Sherlock knew

 

We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.

 Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock

Sherlock and Watson - from the BBC

Last night we watched an episode of Sherlock. If you haven’t seen the show, it’s a BBC version of Sherlock Holmes set in the bonkers world of TV drama and a magically deluded version of the present. Not a hansom cab to be seen.

Sherlock is played by Benedict Cumberbatch who makes a good Holmes at times, but is wasted here. Dr Watson is played a rather wooden chap I’ve seen somewhere before and Moriarty by a guy who comes across as a little boy pretending to be insane.

Last night’s plot was something to do with an all-powerful blackmailer who supposedly has the dirt on every important person in the country. Which rather confirms something we all know anyway, but that's by the by. The blackmailer was played by a neatly bearded chap with rimless spectacles and the subtle, spine-tingling menace of a meringue.

At one point, Dr Watson’s wife Mary is dressed in paramilitary black and about to shoot the blackmailing villain with her silenced pistol, but Sherlock intervenes so she shoots him instead. As you do. In a lucid moment she appears to know Holmes is the good guy but shoots him anyway.

The reason why Mary might make this superficially lamentable error was too boring and improbable to follow. She turns out to be some kind of ex-CIA assassin so my theory is this: Mary is very short-sighted and forgetful, so at the critical moment she simply loses her bearings and shoots the wrong fellow. Happens all the time.

At least it explains why the CIA might have wished to get rid of her. Judging by her performance last night, even St Obama would be in considerable danger with her around.

How Mary gains entrance to the blackmailer's almost impregnable hi-tech lair is a minor mystery too. Sherlock goes to all the trouble and incongruity of seducing the blackmailer's assistant, while Mary apparently uses the tradesman’s entrance which Sherlock overlooks in the sheer complexity of his thinking.

Sherlock’s delightfully aloof brother Mycroft appears, sneers and disappears throughout. He's rather good at sneering too – it's almost worth watching for that alone.

Mycroft Holmes - from the BBC

In my view, the BBC should go the whole hog and give Sherlock the ability to fly like Superman. Maybe a bionic eye and a bionic ear would add to the drama. The eye and ear could be designed and fitted by Dr Watson and Mary at a top secret MI5 research lab in Hinckley.

Mary would need a quick visit to Specsavers first though. Maybe the gun could be put in a safe place too.

This would bring Sherlock closer to his real mentors such as Batman and Superman. After all, right at the end we are told that boy wonder Moriarty has taken control of all electronic displays in order to broadcast his evil leer to the whole country. Petrifying stuff, but didn’t Lex Luthor try that?

A Sherlock-Spinoza universe

From Wikipedia

Well - now Christmas is over and we've finished the booze I think it’s about time we invented a new universe. I’m afraid it will vary in only a very tiny detail from the old version we are bumbling along with at the moment, but it's not the best time of year for new universes.

I’ve called it the Sherlock-Spinoza universe after two great logical thinkers Sherlock Holmes and Benedict Spinoza, only one of whom is fictional. The only newish feature of the Sherlock-Spinoza universe lies in the how we deal with matters of fact.

Philosopher Benedict Spinoza died in 1677, ten years before Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and our scientific view of the natural world began to acquire much of its current cultural shape, legitimacy and weakness.

Spinoza had a much rougher time of it than Newton. He was widely reviled as an atheist, which he strenuously denied, but nevertheless his books were banned and had to be printed and circulated clandestinely. However he soon became a forgotten name in the history of ideas and so until the nineteenth century.

I often wonder how things would have turned out if Spinoza’s ideas had formed a cultural basis for Newton’s science. If our view of the universe had been shaped by Spinoza’s thinking rather than the vaguely scientific but-only-when-it-suits culture we inherited.

We neither feel nor perceive any individual things save bodies and modes of thinking.

Benedict Spinoza

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Sherlock Holmes

In a Sherlock-Spinoza universe we have eliminated impossible forms of awareness to be left with only two - physical reality and modes of thinking. A physical and logical duality. Scientific and many other issues are resolved by physical observation intimately coupled with a logical use of language.

It is worth noting that both Sherlock and Spinoza’s logical take on things were rooted in natural language rather than symbolic logic. So in a Sherlock-Spinoza universe, the following argument would be decisive.

• Unrestrained increases in atmospheric CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming.
• Unrestrained increases in atmospheric CO2 have caused no warming for 16 years.
• Therefore the first statement is false.

However, in our universe many people with pro-AGW allegiances would attack the argument, in my view because our vaguely scientific culture is – well vague. However, the point of interest is not sterile climate debates, but our cultural use and abuse of language.

The key point is surely this. In a Sherlock-Spinoza universe, the argument above would be readily accessible to almost anyone who speaks the language, has a very basic understanding of logical structures and access to some basic climate data.

In other words, the argument is easily taught – expert opinion is not needed. Almost anyone in a Sherlock-Spinoza universe could use the argument with no appeal to authority other than the implicit authority of a logical philosophy.

Not only that, but in a Sherlock-Spinoza universe, physical reality, grammar and other linguistic structures would all be key aspects of our world view, our science, economics and politics.

English teachers would teach the intellectual framework for all matters of fact - cogently expressed and not easily assailed by charlatans. 

Fortunately for charlatans, all this has been avoided in our universe. The reason of course, is elementary my dear reader.

The lost world of Sherlock Holmes

I’m almost through the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve been reading them off and on for a while now, mostly because I took my time, preferring to insert a few stories between my other reading rather than plough through them from start to finish.

After all, the tales are rather similar in many respects. So why do I enjoy them? I think there are three reasons.

Atmosphere.

I find the atmosphere of the stories hugely appealing. Thick London fogs, clattering cobbles streets full of horse-drawn carriages, narrow alleys, fetid docks, dark and stormy nights, bleak moorland, old houses with a sinister history, proper villains with wooden legs, livid scars or evil leers.

When we returned to Mrs. Warren’s rooms, the gloom of a London winter evening had thickened into one grey curtain, a dead monotone of colour, broken only by the sharp yellow squares of the windows and the blurred haloes of the gas-lamps. As we peered from the darkened sitting-room of the lodginghouse, one more dim light glimmered high up through the obscurity.

On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It was a country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-coloured, with an occasional church tower to mark the site of some oldworld village. In every direction upon these moors there were traces of some vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as its sole record strange monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained the burned ashes of the dead, and curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife. The glamour and mystery of the place, with its sinister atmosphere of forgotten nations, appealed to the imagination of my friend, and he spent much of his time in long walks and solitary meditations upon the moor.

Companionship.

For me, the relationship between Holmes and Dr Watson adds immensely to the atmosphere of Conan Doyle’s famous tales. There is something profoundly manly about it. Manly in an old-fashioned sense where intellectual sparks mingle with a genuine warm regard. It's the manliness of a sincere handshake and a slap on the back.

When we share our thoughts and ideas, and do so honestly and with due regard for the other person’s intellect, then we create a strong and lasting bond. There is no doubt that Holmes held Watson in high regard, not so much for his analytical strengths, as his feel for the emotional side of human nature, something Holmes knew he lacked.

Maybe the home comforts of 22a Baker Street play their part here too – the blazing fire, pipe-smoking chats and Mrs Hudson always on hand to mother them.

Freedom.

Sherlock Holmes’ world has barely sailed beyond living memory, yet in some respects it is so far from our time that we barely understand it. Yes, we know it as costume drama and we are told how little boys were always being shoved up chimneys and upper middle class white men ruled the world with an iron rod. The naughty bits our narrow, prissy world so abhors – we know about those.

We know all that but we’ve forgotten the freedom. People were more free in the nineteenth century than they are today, more reliant on themselves, their family and friends. Yes they needed money to be free, but those who had it certainly were. A world where one travelled abroad without a passport and dealings with the state were few and far between.

“Bring you revolver, Watson,” couldn’t be said today - couldn’t be done. There is a whole world of lost freedoms in that single sentence, a loss we are barely able to comprehend because most of us would rather not.

It’s not just the guns and self-reliance, but the way prohibitions of vast complexity have descended on us to such a spirit-sapping extent that we hardly realise what we have lost. We have our own fogs - but not half so atmospheric.

We are not even free to tell ourselves what Holmes and Watson had but we don't. We could of course but we don't. It's not part of the narrative - what we threw away in a whole series of careless, wanton imbecilities.

I think that’s the real appeal of the stories – the nostalgia. Not the silly nostalgia of costume drama, but the nostalgia of a genuine loss we'll never repair.