Quantum Night

21

“Good morning, class. So, awhile ago I asked how many of you drive to the university each day. Remember? We were talking about philosopher’s zombies? Well, let me ask the opposite question: now that the weather’s good again, how many of you walk here each day?”

A rather small number of hands went up.

“Huh,” I said. “Well, I often do. In fact, I did so today. I live about two kilometers north of here right on the Red River, and I’ll tell you, it’s way more pleasant to walk along the bank than it is to fight traffic along Pembina Highway—except for today, that is. Just as I was coming out from under the Bishop Grandin Bridge, I saw a little girl facedown in the water.”

A couple of students gasped.

I nodded and went on. “She was right by the shore, probably unconscious, and the river wasn’t moving fast today, so I could easily wade in and grab her.” I paused. “And, you know, I was going to, but, well, damn it, look at these shoes.” I stepped out from behind the lectern. “Nicest ones I own. They’re not leather—you guys know me better than that! But they’d still have gotten wrecked, don’t you think? And they’d cost two hundred dollars. So, I walked on by. You all would have done the same thing, right, if you were—wait for it—in my shoes?”

I’d seen the transition sweep across the faces as one by one the students realized it was a hypothetical.

“We do know you,” said Boris. “And if that had really happened, you would have gone in.”

I smiled. “True. But why?”

“Because the life of a little girl is way more valuable than any pair of shoes. In fact, there’s no material object you shouldn’t sacrifice to save a human life.”

“Exactly,” I said, and I looked out at the students. “So, again, suppose it was any of you—Felicity, there, I’m no judge, but those pumps look like they cost a couple of hundred.”

“Each,” said Felicity, smiling.

“Well? Would you wade in to get the girl?”

“I’d take them off first.”

“What if—”

And she had them off already.

“Okay,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “But what if you were wearing shoes like mine—”

“Puh-leeze!” said Felicity, rolling her eyes. Laughter rippled across the room.

“—and had to unlace them; there’d be no time for that. You’d have to act fast. Would you?”

“Absolutely,” said Felicity.

“Good. I knew you had it in you.” I looked around the room. “Anyone? Is there anyone here who wouldn’t sacrifice a pair of really nice shoes to save a drowning girl?”

No one spoke up; several people shook their heads.

“Good, good. Because, you know, that story I just told you? It is true. Except that the little girl wasn’t drowning in the Red River right by my home. She was starving to death in Africa. And the $200 I spent on my shoes could have just as easily saved her life there if sent to a reputable aid agency. So, if I were to pass a hat now, how many of you would feel obligated to put in $200, or an IOU for that amount, if you knew it would go directly to saving a life in Africa? Not how many of you would feel it was a decent thing to do, but how many of you would feel you had to do it?”

No one responded.

“Okay,” I said. “Any Trekkies here besides me?”

A few hands went up, and, after they saw some of their classmates admitting it, a few more went up—and one of the girls with a lifted hand had her fingers splayed in the Vulcan salute. “Okay, Melody,” I said. “How’s your Star Trek trivia?”

“Tiberius,” she said at once.

“Ha. True. But let’s play Trekkie Jeopardy! for a moment. You remember J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek from 2009—the first film in the reboot?”

“Sure.”

“Remember Spock as a boy being quizzed by computers on Vulcan, right after the Vulcan bullies had been picking on him?”

“Sure.”

“You can’t see the questions he’s being asked, but the scene ends with him giving this confident answer: ‘When an action is morally praiseworthy but not morally obligatory.’ Remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so, Alex, for $1,000 in the category of ‘Philosophical Terms,’ what question was Spock asked?”

“Umm…” said Melody. “Ah, ur…”

“No, no. Not in Vulcan,” I said. “In English.”

She laughed, and so did several others. “I haven’t a clue.”

“Anybody?” I said, looking around. “What question must the computer have asked Spock?”

Pascal, in the fourth row, rose to the wager. “What is supererogation?”

“Exactly! And no, that’s not watering your plants too much. Supererogation is when you do something good that you didn’t have to do. So, class, why do you say that it’s a moral imperative that you save the little girl who is drowning right in front of you, even at a cost of $200, but at best that it’s merely supererogatory—a mitzvah, in other words—if you give the money to save a child in a foreign land?”

Victoria Chen’s boyfriend was named Ross. He taught high-school English at City Park Collegiate, just across the South Saskatchewan River from the synchrotron. On Mondays, he had a spare period after lunch, and, so today, as always, he drove over and picked Vic up, and the two of them went to Alexander’s Restaurant. Vic, as usual, was wearing all black, and Ross was displaying his preference for blue.

After they ordered—the Thai noodle bowl for her, a jalapeño guacamole chicken burger for him—Ross said, “One of my students handed in an essay on Friday with emojis in it.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine?”

Vic looked at him. He’d told her about this just yesterday. Ross went on: “I hate that. I’m tempted to give her an F just because.”

She tilted her head to one side. Of course, people did this all the time: they had an experience and shared it with everyone they ran into; they didn’t really keep track of who they’d already told. Vic liked to think she was the exception, but, then again, that was probably similar to the statistic she’d gone around quoting—quite possibly, she supposed, to the same person more than once—that eighty percent of people think they’re more attractive than average, which couldn’t actually be the case.

Ross was still on his hobbyhorse. “I mean, seriously? Emojis? And they weren’t even appropriate emojis! I’ve taught Hamlet every year for ten years now, and, trust me, there’s no point you can make about that play that’s enhanced by a picture of a panda bear winking and sticking out its tongue.”

She thought about saying, “I know, baby,” or even, “You told me that yesterday,” but he was getting near the end of the rant, and so she decided to just ride it out and enjoy her noodles.

I’d never done a long-distance romance before, but Skype and texting—and, my goodness, sexting—really helped. I don’t know how people managed such relationships in years gone by, but, now that I was back in Winnipeg, although I desperately missed holding Kayla, at least the keeping-in-touch issue didn’t seem difficult.

Nor, really, should have been the getting-together part. Both Air Canada and WestJet offered multiple direct flights each day between Winnipeg and Saskatoon, and the flight only took ninety minutes. It wasn’t particularly expensive; you could usually get a roundtrip ticket for under $250, all-in.

My heart went out to my contemporaries who had only landed sessional-teaching gigs and were living on little more than they’d had as grad students, but I was a tenured professor; I grossed $145,000 per year, so flying to Saskatoon once or twice a month shouldn’t have put a dent in my lifestyle.

Except, damn it all, practice what you teach. As Peter Singer so rightly said in his 2009 book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty, it would take 250 billion dollars a year to eliminate poverty. If the richest billion people in the world (a group that I, and just about every middle-class or better North American, fell into) were to each give five dollars a week, poverty could be wiped out.

But they don’t. Singer, who devised the thought experiment about the drowning girl that I riff on in my classes, suggested that everyone should pledge to give a portion of their net income to charities—and then, to overcome the easy out of saying charitable donations are wasted on overhead and fat-cat executives, he set up a website, TheLifeYouCanSave.org, listing cost-effective charities, such as Oxfam, for which almost all the money given really does go to those who need it.

But that was the easy part of his site. The hard part, at least for people like me who value their word, is the little clickie labeled “Take the Pledge.” You plug in your gross income and the country you live in, and it calculates what would be a reasonable amount for you to commit to give to charities. In my case, it suggested I could afford to donate five percent, or $7,250, each year to organizations helping people in extreme poverty.

But I teach ethics; I know all about diffusion of responsibility. I know that most people are going to give hardly anything at all. And so, if the average Joe should be giving five percent, I felt I could do at least double that—and I did, for the first three years. And then I realized I wasn’t missing the money, and I upped my donation to fifteen percent, and, even when Virgil came along, and I started paying out twenty-five grand a year in child support, I didn’t cut back.

And, seriously, as much as I loved Kayla—and I think I really and truly was falling head-over-heels in love with her—could I cut back on my donations just to facilitate our relationship?

No, of course not. And so although those $250 round trips were a bargain, I could only afford them now and again. This time, I was driving on my own to Saskatoon.

I sometimes quip that I have sympathy for moon-landing deniers. After all, no one had walked on the moon since 1972; how could we possibly have done that then but couldn’t do it now, almost half a century later? But after making this drive to Saskatoon a couple of times, I have to say I was also beginning to understand members of the Flat Earth Society. Every Canadian knew the joke, immortalized in the opening credits of the sitcom Corner Gas, about Saskatchewan being the place where you could watch your dog run away… for three days.

It was election night—I’d voted before leaving Winnipeg—but instead of listening to the CBC, which would have hours of pointless speculation before the polls closed, I played an audiobook: Dan Falk talking about SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Falk was speculating that one likely reason we’ve never detected alien signals is that shortly after developing radio, any civilization almost certainly also develops the ability to destroy itself. We’d only been a broadcasting species for 125 years now; who was to say we ourselves would be around much longer?

On that somber note, I did finally switch to the radio, just in time to hear a man speaking, a hint of astonishment in his crisp tones: “The CBC is now prepared to call it. It’s by a slim margin, but we will have a majority NDP government; Naheed Nenshi will be Canada’s twenty-fourth prime minister. Our analyst Hayden Trenholm is with me here in Toronto. Hayden, your thoughts?”

“What a close race! It’s not quite a ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ moment, but I do think it’ll take a lot of people by surprise. Still, Nenshi is no stranger to election-night upsets. Six weeks before being elected mayor of Calgary in 2010, polls had his support at just eight percent. He won over his doubters once in office: he was re-elected in 2013 with a staggering seventy-four percent of the vote. He didn’t do that well tonight, but it’s still a historic victory.”

I turned off the radio, smiling, and not just because my party had won; it was also cool to see a hometown Calgary boy make good.

The black sky was a hemispherical bowl stretching from horizon to horizon, and I can’t resist a clear night. I pulled over, wandered out into a field, and looked up. I still didn’t remember anything from that half-year science-fiction course, but the next term I’d taken a poetry class, and a line of Archibald Lampman’s floated into my consciousness from back then: The wide awe and wonder of the night. The sky was cloudless, there was no moon, and the stars shone down in all their profusion. I looked at them, as I always did, in amazement, but Dan Falk had left me thinking, and I found myself feeling profoundly sad as I contemplated the deafening silence, wondering indeed how long our own civilization had left.