Desperate Games

As a result of your carefree or evil attitude, Honoured Presidents, science has not reached the summits which it ought to and could have done. Hence there is a series of crass omissions in our knowledge, which we want to mention here to our own humiliation and to your shame.

At the time of writing we do not know the following:

The secret of the primary mechanisms of the central nervous system.

Whether the expansion of the universe will continue forever or will be followed by contraction.

How to cure the common cold.

What is the precise structure of an atom.

There followed a list as long as the preceding one, displaying the same absence of logical order, and for the same reasons. The letter concluded with the following passage:

…All these obscure areas and many more as well are far from being inaccessible to penetration by us, but they require for their exploration the mobilisation of all the material and spiritual resources of our Earth, which you are squandering, and a rational world organisation of scientific research, which you are incapable of even conceiving, in peace and freedom, which are fanciful ideas to your minds.

This, Honoured Presidents, is what we wish to remind you of concerning knowledge. We made it brief, knowing that such questions are not familiar to you and their range is beyond you. We shall insist further on the second bounty for which the world is indebted to us:

Concerning Power: Not to mention the earliest inventions such as fire, which could only have been made by scientific minds, we have given you in the course of recent centuries:

Dynamite.

Hygiene and Vaccination (the power over death).

Electricity.

Antibiotics.

Atomic Energy, Nuclear Energy, etc.

There was another long list and the letter concluded with a warning:

Concerning the conquest of power which has been gradually extracted from Nature, Honoured Presidents, your role counted for nothing, but we have noticed a difference here and a worsening in your case: you accepted these conquests without understanding the essence of them, of course, and without trying to penetrate their significance, but you distorted them in order to make them serve exclusively your own thirst for comfort, your laziness and also, incidentally, the greatest crimes. By that we mean the systematic massacres of those who, in your madness, you identify as strangers.

Thus, every time one of our discoveries has fallen into your unintelligent or villainous hands (we apologize for the use of these expressions, but we, the Nobels, have weighed them carefully), you did your utmost to divert it from its true significance, and stifle the scientific spirit in which it was conceived, to substitute it finally with a demonic spirit, which the poet has illustrated as follows:

Fall’n Cherub, to be weak is miserable

Doing or suffering: but of this be sure,

To do ought good never will be our task,

But ever to do ill our sole delight,

As being the contrary to his high will

Whom we resist. If then his Providence

Out of our evil seek to bring forth good

Our labour must be to pervert that end,

And out of good still to find means of evil,

Which oft times may succeed…4

All the evidence shows that this was a contribution by the literary Nobels. The others had at first frowned and objected to the introduction of poetry into such a document, but they had been determined and up till then they had played such a retiring role, almost a humiliating one, that it was finally agreed to let them have their way. Before the inclusion of this passage indeed, despite their evident good will, and their desire to collaborate, the literary Nobels had had to content themselves with a few rare interventions, and some suggestions which were often dismissed in a bad-tempered way, in order that the common aesthetic ideal might be respected, which they had forged in the course of a life of research. This ideal consisted entirely in the suppression of most attributive adjectives, on the insertion of some elegant simple past tenses where the reader was expecting a present perfect and above all on the replacement of all adverbs ending in ‘-ly’, such as ‘harmoniously’ or ‘exclusively’, by much more satisfactory expressions such as ‘in a harmonious way,’ or ‘in an exclusive fashion’. Innovative minds in this field were even so bold as to suggest replacing the dreadful ‘slowly’ with ‘at a snail’s pace’, but their colleagues had not been willing to go so far.

Much to their great fury, the literary Nobels had not always managed to win their case and it would have been inhuman to refuse them this innocent satisfaction. Besides, when the meaning of the passage from Milton had been explained to the scientists and they had thought about it, they admitted that the quotation was very relevant: Science could be considered as symbolising the spirit of Goodness, and political forces that of Satan.