Charles
David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Prince Charles and I were born in the same year. Which is why I nurse a vague sense of identity with him. At least I remember feeling vaguely cheated as a child at hearing he had received a boy-sized, petrol-driven car which really drove for his birthday, while I had to make do with my dinky toys. It was, I think, my first appreciation of the fundamental unfairness of the social order.
We presumably shared the sufferings of boarding school life and later I felt I had my revenge for the car when he began to develop a bald spot before I did. We have not met although we were once scheduled to do so, at a newspaper award ceremony which we both failed to attend, no doubt for similar reasons.
Otherwise he has not impinged much on my thoughts, other than by way of my absorption of what might be described as the folklore of his life, as recorded (or, he might well say, parodied) in newspaper headlines – his conversations with his vegetable patch; his adoption of the prince of all con-men, Laurence van der Post, as his personal guru; his fairy-tale divorce and so on and so forth.
Today the early impulse to envy has given way on my part (I cannot vouch for his) to a rueful sense of companionship as a fellow passenger on the vessel of humanity, caught up in the storm of existence – a storm, it might be added, which shows a capricious indifference to whether one is clutching a ticket to princely quarters and the captain’s table, or to steerage.
So it is as to a conversation overheard that I have followed the fuss in Britain over the prince’s Reith Lecture on the BBC. On second thoughts “a fuss” is a misleading description, because the lecture has been dismissed with an incisiveness which has been the very opposite of fussy.
For those who missed the story, Charles used the occasion to present himself as a champion of He/She/It whom he dubbed “the Creator”. It was a piece of impudence for which the Cosmic Jester gave him a right old drubbing.
The prince sallied forth about science’s “inability or refusal to accept the existence of a guiding hand”. He demanded that scientists “rediscover a reverence for the natural world”. And he abjured them “not to change what nature is, as we do when genetic manipulation seeks to transform a process of biological evolution into something altogether different”.
For this, and a string of similar observations, Charles was met with a salvo of raspberries from eminent members of the scientific establishment and their supporters who jeered such as: “Our mumbo- jumbo Prince is at it again,” “Who’s next with a Reith Lecture, Shirley Bassey ?” and “Is this the same Prince Charles who kills animals for fun?”
Even that most eminent of zoologists, Richard Dawkins, laid into him, declaring: “Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.”
This princely battering-about-the-ears gave me considerable satisfaction. I share with rationalists an irritation with the fundamentalist line of argument – “if God had meant us to …”. The use of it by the prince confirmed to me the intellectual advantages of being brought up in the more Spartan tradition, in which dinky toys reign supreme.
The involvement of Dawkins also brought to mind my dream of unmasking the Cosmic Jester. My guide in this holy (or unholy?) quest has, of course, long been Stephen Hawking.
Since discovering black holes, the Cambridge mathematician and cosmologist has been in hot pursuit of the Unifying Theory of Everything which will reconcile the Theory of Relativity with quantum mechanics and thereby hopefully afford us insight into the mind of God (to use the Goodly Stephen’s characterisation of the lead character in our earthly and heavenly saga).
Recently, however, I stumbled across a remark dropped by Hawking which suggested he might be tiring of the chase. It was to the effect that perhaps the universal theory was discoverable not in cosmology but in another discipline such as the study of evolution.
Consulting hurriedly with my scientific advisers on how to brush up on evolution, I had been pointed in the direction of Dawkins. Reminded of this by Dawkins’ attack on the prince I clambered on my cyber-board and surfed off in search of the great man.
I thought “brushing up” on evolution would be something of a formality – assuming, as I did, that the basic issues had been settled by Clarence Darrow in the great Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, or at least by Spencer Tracy playing Darrow. Either Charles Darwin was right, in postulating evolution, or the creationists were right that God cobbled the whole thing together in its current form a few thousand years ago.
To my horror the first website I touched down on informed me that not only was the anti-Darwinian camp no longer limited to the Tennessee education authorities, but Darwinism as such (“pangenesis”) has long been discredited. The original battlefield has now been cluttered with a jostling mob of competing theories with names and titles like transmutationism, orthogenesis, neo- Lamarckism, process structuralism, saltationism, pluralism, hierarchicalism, process structuralism, genic reductionism, monism …
Dawkins might be right and rationalism “the crowning glory of the human spirit”. But, it now struck me, scientific reasoning is if anything as obscure as the mind of Hawking’s God and Charles’s Creator.
Feeling the terra firma of rationality shifting beneath me, I clutched at some philosophical basics. “The truth will make you free,” I hastily intoned. I winced, remembering it is the slogan, carved in stone, overlooking the lobby to the Virginia headquarters of the CIA. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” I tried. But the truism of youth had a schoolboy ring about it.
By now hyperventilating, I staggered through to the sitting room and slumped in front of the television, hoping there to discover a handle on reality with which I could steady my nerves. Instead I found myself watching the most terrifying TV footage I have seen in my life.
It was a wildlife programme featuring killer whales surfing up on to steep beaches, snatching up elephant-seal pups in their jaws and then sliding back into the sea to munch on them. Hurriedly I reassured myself that “kill, or be killed” was the first law of the bushveld and presumably extended to the high seas.
Then came Act II. The killer whales, their hunger pangs apparently sated, began playing what can only be described as a monstrous game of maritime tennis – tossing the still- living seal pups into the air and whacking at them with their tails, with the careless savagery of Pete Sampras killing a lob at a tie-break.
Fumbling for the phone directory, preparatory to making a hurried call to the SPCA, I was frozen by amazement at the finale of this exhibition. The whales, seeming to tire of their sport, had apparently guzzled all their living tennis balls.
All except one killer whale which carried its seal pup back to the shore and nudged it up to a safe place on the beach with the tender care of an innocent mother hurrying out of a cinema after inadvertently confronting her whimpering child with “nudity, violence, sex and strong language”.
As the seal gazed around with wide-eyed bewilderment I murmured in knowing sympathy: And I suppose you, too, want to see into the mind of God, little pup?
Clear as a bell, back into my mind came the retort: “Been there, done that.”