“…Logic (and therefore probability as a branch of logic) is not concerned with what men do believe, but what they ought to believe, if they are to believe correctly.” – John Venn
Back when human beings were human beings, the fear of death and the acknowledgement of one’s own mortality were amongst the main driving forces of philosophical, cultural and intellectual life. Of course, since the millennium and the evolution of human beings into celebrity-worshipping, Xbox-addicted detritus, I was worried that the preoccupation with understanding the human condition has been replaced with inane family entertainment. Instead of going down the local arts centre or library to pore over carefully constructed considerations of life, death and everything in between, 21st century man watches celebrities attempt to complete obstacle courses whilst Richard Hammond smugly delivers put-downs, lovingly crafted by his team of writers.
I was deeply concerned that people no longer seemed to worry about the big questions of death and mortality; not when they have holidays to organise, cars to buy, and elaborate telephone voting scams organised by Ant and Dec to participate in. However, seeing this majestic stained-glass window (pictured below) helped to reassure me that western civilisation is probably going to be ok. In fact, conquering our innate desire to understand ourselves and our place in the Universe is perhaps amongst the greatest of all human achievements. We should all rejoice that mankind has successfully transcended its desperate attempts to understand itself, in what can only be seen as a stunning triumph for the Enlightenment project.
Regular readers of IYTT, eager to read ironic articles about sport and popular music, will probably be entirely unfamiliar with the Enlightenment; to be honest, so am I. Basically, to sum it up, a lot of people published a lot of books on a variety of subjects. These authors challenged all conventional notions of truth, morality and spirituality, and the movement reached its apex when a man called Nietzsche killed God. Of course, he didn’t literally ascend to heaven and slay the great Deity Himself; although in the biopic that I am currently writing about Nietzsche, I have made this into a literal battle, mainly to appeal to the kids. Nietzsche killed God in a more metaphysical sense, in that the idea of God which had underpinned Western civilisation was now redundant.
Along with the death of God, mankind lost it’s golden ticked to immortality. Seriously pissed off, humanity put Nietzsche into a lunatic asylum, and began to wonder what it would do with itself now that it had to face it’s own mortality without the aid of thousands of years of religious dogma. The solution was quite simple; the Venn Diagram.
The Venn Diagram is quite a simple and logical piece of mathematical genius; and yet it is also a bizzare and absurd concept. The Venn Diagram was named after it’s inventor, John Venn. Now, I think that the very fact that someone invented the Venn Diagram is taking things a bit too far; surely a simple diagram expressing the fact that two separate concepts have an overlap in the middle is pretty much common sense?
Further to this, Venn only got around to ‘inventing’ two circles with an overlap in the middle when he was in his fifties. What had he spent the best years of his life doing if this moment of epiphany only came to him after half a century? Had John Venn spent his youthful years frustrated at his inability to express a very simple concept; that two seemingly different things actually had some sort of relation to each other. Had a young John Venn been laughed out of a sandwich shop when he tried to explain that ‘bread’, a staple food made from flour and yeast, and ‘ham’, a cut of meat from a pig, could successfully be combined together to make a ‘ham sandwich’? Did John Venn lock himself in his office, clutching a bottle of brandy and leaving a trail of wrecked marriages behind him, whilst he grappled with the perplexing problem that plagued his life? Surely the wailing of his fourth wife as she banged the solid-oak door of his study and screamed “you don’t love me John, you just love your stupid circles” would have distracted him from his work?
But no, John Venn had a steely determination to map out the inter-relationship between two seemingly unrelated things. So determined was John Venn that he had a midlife crisis and embarked upon a life of alcoholism and liaising with prostitutes. But, unlike the romantic poets of the day who lived similarly debauched lifestyles, there was a method to John Venn’s madness. He would mix together a shot of whiskey with some Ginger Ale, and be inspired at two separate liquids mixing together to create a single drink. He was well known in the brothels of Victorian London for particularly enjoying a ménage à trois, not through choice, but because he could only become aroused by the physical depiction of the concept which tormented his dreams.
Of course, that is just speculation.
But the important point about the story of the life of John Venn is this; through discovering the Venn diagram, John Venn achieved the closest that human beings can come to being immortal. By inscribing his name on the page of history, John Venn will live forever. John Venn will live in the classrooms, where four-year-old children are being taught about his magnum opus. John Venn will live in the Subway restaurants, where amazed customers will see some bread and some tuna magically transformed into a tuna sandwich before their very eyes. And John Venn will live in the blogosphere, where bored and infantile young men will spread disparaging rumours about his life.
It’s very easy to sneer condescendingly at modern culture. However, by understanding the intellectual forefathers of modern day celebrity culture, we can begin to see it in quite a different light. Sure, it’s a bit of fun, with catchy songs, energetic dance moves and recycled jokes. But celebrity culture also represents the ultimate acknowledgement of human frailty and mortality; when Les Dennis appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, and when the Saturday’s turn up unannounced at any sort of charity gig, they are not merely fame-hungry imbeciles. They are chasing the magic status of immortality, and they are embracing a proud philosophical tradition that stretches back to Nietzsche and Venn, and can be traced all the way back to the philosophers of Ancient Rome. As the Ancient Roman philosopher Maximus Decimus Meridius proudly stated:
“Brothers, what we do in life, echoes in eternity.”
That was a very goood read
[and amusing]