you will choke until you choke your last breath. Most of us wouldn’t want anyone to die like this, unless they are one of those politicians in the House of Lords who blocked the Assisted Dying Bill.

Dying might go on for a while, but dying only happens while we are still alive. When we are dead, it’s all over. Assuming there is no afterlife, there is nothing more. There are no memories, no hopes, no pains, and no dreams. We won’t even be aware that we are dead.

Belshare shares a fairy tale where two young lovers enjoy a candlelit dinner. Jazz band, Champagne, oysters. A first kiss. After their romantic rendezvous, they drive home, but the young lady loses control of her car and hits a bridge. She is killed instantly before she is even aware of what has happened. She dies without pain, and she experiences no fear.

The young lady’s death brings sadness to her family and friends. Relatives bring flowers to her funeral, and her lover sheds many tears. However, the young lady knows nothing of her death. Did anything bad happen to her?

Most of us will say, “Of course! She had her full life ahead of her. And now she is gone.” Isn’t that obviously bad?

Epicurus and Lucretius argued that death isn’t bad for us after all, and we shouldn’t be afraid of it. They both believed the world is made of particles (long before scientists discovered atoms) and after we are dead, we go back to being particles once more. Being dead means nothing to us because we no longer exist. If Epicurus and Lucretius are correct, it’s wrong to say that this young woman is harmed in any way. She had no fear or anxiety, and she did not suffer at all. Her family mourns her death, but she knows nothing about any of this (Belshaw).

What obligations does the deceased’s family have? Before you die, you tell your family, “When I die, I’d like to be buried on the edge of the woodland in a cotton shroud with a small choir singing English folk songs.” Your family promises to satisfy your wishes, but what happens if they break their promise? Who will be hurt? Keeping the promise pleases no one, and breaking the promise hurts no one, either.

You should make those plans anyway, even if your wishes might not be followed. If your family decides to ignore your wishes and sends your body for cremation, there’ll be no one to be bothered. But if your family does decide to celebrate your life, they won’t have the burden of worrying how. They’ll just have to buy that cotton shroud. Extra bonus: if they follow your wishes, you won’t end up in an expensive mahogany coffin with a plush velvet interior that costs twelve thousand dollars.

C.S. Lewis wrote about the death of his wife in his memoir, A Grief Observed, and I have often wondered whether mourning is easier for Christians who believe in an afterlife. Is it easier to accept the death of a loved one if you are sure that you will meet again? Lewis says it is not.

A Grief Observed begins with the unbearable pain that came from losing his wife (he refers to her as H.), then takes us through his changing emotions as he comes to accept her death: still suffering in each phase of grief, but suffering in a different way.

By the end of the book, Lewis still feels her absence — “like the sky, spread over everything” — but where once he felt that he shared his body with his lost lover, now his body is just an empty home.

He takes us through the stages of their loss — through dying, death and mourning. Even when H. is dying of cancer, they still share the joy of living together; their joy continues to flow even when all hope of living is gone. After she passes away, Lewis contrasts the joy of living with the grief of being without her. According to Lewis, the one who survives will never understand what it is like to be the one who dies — this much is true. But he also asserts that it will always be worse for the one who dies, but I think he has this wrong. In the tragedy he describes, where the lovers have time to prepare, it is so much harder for the survivor to understand what it will be like to live alone, while the other has nothing to do but die. It is harder for those who will grieve.

But that grief does not stay the same forever.

What does it matter how this grief of mine evolves or what I do with it? What does it matter how I remember her or whether I remember her at all? […]

Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. […]

But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short. […]

What pitiable cant to say ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. […]

What does it matter how I remember her or whether I remember her at all?

— C.S. Lewis

Lewis’ mourning begins with a cry that his pathway to God was shut and bolted by his loss, but later, he wonders if it was his own need for grief that slammed it closed. This might be true, too, for those who need help from their family — While our grief is fresh, we have to suffer it alone, and we have to re-learn how to ask for help.

Most of us don’t understand what a complex business it is to die. The agony of preparing to die can be hard, but it’s harder for those who will be left behind. In addition to visits to the hospital, your family has to learn to pay the bills and figure out where the money is hidden. Of course, if you die suddenly, you have none of this to deal with. But if you know what’s coming, you can be ready, and you can share your ability to know the future with your family, so that they can know, too.

Then you can share in the joy of living.

• Christopher Belshaw (2005). 10 good questions about life and death.
• Bernard Williams (1973). Problems of the Self.
• The Holy Bible: King James Version.
• Lucretius (Ancient Rome). De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things).
• Epicurus (Ancient Greece). Letter to Menoeceus.
• Thomas Nagel (1970). The Possibility of Altruism.
• Tacitus (Ancient Rome). Agricola.
• Nick Drake (1969). Riverman.
• C.S. Lewis. (1961). A Grief Observed.

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— 1979 —

We were always in trouble during those years, but I was just a naughty boy. I talked too loudly in class. I rarely did homework on time. My worst crime was arguing with teachers. I was just a naughty little boy; nothing worse than that. I never stole anything… or broke anything… or hurt anyone. Still, I got lots of detentions. Paul did, too.

We both liked to make people laugh. In the first few years of school, we put on a play for the drama festival. My class chose a comedy about two football hooligans who were always in trouble with the law. Guess who played the hooligans!

But Paul was something more. He wrote graffiti on the walls and stole motorbikes. He occasionally came over to my house to give me a ride, but I was never interested in stealing motorbikes myself.

Still, we were naughty, and we had a rule at Chis & Sid: if you got more than three detentions, you got the cane. But our headmaster was a nice guy and didn’t whack us, so Mr Gooden, our form teacher, did the whacking instead with his size-13 Dunlop Green Flash tennis shoes. He’d make us come down to the teacher’s changing room and stare into his eyes while he gave us our lecture. Then we’d take off our purple blazer, and he’d hit us as hard as he could. Three times. I got lots of those.

One time, we were a bit rowdier in French class than we should have been. Miss Furey was quite young — probably new to teaching — and our class wasn’t the easiest class to handle. She would shout “Taisez-vous!” (“Be quiet!”) over and over. I spent much of her class writing “Le silence aide le travail” a hundred times in the corridor outside her classroom, because je ne me taisais pas.

Martin and David caused some commotion in French class when Martin looked out of the window and shouted, “Look at that!” The whole class ran over to look out the window, and there was nothing that poor Miss Furey could do to regain control.

“Asseyez-vous! Asseyez-vous!” Ms Furey shouted.

There was nothing poor Miss Furey could do to regain control. She just broke down and burst into tears. She ran out of the classroom crying and didn’t come back for days.

The deputy-head master came in soon after to tell us what naughty children we were, and Mr Gooden beat us with his tennis shoe. Paul and I had nothing to do with this particular commotion, but he beat us anyway.

I like to think we were kinder to Miss Furey after that.

Another time, Mr Gooden made us come up to Room 51 to get the cane, long after everyone else had gone home. I forget what our crime was — maybe there was no crime at all — but Paul went in first, and I stood outside, waiting for my turn.

Back in those days, we put our wooden chairs on top of the wooden desks, so the cleaners could do their cleaning, and before long, Paul and Mr Gooden started shouting at each other and throwing chairs. Naughty little boy that I was, I sat outside, terrified that I was next.

Mr Berry, Mr Gooden’s boss, came out of his office and asked me what was going on. Why was I sitting there so late in the evening? I explained that Paul and Mr Gooden were in there, throwing chairs, and that I was next.

“Oh,” said Mr Berry.

Then he grabbed his coat and went home.

After a bit more banging and shouting, the uproar calmed, and Mr Gooden drove me home. When we got to my house, he made me stay in the car while he went to talk to my mother. After maybe fifteen minutes, I went inside and told Mum that I wanted to go to a different school. “I know”, she said.

There was a military school in Greenwich. Maybe I could go there.

— 1980 —

While I continued getting in trouble for stupid little things, Paul upped his game. He made a bomb with gunpowder and aerosol cans one time and tried to blow up Five Arches bridge over the Cray River.

One weekend, Paul broke into the school chemistry lab and stole half the chemicals — sodium, phosphorus, sulphuric acid, magnesium dust — and a whole lot more. Boxes and boxes of dangerous chemicals. Not long after, Paul was hanging out with friends, and he threw burning phosphorus at someone. They called the police, and Paul went to the juvenile detention centre.

I never saw him again.

A lovely lady left me a comment a little while ago to say she was having lunch with Mr Gooden next week, and “Would I like her to say anything to him for me?”

I wrote him a polite little note, reminding him what a great chemistry teacher he was, but what a hard time he gave us as a form teacher. He wrote back, and now we are planning to meet for dinner one day soon. What a world, eh?

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— 1980 —

As usual, I did no classwork or homework in her class. None at all. But I was the only one to get a decent grade in the final exam. I got 70%, John got 57%. The class average was 34%.

Ms McDonnell accused me of cheating and reported me to Mr Gooden, my form teacher. Mr Gooden checked my books and asked me some physics questions to check that I knew what I was supposed to know. I had done precisely zero homework for the entire year, but I hadn’t cheated. I knew all the answers.

When Mr Gooden found that I hadn’t done any work, he made me do a whole year of physics in the last two weeks of school.

After the end-of-year exams, we always had two or three weeks with no work to do. We just hung out in the sunshine and had fun, but this year I sat at the back of Mr Gooden’s chemistry class to catch up on the work I had skipped.

Mr Gooden was teaching an older class to prepare them for university. They barely knew anything, so when they didn’t know the answer, he asked me.

Gooden: “What’s the by-product of fermentation?

Silence. No one knows.

Gooden: Kevin?

Me: Carbon Dioxide, sir.

Gooden: Well done, Kevin.



Gooden: What is that carbon dioxide used for?

Silence.

Gooden: Kevin?

Me: To pressurise the kegs, sir.

Gooden: That’s good, Kevin.

This went on for several days. I knew all the answers, and they knew nothing.

My Dad had bought me an American college textbook on organic chemistry for Christmas that year. I could’ve easily done A-level chemistry when I was 14, but that wasn’t an option — and for the next two years of school, I did practically zero work and never even took a book home.

C.S. Lewis was an atheist earlier in life, and he addresses a lot of points that atheists supposedly misunderstand, but I found many of his points confusing. I’ll write some of them down here, and maybe you can help me. 

I’m not interested in persuading anyone that C.S. Lewis was wrong. I just want to understand a bit more. Every chapter here is my understanding of what C.S. wrote, except for the final paragraphs that add some commentary.

Chapter One — The Law of Human Nature.

The Law of Nature is about gravity, heredity and other scientific laws — laws that can’t be broken. But the Law of Human Nature is more about moral laws that can be broken. C.S. uses various phrases for this idea: Right and Wrong; Moral Law, Moral Behaviour. They all amount to a set of rules that God made for us, and we sometimes fall short and break those (pp.4-5).

C.S says that all people and all civilisations share these same Moral Laws, more or less. They might be a bit different, but are mostly the same. For example, there’s no country where you’ll be admired for running away in battle or for double-crossing people who are kind to you — no more likely than a country where 2+2=5. Men in different countries might differ over whether they can have one wife or four, but they will all agree that you can’t just have any woman you fancy (pp.5-6).

You might sometimes fall short in your attempt to follow the Moral Law — just like you might make mistakes with the multiplication table — but, deep down, you know the Laws, and must try harder next time to do the right thing. Just like when you make a mistake in maths (pp.6-7).

C.S. summarises this with two points: 

1. Everyone all over the world knows they should behave a certain way (they have the same Moral Law).
2. Sometimes they fall short.

I don’t understand these points at all.

C.S. was writing during the Second World War, and there were some pretty bad people in Nazi Germany. Did they not know the rules? Or did they know the rules and fall short? I think it’s more likely the Nazis had a different set of rules altogether; rules that the rest of us — and God — would not approve of. 

C.S. says that there is no sense in saying that what the Nazis did was wrong unless the Nazis themselves knew they were wrong. But even if they didn’t know what was wrong, we’d still fight them, but we would have had no right to blame them (p.5).

I don’t understand this either.

Chapter Two — Some Objections.

Sometimes an instinct will lead you to do the right thing, sometimes not. For example, suppose a man is drowning. You might feel an instinct to save him, or an instinct to be safe and stay away — but those are just instincts. The Moral Law says you should save him whether you want to or not. Even if your instinct to stay away is the stronger one, the Moral Law will tell you to save him all the same. That can’t just be an instinct because it makes no sense for an instinct to override an instinct. It must be a law.

I don’t quite get how I would know whether I am feeling an instinct or a law. In this example, I expect most of us would want to save the drowning man, so it’s hard to distinguish the “Moral Law” from the “good instinct”. In a better example, the good and bad instincts would be harder to choose between, but I still don’t understand how I would tell instincts from laws.

In Pete Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment, the “good instinct” is much harder to choose. Most people would rescue the drowning child, even if it ruins our expensive shoes (Moral Law = Good Instinct), but what about a child on the other side of the world who is dying of malaria? The Moral Law would have us save that child, too, but most of us wouldn’t do it (Moral Law = Bad Instinct). It’s hard to know when the Moral Law applies.

Chapter Three — The Reality of the Law.

When you think about a stone falling, the stone doesn’t have a choice whether to follow the Law of Nature. The law just means this is “what stones do”. However, the Law of Human Nature is different. It does not mean “What humans do.” It means “What humans ought to do.” (p.17)

Humans ought to behave decently. But what does it mean to behave decently? It’s not just doing what benefits me — cheating would benefit me, but that’s not behaving decently (p.19). Maybe it means doing what benefits all of society. But why would I care what benefits society, unless it also benefited me? Well, because it’s decent. But now I am back where I started: What does it mean to behave decently (p.20)?

The Moral Law says we should behave decently, but since we don’t have an explanation for why we should behave decently, the Moral Law must come from some other reality. From outside us (p.20).

This leap seems like a big leap to me. We don’t even know what the Moral Law is yet. How would we know where it comes from?

Chapter Four — What Lies Behind the Law?

There are two views of the universe (pp.11-12):

1. The materialist view says that matter and space have always existed, but no one knows why. There is nothing “behind” the matter, and matter just happened to create us by a fluke. 
2. The religious view is that behind the universe, there is something like a mind. The universe partly exists for reasons we don’t know, and partly to make minds like itself.

Science can’t tell us which is the correct view. Science gets us some of the way, but it can’t answer questions like “Why is there anything at all?” or “Is anything behind those things that science can describe?” Even if science helped us understand every single thing in the whole universe, it still wouldn’t be able to answer questions like, “Why is there a universe?” (p.23). We need a better way to know which view is correct.

There is one thing in the universe that knows more than science can tell us, and that thing is Man. We know that men observe a moral law (see Chapter Three); however, we could never observe this moral law from the outside; the only way we know it exists is through a command inside us, telling us how to behave. There is a power outside the universe that tells our minds about the Moral Law (pp.23-24).

We have not explained Christianity yet, but we have shown that there is a Power behind the universe that appears inside of us, telling us how to behave. We have to assume it is like a mind because the only other option is matter, and we can hardly imagine matter giving us instructions (p.25).

The previous leap was difficult to understand, but this is an even bigger leap. If our moral law comes from another reality, it must come from a Power outside of the universe.

My own instinct is that the universe could exist for no reason at all. Perhaps it has always existed. We have no evidence either way. Perhaps it exists for a reason that we just don’t know yet. 

Chapter Five — We Have Cause to be Uneasy

You might feel a little uneasy about what we have learned already, but here are three things that might make you feel a little better.

Firstly, an analogy: you can put a clock back if the clock is wrong. Or, if you have taken the wrong road, you can go back and take a different turning. You can do this when you are doing maths, too. When you make a mistake, you go back and do it a different way. Humanity has made mistakes, and when we make a mistake, we should go back and try a different way (pp.28-29).

Secondly, we have proven that there is Something or Somebody behind the Moral Law (though we haven’t proven that it’s God yet). We have two bits of evidence that Something or Somebody exists. 

1. The universe He has made is one clue. But with the universe alone, we must conclude He is a great artist, but merciless (p.29). 
2. The Moral Law that He has put in our minds (pp.29-30). 

You can learn more about God from the Moral Law than you can from the universe, just as you can learn more about a man from his conversation than from looking at his house. The Being behind the universe — God — must be interested in decent behaviour, although ‘decent’ does not necessarily mean ‘good’ (see chapter two) (pp.29-30). 

And the last point: Christianity makes no sense unless you know these rules. It’s only when you understand that your position is nearly desperate that you will understand what Christians are talking about (p.32). 

Perhaps this is related to his time as an atheist, when he rejected Christianity because he did not understand it. Perhaps discovering these rules helped him find God.

I don’t really understand what the Something is, or how the existence of the universe proves that the Something exists, too. I also don’t understand why the Moral Law and the universe show that God exists.

Thanks for reading Chasing Shadows! I post occasionally on philosophy and culture.

Mere Christianity is one of the most successful books in the twentieth century about Christianity, with millions of readers. It was named the best religious book of the 20th century by Christianity Today (I can’t find the original article, but it is quoted a hundred times on the web). On Goodreads, nearly all the reviews of Mere Christianity are five stars or one star. People love it or hate it. 

The book gets great reviews from Christian websites, too, but apologists and professors are more critical. Some of these apologists say it is dated. Fair enough. But I am still curious what people ever understood it to mean, and why it carried so much power.

I didn’t really understand much of Mere Christianity, and I would love to understand it better. If someone has a more up-to-date book of apologetics for beginners to replace what CS Lewis says, I’d love to read that, too.

What a horrible place Britain was in the early 80s.

I’m reading Dominic Sandbrook’s Who Dares Wins. This is one of five books that tell the history of Britain from the fifties up to the eighties. Most of the book is about the politics of the era, with Mrs Thatcher as the star of the show.

Actually… star of the show? Make that the villain of the piece.

I was a teenager during this period, and I remember it as a period of adventure and good times, but Sandbrook reminded me that there was plenty of other stuff going on that wasn’t so jolly.

It covers probably the single most controversial period in my lifetime: the first Thatcher administration, which still evokes extremely strong feelings today. Many of the events it covers – the advent of the first woman Prime Minister, the catastrophic recession of the early 1980s, the inner-city riots of 1981, the civil war inside the Labour Party, the New Romantics, the Northern Irish hunger strikes and of course the Falklands War – could easily take up hundreds of pages. And the cast of characters – everybody from Margaret Thatcher, Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone to Ian Botham, Simon Le Bon and Clive Sinclair – is almost Dickensian in its lurid variety.

— Dominic Sandbrook

Britain was already experiencing disaster before Mrs Thatcher came along. Unemployment was at scary levels, and industrial action brought strikes just about every week: miners’ strikes, dockers’ strikes, car manufacturers, truck drivers, gravediggers. The list goes on. The military was called in to cover the most critical strikes, and some friends of mine drove fire trucks when the firefighters stopped fighting fires. Unions were demanding 40% pay rises, inflation peaked at 26.9%, and unemployment reached 5.5%. There were riots.

This period is remembered as the Winter of Discontent.

Britain was already experiencing disaster before Mrs Thatcher came along. Unemployment was at scary levels, and industrial action brought strikes just about every week: miners’ strikes, dockers’ strikes, car manufacturers, truck drivers, gravediggers. The list goes on. The military was called in to cover the most critical strikes, and some friends of mine drove fire trucks when the firefighters stopped fighting fires. Unions were demanding 40% pay rises, inflation peaked at 26.9%, and unemployment reached 5.5%. There were riots. This period is remembered as the Winter of Discontent.

Mrs Thatcher moved into 10 Downing Street with the intention of leading a revolution to cure Britain’s woes. Thatcher wanted to replace Britain’s postwar economy, based on welfare and workers’ rights, with policies centred on deregulation, tax reform and privatisation. Milton Friedman was her hero.

But Thatcher led Britain further down the economic drain. Industry collapsed. Unemployment doubled to 12%. Interest rates reached 17%. I remember watching the BBC News as a teenager, seeing yet another industry closing for good every evening. All the car companies, the factories that made ships, the mines, heavy industry and the makers of textiles. All gone.

Thatcher broke Britain.

It wasn’t all bad, though. When I was 14, everyone I knew lived in a council house. We were a family of six living in a 900 sq ft (83m²) maisonette on a housing estate. The rent was £24 per month, and I loved it. Loads of friends. Loads of adventure.

Back then, nearly half the population lived in council houses owned by the government, but one of Thatcher’s defining policies was to sell off the council houses to the people who lived in them. It was a good policy, and it gave the poorer classes something to aspire to. Two million council houses were sold. Both my mother and my father (divorced by now) bought their council houses, and we transitioned from working-class to middle-class along with the rest of Thatcher’s society.

Aside from a handful of popular policies like Right to Buy, Mrs Thatcher, in 1980, was the least popular prime minister ever. Probably, the only thing that saved her was that the Labour Party were hated even more.

The chapters about the Labour leadership are astounding. Practically all the sensible leaders had been driven out of the Labour Party. By 1980, socialist Michael Foot was the only one left who wasn’t a communist revolutionary. Tony Benn wanted to nationalise all the key industries and have them run by workers’ collectives. He also wanted to abolish the monarchy and Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) earned her popularity too. Northern Ireland’s “troubles” had started in the early seventies, but the IRA’s terrorist attacks on the British mainland reached a peak after Thatcher came to power. They were appalling.

The IRA killed 50 people in London with bombs and injured 800 more. Nail bombs were especially evil when the curved nails stuck in civilians’ faces and bodies.

Several IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland went on hunger strike during this period because they wanted to be treated as political prisoners rather than criminals. Their leader, Bobby Sands, was elected to parliament during his hunger strike, but died, along with nine fellow prisoners, but Mrs Thatcher showed no mercy.

Besides politics, the book covers plenty of sports and culture — but there was plenty of violence in here, too. Football hooliganism had been a growing problem throughout the 70s, but it got worse in the 80s, and English fans took it to Europe.

The fighting at home was bad enough, but it was worse in Europe. Gangs of English thugs would smash foreign cities before every game, and attack people in the street, football fans or not. The violence peaked at Heysel Stadium in Belgium when Liverpool fans breached a fence to attack Juventus fans. 39 people died, and 600 were injured. Fourteen Liverpool fans were sent to prison, and English clubs were banned from Europe for five years.

There were plenty of race riots back home, too.

Apart from the riots, there’s a lot more on sports, but it’s mostly good news this time. Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett broke world record after world record in the 800m and 1500m. Daley Thompson became an English hero in the decathlon, and Ian Botham was a legend.

The music chapters were good, too. Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran are obvious stars of the time, but there are also bits about smaller musicians like The Specials and Gary Numan (who married my next-door neighbour). That period of music was probably the most political before or since, and Sandbrook uses their stories to make wider points about society.

The next chapter is about the Falklands War, but I have said enough about my own trip there already. The Argentinians surrendered.

I love Who Dares Wins, but Dominic Sandbrook does go on a bit. Forty pages on Steve Davis winning the World Snooker Championship was maybe a bit too much, and I know a lot more about Tony Benn now than I needed to know. But, still. I recommend it heartily. I still have the other four books waiting to be read, but I might take a break before I dive into those.

In addition to being a great writer, Dominic Sandbrook has a podcast — The Rest is History — that he shares with Tom Holland. According to Spotify and Apple, The Rest is History is the most popular podcast in the world.

They do an hour-long podcast every week with snippets of history ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the Titanic, with episodes on Nazis, slavery, and Marie Antoinette in between. You’ll be surprised at how often they make you laugh and cry (especially during the Battle of the Somme or the Holocaust).

There are 800 episodes, but you will probably only enjoy 700 of them. Give them a try!

I don’t know how Emily found me, but she gave me hope. Emily introduced me to Kristina, and we have shared our fears and wishes ever since.

It’s hard to know when it’s time for faraway friends to leave us, but over the last week or two, Emily stopped replying to our messages. We had no way to contact her family to find out how she was, and we had to fill in the gaps for ourselves. But the bad news came yesterday. Emily has left us.

My sadness at Emily’s departure is heavier than I expected, but it helps me to think what this means for Emily’s family, and for my own.

We talk a lot about what will happen when it’s my time to leave. None of us is in any hurry to move on, but I think we are all ready.

Goodbye, Emily. You gave me hope.

I don’t expect AI to become more intelligent than us and then kill everyone, but other outcomes are almost as depressing. First of all, there are plenty of jobs where AI will soon be better than people, and AI will steal all the jobs.

Take journalism, for instance. AI is nearly as good as journalists already. There are still great journalists out there, but the nearly-as-good ones will soon be out of a job. Even if the AI is not quite as good, humans will be more expensive, so why not just use the cheaper AI? Maybe the great journalists will stick around for a while, but how will new journalists get started when all the newspapers are gone?

The same future can be expected for programmers, architects, software testers, creative designers, lawyers and the people who make commercials. Any knowledge-based job, really. As with journalists, maybe there will still be work for the best lawyers and the best architects, but we won’t need nearly as many architects and lawyers as we have now. And if we don’t need all those people with brain power, we won’t need the teachers either.

That’s a lot of people without a job.

A lot of people are more optimistic than me. We have been through all this before, they say.

The Industrial Revolution stole the jobs of textile makers, farmers, knocker-uppers and the people who made barrels, but the workers did OK out of the changes. The jobs in the countryside were gone, but they could work in a coal mine or in a factory in the city.

The biggest difference between then and now is that the Industrial Revolution took almost 100 years to wipe out all those jobs. When the AI Revolution comes, the jobs will be gone in just a few years. And what are the jobs that will replace them? We haven’t figured that out yet.

Oh, and by the way, in the Industrial Revolution, lives got worse before they got better. One minute you are weaving sweaters, the next minute you are working in a sweater factory feeding wool into a machine for a fraction of the money. It took a long time for workers’ lives to improve. How will our lives compare?

Maybe, the optimists say, when society becomes more efficient, it will give us everything we need, and we won’t need to work anymore. But have you seen Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos? Do you think they’ll be sharing their trillions? Or will they be piling up their trillions in the Musk and Bezos banks and leaving us to beg for cash to pay for food?

Stephen Hawking had something to say about this.

We might also wonder where AI gets its data from. To take one example, when you search for something on Google…

… Gemini jumps in with the answer.

You’ve probably noticed that Gemini steals nearly all its info from the top search result. No one scrolls down and reads a proper website anymore; they just read what Gemini has to say. Who is going to build a website if no one is going to read it? And who is Gemini going to learn from? Maybe they’ll learn from Claude and OpenAI. But where will they learn from?

Many commentators say we should be afraid of the existential risk that comes with superintelligence, but I am more worried by the immediate risk that AI takes away all our jobs.

Maybe we should all learn to be plumbers… until the robots come along.