Common Treasury?

Politics and economics are inevitably intertwined. If people feel worse off, they will more often than not blame the government and vote (if voting is permitted and fair) to remove it. If, therefore, you change the political landscape, there is surely scope, if not desire, to change the economic one.

The execution of King Charles I in 1649 is a case in point. The monarchy, as it was conceived in, say, 1639, had been dismantled, not only literally but legally. Despite the efforts, some of which were honest, on both sides, the distrust and intransigence engendered by years of plotting and warfare led to the demolition of the political and social hierarchy as it had been known. The question was: what happens next?

Perhaps the most radical reform propositions put forward were those of the ‘Diggers’, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the ‘True Levellers’. The Levellers themselves were a more radical organisation, proposing to extend the franchise but maintain property rights. The Diggers objected that the poorest people would not benefit from this. The rich parcelled off land for themselves, while the poor had to beg or scratch a living from land rented at a high price or beg for bread for their families.

The Digger solution was to restructure landholding. The people should be restored to their land, each with sufficient land to grow their own food. The workers on the land of others for ‘small wages’ barely enough to keep themselves and their children should be able to work for themselves. All people, rich and poor alike, will act more righteously towards each other when Christ comes again and that event was expected soon.

The Diggers, of course, acted as they wrote. In 1649 twenty or so Diggers set themselves up on St George's Hill in Surrey and proceeded to build shacks and plant the land. The land was, they informed the authorities, crown land, but as the king was no more, and the crown claimed the land by right of the Norman Conquest, the had been returned to the original owners, the common people of England.

The local landowners, of course, regarded the Diggers as a threat. Eventually, so did the authorities. The Diggers were harassed, their plantings and home destroyed and many were arrested. Their threat to landowners was perceived as considerable, although their writings denounced the use of violence. Persuasion was the key: landowners would voluntarily give up their land to the poor when they saw the rightness of the cause of the poor. This is based, of course, on a particular reading of Scripture, particularly the texts relating to the Garden of Eden and also relating to the second coming of Christ.

The Church, of course, was intimately related to the landowning class, the clergy being mainly drawn from the strata of society and churches being major landowners themselves. In common with a lot of the other sects, the Diggers had no time for the established church or its clergy. Indeed, some of the early resistance to their commune was organised by a Parson. They accused the clergy of making God and Christ distant from the ordinary people, and so reliant for salvation on the clergy themselves. With the addition of heaven for obedience or Hell for the opposite, the power of the clergy over the minds of the ordinary people was, in the Digger view, established, and alienated people from God.

Winstanley, the key author for the Diggers, stressed the immanence of God, God could be known by all. Here, of course, we see the influence of the translated Bible. If all can read Scripture, then all can interpret Scripture. All can, themselves, know God without the intervention of clergy (or, indeed, anyone else). Here Digger arguments perhaps start to shade into Quaker theology: all carry the light of Christ in themselves, and none should oppress that.

While the Diggers were ejected, suppressed, and fined, the ideas they put forward did not totally expire. In 1999 some land rights activists reenacted the first Digger encampment and were similarly ejected. The Diggers are often described as England’s first communists, which is sort of true, but that description is often given by the more Marxist historians of the English Civil Wars and their aftermath, which ignores the very strong theological strands in Winstanley’s thinking.

There are resonances between the Diggers’ views and those of some contemporary theologians. This is not so true in the liberal Western tradition, where, after all, the welfare state, at least in theory, prevents people from being really, really, poor, but in other parts of the developing world, the liberation theology has inspired social action and political views aimed at overcoming oppression and promoting social justice. The reading of Scripture by the people themselves, the oppressed, can lead to a liberation of their views, including on the church and its collusion with the authorities, and then action to remedy the injustice.

Partly, then, the questions of the Diggers and the latter-day liberationists turn on the right and authority to interpret Scripture. If it is from the established authorities, the church in collusion with oppressive regimes, then ‘pie in the sky when you die’ is the religion that is promulgated and accepted by many. But the Bible is full of scenes of liberation and salvation. A key theme, I believe, in liberation theology is the Exodus, with the refrain ‘set my people free’. Similarly, the movement for cancelling debt draws its inspiration from the Biblical principle of ‘jubilee’. The Bible can be a potent political weapon.

The weapon of the Bible can cut both ways. The problem with the powerful is that they prefer to keep hold of their power and privileged. The Digger encampments were scattered and destroyed. Third World land rights activists are assaulted and murdered. We should not overstate the Diggers and their influence, of course – there was a period of at least two centuries when no one had heard of them – but the issues they raised are still live ones today.

The Multiple Universe

 Quantum mechanics is weird, counter-intuitive. The ‘true meaning’ of quantum mechanics is the subject of many late-night undergraduate discussions, preferably fuelled by a few beers, but, so far as I know, most physicists and practitioners of allied subjects such as mathematics and chemistry simply and pragmatically decide not to worry about the meaning, get on, and calculate stuff that is useful. What it means more widely than the result to apply to the case in hand is not really a problem.

Despite the pragmatic approach of most physicists, there are a few, theoretical physicists and philosophers of science, who continue to worry about what quantum mechanics means for our view of the universe. The problem which most concerns them is that quantum mechanical weirdness seems to potentially have macroscopic effects.

The principal example of these macroscopic effects is the widely known ‘Schrödinger's cat’ paradox. Suppose we have a cat in a box (no cats were harmed in the writing of this post). Also in the box is a radioactive source. These sources decay randomly, and, it being in the box, we do not know when it is going to decay, but when it does, the cat will die. From outside the box, we have no idea as to whether the cat is alive or dead. In quantum mechanics terms the wavefunction of the radioactive source and the cat is in a superposition of states:

|cat> = a|cat alive> + b|cat dead>

The odd-looking brackets are standard quantum mechanics notation denoting the quantum wave functions. The letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ are the probabilities of the cat being either alive or dead. In standard quantum mechanics, these are complex numbers; the modulus squared of the complex number giving the probability of that state.

The only way to establish the health of the cat is to open the box and look. At this point the wave function |cat> collapses, or at least the superposition collapses, and the observer sees either |cat alive> or |cat dead>. The superposition of states is not observed. The question arises of how, exactly, this works. What is going on to collapse the superposition of the wavefunction?

This leads us to at least one conceptual problem. We can view the collapse as a purely instrumental affair, and ignore the human questions of what is going on. The important thing is the answer and, to boot, that it is the right answer. While this works for quantum mechanical problems, it leaves the understanding of the universe behind. Quantum mechanics does not describe the universe as it is, but is a tool to describe the results of experiments.

Conceptually, instrumentalism means that all we are interested in is the observational output of the theory of quantum mechanics. How such results are achieved is unimportant. But quantum mechanics is very successful at predicting and explaining the unexpected, such as superconductivity. The idea that results such as this are simply the consequences of some sort of formalism unconnected with reality is uncomfortable, to say the least.

There are, of course, other options. Another approach suggests that there are hidden variables that represent the state of the system but are unknown until we choose to measure it. However, from a physics point of view, the hidden variables simply add complexity to the theory of quantum mechanics without adding any physics. Making, possibly, the theory intelligible is not sufficient pay-off to make these theories popular.

Another approach is the quantum many-worlds theory. Here, the idea is that that there are two parallel, but non-interacting worlds created at the point of a quantum fluctuation. The argument is something like this:

The cat is either alive or dead, but we do not know which. When I make an observation, I go from being ignorant of the fate of the cat to knowing it. I do not see an indefinite cat, but a cat in a given state. But then if you ask me ‘Is the cat alive or dead?’ you are in a state of ignorance until I tell you. And so on. The point here is that the wavefunction of the cat, the observer, and observers of the observer are not separable. Macroscopic forces act of the cat, me, you, and everything else. Before I look the whole universe is in two states, one with a live cat, one with a dead one.

Upon looking the wavefunction collapses into one or the other case. But the argument of the many-worlds approach is that collapse does not happen. The universe splits into two, one with a live cat and one with a dead cat. There is no collapse but simply we find ourselves in a world with one outcome or another. We might have found ourselves in a world with another outcome.

Given that quantum interactions occur many times a second in the universe, that universe is splitting into incredible numbers of universes all the time. This is a very strange idea (much exploited by science fiction writers) but it can be claimed, with some justification, that it is a natural result of the quantum mechanics theory.

I do have my doubts, however. Quantum mechanics is well known for breaking the conservation of energy over short time periods, but the energy required to create many universes, each a copy of the current one seems to be prohibitive. I have never seen an argument to suggest that this can be achieved within our understanding of physics as it is. Admittedly I have not yet looked very far, so it might exist.

My second objection is a bit more philosophical. The creation of many, many, universes which do not interact ever again seems to me to be multiplying objects to no avail. This seems to be a clear break of Occam’s razor. If we can never tell if the universe has just bifurcated, why bother having it so. This also suggests that the many-worlds interpretation is heading away from being science – we can never test the idea because, by definition, ‘our’ universe and its parallel never interact past creation.

That is not to say that such ideas are in principle untestable or pointless. I may simply be expressing my ignorance and I certainly need to read a bit more about them. But quantum mechanics and its implications are unsettling enough for most people. Multiplying universes at such speed seems to be a bit beyond the pale.