The Privilege, page 25
Redfield laughed quietly into the night, and then took a long, slow drink from his glass. When he put down the glass, he looked at me with a different expression. He was deeply serious.
“It isn’t a bad analogy for the way most people think - the constant changing of disordered minds almost blinded by the millions of discordant voices coming at them now from every side, all those shifting images that they keep watching on their computer and television screens. It is complete and total madness, and it has become the only permissible definition of not just progress but civilization That is why I did this: went into business, started AIE - to save, to try to save, something of what is important for the world to remember. Let me tell you a story,” he said, leaning closer. “The first day I sat in on one of Alan Boe’s classes, an undergraduate course in the second semester of his year long course in the history of political philosophy - imagine fifty or sixty students, all of them far above average in intelligence, all of them the highest, or near the highest, in their graduating class in high school; all of them, in other words, worse than ignorant, wrongly educated! The first thing Boe did was take a piece of chalk, stand at the blackboard and start a line at the top left corner. ‘Ancient Greece,’ he explained. And from that high point on the board he drew the line downward at a forty five degree angle. ‘The Dark Ages’ he announced. Then he drew the line back up, not as high as the Greeks, but close. ‘The Renaissance.’ Then, and he did this with a flourish, he drew the line almost to the bottom of the board, lower than the Dark Ages. ‘The Present Day.’
“I became obsessed with what that meant, this strange new notion that instead of progress we had somehow gone backward, that instead of making things better science, which is really how the modern world became what it is, had made it worse. I did nothing but study, trying to learn, to understand, everything I could about the difference between the ancient and the modern world. What did Alan Boe mean? What did the Greeks know, what had we forgotten? That is what I thought about, that is what I studied, that is what….”
Refield stopped suddenly, and looked at me as if he thought he should apologize for getting carried away, for going farther than he had meant to go. I started to tell him that I wanted to hear the rest of what he had to say, but he had already changed his mind.
“I speak for an hour, five, sometimes six, nights a week. I am now always too full of lectures. Let me get to my point another way. You heard most of it this evening, the reason for our existence, why it is important that we have some people who understand that what everyone else thinks the greatest achievement of our time, is as perfectly useless as the rest of this technology we invent. We have to make sure that at least a few people stay free.”
“And so you arrange to have a few people killed so you can use the trials of innocent people to illustrate the evil, the corruption, that you want this privileged group of a hundred to protect itself against?”
I asked this as if it were nothing more than the logical next question; as if, far from angry about what he had done, I was only trying to understand why he had done it. It was, however intended, a serious question, but when he replied he began by appearing to dismiss its importance.
“One of the things I learned in those long forgotten books I studied is that the acknowledgement of others is nothing more than vanity. What use, what value, the approval of the crowd, of people who haven’t studied, who know nothing and for that reason think they know everything? There are three kinds of people, Mr. Antonelli, and only three. There are those - a few, perhaps one every century or so, though sometimes more; they sometimes come close together: the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. when suddenly, in quick succession, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle came into their all too brief existence. And then, nearly two thousand years later, the l6th and l7th centuries, Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes and Locke. I said there were three kinds of people. These are all part of the first group, those few privileged minds who are able to learn and understand things on their own. They do not need teachers; everyone else learns from them.
There is a second kind, and there are not many of these either, at it turns out, and fewer and fewer all the time, perhaps a few dozen, perhaps a few hundred, in any generation: those who can understand things when they are explained to them. Then there is the third, and last, kind,” he went on, with a strange gleam in his relentless eyes, “those who cannot understand no matter who explains, the great, the overwhelming, majority of people in all times and places. All of us, Mr. Antonelli; nearly all of us. The great democratic majority who insist they know everything, that their judgment can never be questioned that everyone is equal in everything, that there is no better and worse. They can’t understand, which means they don’t understand that they don’t. Unaware of their ignorance, everyone lives in a fantastic swirl of strange delusions. Everyone believes - in something, and whether it is religion or politics they know, they always know, they are right. Everyone, or rather almost everyone, because there are still some of us who have, sometimes quite by accident, been drawn to what those few great minds, the ones who were born with the gift of seeing things as they really are, born with the ability to see that what everyone else claimed to see was someone’s made up fiction, have left behind. And if you are lucky enough to be drawn to the study, the serious study, of that small number, a dozen or so, of true philosophers, then you have only one obligation: to do whatever is in your power to make sure that there are others who will keep those thoughts alive, help others learn to understand what it is important to know.”
Redfield looked past me, nodding slowly as if in agreement with what he had just said. He had made it seem almost commonplace, obvious, a description of the human capacity with which no intelligent observer could disagree, and yet, as I realized, it violated the cardinal principle of democracy, the belief that everyone had an ability to learn, the belief in the truth of the Enlightenment.
“Let’s go inside,” suggested Redfield, as he gathered up his glass and the half finished bottle.
I followed him across the brief patch of lawn to the sliding glass door. In the living room he bent his head toward the sparsely filled bookshelves.
“A hundred books. Too many. You could spend your life, and spend it well, with less than half that number, especially if you read them the way they were meant to be read - slowly, word by word, and then read over, and over again. There is a story - Alan Boe must have told it - about Averroes or Alfarabi or someone else among that handful of marvelous Arab philosophers from the early Middle Ages. Whoever it was one day ran excited through the town square exclaiming with perfect joy that after reading it for the tenth, or the twelfth, time - I don’t remember the exact number - he had finally understood what Plato meant in one of his dialogues.”
Redfield shook his head and laughed. “I was wrong. Half the number of books is much too large; half of the half would be more than enough. Here, sit down. Let me fill your glass.”
While he poured the wine first into my glass, and then into his, I gazed around the living room, struck again by the feeling of quiet contemplation, like a vast, private library in which anything more than a whisper would be an intrusion. The shuffling sound of Redfield’s loafers on the hardwood floor, the sound of wine pouring into a glass, were separate noises, distinctive and almost too easily heard.
“You live here - alone?” I asked, when he took a seat on the sofa facing the one on which I sat. The fireplace was just off to the side.
“You’re the only other person who has ever been here. As a guest, I mean. There is a woman who comes to clean, and on occasion to cook dinner. And someone comes to take care of the pool and the yard. I never see them.”
“You never see anyone.”
“I see a lot of people,” he corrected. “I go all sorts of places; I talk to all kinds of people. I live a little like you do yourself, at least how I believe you lived, before you started living with Tangerine Winslow. She is really quite remarkable, as beautiful a woman as I have ever seen. But, before that, when you lived alone, you did not feel alone, did you?”
I was not much interested in talking about how I had lived; I certainly was not interested in telling him how I had felt about it.
“It was one of the reasons why I was so glad you decided to handle the Friedrich case.”
“It was…?”
“You had no obligations, no responsibilities, no family to worry about. You spent all your time doing the one thing you like doing. You didn’t have any other interests. You don’t sit at home watching sports; you don’t watch anything. You don’t play games, you don’t play golf; you have no hobbies,” he said, emitting a short, mocking laugh at the habits of others. “You don’t entertain; other than Albert Craven, with whom you work, you have no friends. You are, every minute of every day, a lawyer, a courtroom lawyer. If you didn’t try cases you would have to shoot yourself. But you do try cases, and the only people who think about suicide are the poor bastards who try to prosecute the people you defend. You were - you are - perfect for what I wanted.”
“What you wanted?” I asked, searching those impenetrable eyes of his for the key to the secret of what he was trying to do. “Whatever it is, it is going to stop. I’m not going to be used anymore.”
He only smiled.
“I’m sorry you think you’ve been used. You really shouldn’t feel that way. What you did in those two trials was something no one who had the privilege of watching them will ever forget. What you did for Alan Boe -”
“Alan Boe -! I did nothing in that trial. Boe was his own defense. I just sat there and watched.”
“And marveled, too, I’ll bet! Isn’t he something? Do you know how much good that did, having him on trial? What better way to show everyone what an intelligent human being is really like? What better way to show how mindless the American university has become? Those hundred people tonight, the ones who work for me - Do you know why they came, why they decided to start their careers with AIE? Two reasons, two reasons only: the reputation of what we do, the most advanced technology company on the planet, and the money. They don’t get paid a decent salary, they don’t get paid at the highest level of salaries paid in Silicon Valley. No, they become independently wealthy the day they walk in the door. Think about it! How easy it really is,” he said, as he rose from the sofa and with his glass in hand began to move about the room. “Artificial intelligence. Everyone likes to talk about the future, what artificial intelligence is going to mean. That future they’re always talking about? - That future is our past. Did you notice, on that tour you were given, how few people there seemed to be, and how many cubicles, how much space there was? We are already using so-called artificial intelligence, that is what does nearly all the work. Have you ever - perhaps when you were a college student in biology class - watched through a high-powered microscope at a microbe as it begins to multiply, how it starts to grow faster and faster, how it increases exponentially? It is what we are doing now with programmed computer systems. We have learned how to start them off in a certain direction and then, from that point forward, let them design their own expansion. Carruthers showed you what we are doing with medical technology. She did not tell you how it will make all of us together far less healthy.”
Redfield was talking in a slow, quiet, measured voice. There was a rhythm to his speech usually heard only from a stage actor delivering a soliloquy. I do not mean to say that it sounded practiced or rehearsed; it was simply, I thought, the reflection of his balanced, well-organized mind, everything carefully considered, not on the surface where it would take time, but somewhere deep inside that remarkable intelligence where it came far quicker than it took to speak the words.
“We all live now like the outpatients of a hospital, everyone sick or on their way to getting ill. Turn on a television set, what do you see? - Endless advertisements about the drugs you should take, drugs that may not cure you, may not make you healthy, but will keep you alive, even if for just a little while longer. What is the point of it? There is nothing any more that anyone thinks more important than mere existence, staying alive. What has medicine become? Not what it used to be, what it was supposed to be - a way to restore health, always with the understanding that when it could not be done, it was better if the patient died than live out a long, lingering death. Now medicine - modern science altogether - has two related objectives: eliminate as much suffering as possible and lengthen life by whatever means or methods can be invented. What for? What virtue in a long life free of any forms of not just suffering, but discomfort? Mozart died at thirty-six. Would you - would anyone in their right mind - trade the life he had, what he was able to achieve, for a so-called normal life lived for twice that many years? But that is what we are doing, with our emphasis on the length of time we live, instead of the kind of life we live. What happens when everyone thinks of themselves as patients, when we worry all the time about how we feel, instead of what we should be doing? And if that is how thing are now, imagine what is going to happen when from the very moment we are born, we are implanted with microscopic devices that monitor, and eventually treat, our condition; when we are all connected to a machine, a vast computer network in which we are under the constant scrutiny of a computer program - or, rather, a whole series of them, always communicating with each other, every little thing that happens, even the slightest change, given instant treatment. It would be better if we abolished machines and were left to live without any outside help. Science, technology, machines, medicine - the daydream of painless longevity, the dream of cowards.”
Standing next to the still open sliding glass doors, Redfield crossed his arms and began to laugh.
“Everyone else’s future, it’s already part of my past. It isn’t difficult to see where this is going - if you’re not caught up in it, if you get far enough ahead of it, if you have gone far enough back into the past to see how it all started. If you read, if you study, what someone like Descartes was really trying to do - devise a method that would make it possible to use each problem that his new science solved as a way to solve the next problem after that: science an artificial construct of the human mind, imposing an order of its own on all the material that nature supplied; the workings of human intelligence codified, made, if you will, machine-like. That is what Descartes called human beings - machines that could be made to work. We talk about artificial intelligence; Descartes thought human intelligence artificial, something that could be made, or made over, by the invention of a method of doing things, his method, what we in our ignorance call the scientific method.”
I listened, listened carefully, listened to every word. I was fascinated, more perhaps by the fact, the great overwhelming fact, that Redfield had mastered things I could not possibly understand, than by that knowledge itself. If I had had any doubts about what Alan Boe had told me about him, I did not doubt now that Redfield was different from anyone I had ever met. It was impossible not to be drawn to him, not to want to hear more about anything he wanted to say. I had to remind myself what he had done and why I had agreed to come.
“We have a hundred people, that is all; a hundred young men and women who now have more money than they will ever need. The company can afford it; we make billions every year. Those hundred men and women were among the most highly recruited college students in the country. I say among, because there were others we did not choose. It is only a seeming paradox that we turned down anyone who said they wanted to make a lot of money. We also turned down anyone who was not single. If they were married, they could not live the way they live here, everything in common, no real privacy. They have to live like that if they are going to learn that money is nothing more than a means, that the reason they will be made wealthy is so they can live free and independent lives, studying serious things and doing good things, helping the poor, helping raise the level of public life. But the main reason, the most important reason, is to make sure there will be at least a few people to continue the tradition, the belief that there is more to human existence than simply staying alive, that there is a reason why the human being was endowed with reason.”
Redfield stared down at the floor. He closed his mouth, clenching his jaw so tight that for a moment his head trembled with the tension. He lifted his eyes just far enough to give me a searching glance.
“Your question - why those two trials ? The power of example, the clarity that comes when you can see - when a hundred of the most intelligent young men and women in the country can see - what happens when the requirements of the law and the requirements of justice are completely different; when they can see, not in the abstract, not in some history book, but here and now, what happens when a man and wife live like the Friedrichs did, and when someone as brain dead as Lucas Fairweather is put in charge of a university. It was never true that a picture is worth a thousand words; it was only when the words were written by someone who did not know how to write that people thought it was. What is true, is that an example is the best, because the most convincing, way to explain to those capable of understanding what something means.
“What you did in those two trials was far more valuable than anything you can imagine. I had to show them, teach them, the limits of the law. The law says not to kill, but there are some things worse than murder. The law says not to steal, but there are times when, to save someone from starvation, it is the only decent thing to do. We are taught from childhood that lying is always wrong, but lying about the deficiencies of others, lying to make them feel better about themselves is something Aristotle, among others, insisted was the only honorable practice. But these only point to the most important lesson that the law’s limitations teach, what the Friedrich and the Boe trials in their different ways taught: what the law requires is not sufficient, what the hundred need to follow is a law of their own, a law more stringent, most demanding, than what the law requires of normal people.”
