tackle the most entangled human problems, those involving society, first of all, and the best way to govern. He had to be able to bear in mind, on the one hand, the shapeless and senseless reality of human society, which does nothing but generate monstrosities and disasters; and, on the other hand, a model of the perfect social organism, designed with neatly drawn lines, straight or circular or elliptical, parallelograms of forms, diagrams with abscissas and ordinates.
To construct a model – as Palomar was aware – you have to start with something; that is, you have to have principles, from which, by deduction, you achieve your own line of reasoning. These principles, also known as axioms or postulates, are not something you select; you have them already, because if you did not have them, you could not even begin thinking. So Palomar also had some, but since he was neither a mathematician nor a logician he did not bother to define them. Deduction, in any case, was one of his favorite activities, because he could devote himself to it in silence and alone, without special equipment, at any place and moment, seated in his armchair or strolling. Induction, on the contrary, was something he somewhat distrusted, perhaps because his experiences of it seemed vague and incomplete. The construction of a model, therefore, was for him a miracle of equilibrium between principles (left in shadow) and experience (elusive), but the result should be more substantial than either. In a well-made model, in fact, every detail must be conditioned by the others, so that everything holds together in absolute coherence, as in a mechanism where if one gear jams, everything jams. A model is by definition that in which nothing has to be changed, that which works perfectly; whereas reality, as we see clearly, does not work and constantly falls to pieces; so we must force it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model.
For a long time Mr Palomar made an effort to achieve such impassiveness and detachment that what counted was only the serene harmony of the lines of the pattern: all the lacerations and contortions and compressions that human reality has to undergo to conform to the model were to be considered transitory, irrelevant accidents. But if for a moment he stopped gazing at the harmonious geometrical design drawn in the heaven of ideal models, a human landscape leaped to his eye where monstrosities and disasters had not vanished at all and the lines of the design seemed distorted and twisted.
A delicate job of adjustment was then required, making gradual corrections in the model, so it would approach a possible reality, and in reality to make it approach the model. In fact, the degree of pliability in human nature is not unlimited, as he first believed; and, at the same time, even the most rigid model can show some unexpected elasticity. In other words, if the model does not succeed in transforming reality, reality must succeed in transforming the model.
Mr Palomar’s rule had gradually altered: now he needed a great variety of models, perhaps interchangeable, in a combining process, in order to find the one that would best fit a reality that, for its own part, was always made of many different realities, in time and in space.
In all this period, Palomar did not develop models himself or try to apply those already developed: he confined himself to imagine a right use of the right models to bridge the gap that he saw yawning, ever wider, between reality and principles. In other words, the way in which models could be managed and manipulated was not his responsibility nor was it in his power to intervene. People who concerned themselves with these things were usually quite different from him. They judged the models’ functionality by other criteria: as instruments of power especially, rather than according to principles or to consequences. This attitude was fairly natural, since what the models seek to model is basically always a
To construct a model – as Palomar was aware – you have to start with something; that is, you have to have principles, from which, by deduction, you achieve your own line of reasoning. These principles, also known as axioms or postulates, are not something you select; you have them already, because if you did not have them, you could not even begin thinking. So Palomar also had some, but since he was neither a mathematician nor a logician he did not bother to define them. Deduction, in any case, was one of his favorite activities, because he could devote himself to it in silence and alone, without special equipment, at any place and moment, seated in his armchair or strolling. Induction, on the contrary, was something he somewhat distrusted, perhaps because his experiences of it seemed vague and incomplete. The construction of a model, therefore, was for him a miracle of equilibrium between principles (left in shadow) and experience (elusive), but the result should be more substantial than either. In a well-made model, in fact, every detail must be conditioned by the others, so that everything holds together in absolute coherence, as in a mechanism where if one gear jams, everything jams. A model is by definition that in which nothing has to be changed, that which works perfectly; whereas reality, as we see clearly, does not work and constantly falls to pieces; so we must force it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model.
For a long time Mr Palomar made an effort to achieve such impassiveness and detachment that what counted was only the serene harmony of the lines of the pattern: all the lacerations and contortions and compressions that human reality has to undergo to conform to the model were to be considered transitory, irrelevant accidents. But if for a moment he stopped gazing at the harmonious geometrical design drawn in the heaven of ideal models, a human landscape leaped to his eye where monstrosities and disasters had not vanished at all and the lines of the design seemed distorted and twisted.
A delicate job of adjustment was then required, making gradual corrections in the model, so it would approach a possible reality, and in reality to make it approach the model. In fact, the degree of pliability in human nature is not unlimited, as he first believed; and, at the same time, even the most rigid model can show some unexpected elasticity. In other words, if the model does not succeed in transforming reality, reality must succeed in transforming the model.
Mr Palomar’s rule had gradually altered: now he needed a great variety of models, perhaps interchangeable, in a combining process, in order to find the one that would best fit a reality that, for its own part, was always made of many different realities, in time and in space.
In all this period, Palomar did not develop models himself or try to apply those already developed: he confined himself to imagine a right use of the right models to bridge the gap that he saw yawning, ever wider, between reality and principles. In other words, the way in which models could be managed and manipulated was not his responsibility nor was it in his power to intervene. People who concerned themselves with these things were usually quite different from him. They judged the models’ functionality by other criteria: as instruments of power especially, rather than according to principles or to consequences. This attitude was fairly natural, since what the models seek to model is basically always a
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