Counterfactuals

Last Friday I received a late Christmas card, from Tasmania, the large Australian island south of the mainland. I looked at the name on the back and thought: “Oh my God, can it possibly be?” I opened it and it was. It was from a chap I had been at boarding-school with 50 years ago. Although we had been pretty good friends, we had never had any contact from the moment we sang the parting hymn and left. (It was not, I am glad to say, that favorite: “Lord dismiss us with Thy blessing,” which contains the memorable line: “Those returning, make more faithful than before.”  You are probably starting to realize that I am not into faithful, especially where sports-obsessed boarding schools are concerned.)

Of course the klutz had not bothered to put an email address, but a couple of minutes on the Net yielded his phone number and, checking that I was not calling in the middle of the night, for the next 30 minutes had the greatest chat with an old school chum. It turns out that he is now winding down his career, after 30-odd years as a surgeon in Australia, and therein lies a story. Andy (we always used surnames to address each other, his name is Anderson, and so naturally it was shortened and familiarized) will forgive me I am sure if I say that he was not in the top flight of scholars when we were at school. In fact, if I were he I would be very, very proud of the fact. When he took the school leaving qualifications — the A levels — as I remember he passed only History and Geography, and these not in a very distinguished fashion. At the age of 18 he had no immediate prospects and needed to get planning and find a way to the future.

Looking through university catalogs, at best it seemed that Andy’s fate might be admittance to some minor institution followed by a lifetime’s teaching at a school — the kind of institution so memorably characterized by Evelyn Waugh in Decline and Fall. He then discovered remarkably that the London medical schools (loosely affiliated with the University of London but with considerable autonomy) demanded only the minimum qualifications, making no specifications as to subject. He applied, much to the chagrin of our headmaster (which in itself made it all worthwhile) and lo and behold was accepted by one of the best, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital (Barts), and off he went. Clearly, they made a good choice and knew what they were about. 

I have often wondered through my life whether my reluctance to track down and reconnect with an old friend was a function of envy.  I jumped through all of the hoops, got into a good university to read mathematics, discovered on the first day that although I was a good high school mathematician, I was no university mathematician, and was thoroughly miserable. In England, you are (certainly you were back in 1959) stuck with the program in which you entered, and although I did manage to move sideways a bit to do some philosophy, that was my lot.

Now do please understand that, as with my spelling, I am not writing for sympathy. I don’t want it and don’t need it. As you will see, things are a bit more interesting than that. I am writing about the roles of planning and of contingency in our lives. My decision was made after much planning; Andy’s frankly was not. I have often wondered what might have happened if my marks had not been quite good enough to get into the university to which I applied. What if I too had been left at 18 with no immediate future and had had to look again? What if I too had breezed through the catalogs and come across the medical schools and applied and been accepted? What then would have been my fate? Would I have been happier? Would my life have been more fulfilled? 

It seemed then and for several years thereafter that the sense of self-worth from being a doctor, not to mention things like the camaraderie of medicine, would have been literally life transforming. But before I try to answer this question about happiness and fulfillment, let me say that on at least a couple of subsequent occasions almost-random events affected the course of my future life. The first was just after I finished my undergraduate degree. It was, as you might expect, not distinguished.  Andy may not have been a star in secondary education. I outdid him in tertiary education. However, my guardian angel was at work, because the head of the philosophy department saw more than was apparent, and when that summer an unknown university in Canada wrote to say that they had unexpected funds and did he know of anyone who wanted to come and do graduate work, thanks to his generosity about my abilities as opposed to my achievements, the next month I found myself sailing down the Clyde on the Empress of England bound for North America. When I say that the alternative was an interview for a job in the local tax office, the decision as you might say was a no-brainer.

Chance intervened again three years later. Just as changing to typing made little difference to my dreadful spelling abilities, so moving to North America made little difference to my dreadful student habits. I found myself kicked out of graduate school, and at the last moment hired on a course-by-course basis at a new Canadian university to teach an unexpected flood of intro philosophy students. Naturally, as soon as I had responsibility, I started to get up in the morning and to wash, I quit smoking, and in short I turned into my parents — conventional, concerned, and desperately Protestant about obligations and duties and the virtues of hard work. 

The next summer, I was offered more permanent employment, and (having now successfully completed a doctoral program) stayed at that institution — the University of Guelph in Canada — for 35 years, leaving only in 2000 when I was facing the prospect of compulsory retirement. However, the first fall of my being hired — when I was very, very temporary — I had taken the Canadian government exams for high flyers in the civil service. I was warned that because I was not a citizen the chances of acceptance were low (I was part of the Commonwealth) but the next summer, just after Guelph offered more permanent employment, I did indeed get a job offer from Ottawa (the capital). I could have become a trainee Sir Humphrey (of “Yes Minister” fame).

Three roads not taken. Three counterfactuals. A doctor.  A tax inspector. A high-level civil servant.  Would it really have made all that difference to the person that I am standing on the verge of 70? Let me say that my real life turned out very well indeed. Not only did I have a job I loved, but in my 30s I discovered that I could write with ease, that I could lecture and debate in public, and that there were issues that excited me and where I felt that I could make a real contribution. Most particularly the whole business of Creationism raised its ugly head and I have spent many years fighting what I take to be a real threat to rationality and to the teaching of children in schools. I was able to do worthwhile things and I have had a lot of fun doing them.

But what if I had gone down one of the other roads? My suspicion is that, strange as it might seem, had I become a doctor I would be doing much the same as I do now. I simply don’t have the patience or the care to deal with people, day in and day out. I just don’t. But by the 1970s there were issues that would have engaged me, about medical ethics for instance, and I could well imagine that I would have wanted to move into something like that, become an academic and started writing like mad.

Had I become a tax inspector my life is less certain. Lizzie has a brother-in-law who works in a relatively minor job for the government in Ottawa. He doesn’t mind it, but basically it means nothing to him. His real joy is vacation time, when he can go out and kill large Canadian mammals in the most primitive way possible, with a bow and arrow or some like adolescent daftness. He has now put in his 30 years, and is going to retire very soon. Would I have been like that? I cannot imagine a lifetime’s obsession with tax collecting, worthy occupation though it is. But would I have become a writer on the side? I dare not say that I would have. Judging by some of my other contemporaries, I might well have become keen on caravanning or some other god-awful hobby.

Had I become a high flyer in Ottawa, I imagine my life could have been very happy and worthwhile. I believe in government — did I mention my feelings about health care? — and I think Canada is a country worth working for. No doubt I would have done some writing as part of the job. Perhaps I would have moved sideways into academia or a think tank. But I don’t think I would have become a writer in quite the way that I have become.

As I draw to a close, let me say that this has not just been a trip down memory lane, an orgy of talking about myself. It is more a meditation on the roles of planning and contingency in one’s life.  A huge amount of what I have done and become has been the result of very hard work, and thinking things through. But I am very conscious of how much is almost blind chance. What if I had not done as well as I did in my A levels? What if my philosophy professor had had trouble finding me that summer? What if Ottawa had made the job offer in April not May? What is really interesting is that my own life is a small reflection of issues that for the past 30 years have been much engaging evolutionary biologists — chance versus contingency. I will pick up on this in my next post. Does my ontogeny truly recapitulate life’s phylogeny?