The Price of Altruism (32 page)
Read The Price of Altruism Online
Authors: Oren Harman
I was going to the Grand Central Station from our home on East 11th Street (where you once visited us) and one stage of my morning trip consisted in arriving at Union Square on an Avenue B bus which approached the square along a side street and reached its terminus, where I got out to take another bus just short of Park Avenue South. Every morning I would get out of the Avenue B bus and walk a few steps to the corner, where, in turning it, the first thing I would see would be the big turning clock, right by where I was to take my next bus. It quickly became my habit to check my watch against the turning clock, and to do so the instant I turned the corner and the clock came into view. But of course I could not do this if it was the thermometer side turned toward me in that instant that I turned the corner. It quickly developed that it was far more often the thermometer than the clock…. In the course of months—scores of times—of this refutation of the laws of probability (for surely there was no synchronization possible involving the arrival of the bus, the swinging of the clock, and the time it took me to reach the corner from the bus stop) I became progressively intrigued, then puzzled, then incredulous, then almost appalled.
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Henry’s first son, Jack, had just been born, and he was feeling overwhelmingly grateful. But
whom
should he be grateful to? When he returned home one evening, flipped a penny that fell on heads nine times consecutively, called the next toss tails, and was right—he gave in and became a Roman Catholic right then and there. His old Harvard friend and George’s Chess Club mate, Lloyd Shapley, now senior mathematician at the RAND Corporation, told Henry that if he had turned the Union Square corner and experienced the same thing, he would naturally have assumed that someone was playing games with him. Alas, Henry thought secretly, Lloyd had mistaken someone for Someone.
George was ecstatic. Could he show Henry’s letter to Christians “as well as heathens I am trying to convert”? Henry’s founding of the New York C. S. Lewis Society was a source of joy as well. Not yet familiar with all the writings of Britain’s highest-profile convert (a hero to many an initiate), George had read
Mere Christianity
and
The Screwtape Letters
and borrowed
Miracles
from the library. In fact, after Henry sent him the contact information of an interested London fan, Kenneth Demain of Forest Gate, George began the business of creating a British chapter, even recruiting Lewis’s own literary executor—his brother. Until a bigger space could be secured, meetings of the newly formed C. S. Lewis Society of Great Britain and Ireland would take place in George’s living room on Little Titchfield Street.
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He was coming into his own as a Christian. He was “only 50 days old” he wrote to Henry, but he knew clearly, if he didn’t mind him saying so, God preferred that Henry concentrate on spreading His Gospel through C. S. Lewis Society activity rather than writing a book about UFOs. And if Henry had yet to succeed in securing the cash needed to move his family to France, obviously it was because God wanted them to stay in New York a little longer. “I am not sure that we can so easily penetrate God’s wishes by merely aligning them against the success or failure of our own pet projects,” Henry replied. “All we really know of His wishes for us is that we should return to Him, knowing Him for our Creator.”
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“How could you say such things?” George replied, indignant.
“You tell me that God was concerned about whether you should flip heads or tails with a penny, and you doubt that God is concerned about whether you produce a UFO book or a C.S. Lewis book!” God was concerned about
everything
, and he had a plan for
everyone
. Matthew 28:19, Luke 9:60, Acts 10:42, Timothy 4:2—all made clear that He wanted man to preach the Gospel. Clearly Henry had been chosen to do this via Lewis. What he needed to do was to admit that “Lord” means exactly what it says. In case he didn’t believe him, George wrote, he should go to a higher authority. “Henry, for God’s sake, please ask God.”
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In fact George already understood that God was constantly testing us. “You remember the story of Moses and the burning bush?” he wrote to young Anne Sheffield back in the United States:
It says there (Exodus 3), “And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.’ When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!…’” Now the important point is that the bush that burned but was not consumed was something that Moses took notice of, that “he turned aside to see.” And it was only after God saw that he turned aside to see that God spoke. So Moses, my New York friend, and I each noticed and “turned aside to see” something strange. What we took notice of was quite different because we have different interests. We were each shown the sort of phenomena that we were interested in and that we would take notice of. Henry saw gentle intellectual “games” not because God is that sort but because that is what Henry would notice. And I saw especially coincidences involving girls because that was what I would especially notice. And, also, my coincidences included many involving names and dates because I tend to notice such things.
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It was clear then that Anne had been scheduled to be in London when she was in order to be George’s “burning bush.” Not that everything is predetermined; being able “to turn aside and see,” was, after all, the key to every man and woman’s fate. And yet, George now wrote, “it is obvious to me that I was allowed practically no freedom about the events of late May and early June.” Christianity had been forced on him just as it had on Paul on the road to Damascus.
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His scientific work now assumed an altogether different purpose. Suddenly the fact that not one of the great minds since Darwin had come up with the simple covariance equation but rather he, a complete outsider, had, became illuminated:
George had been chosen
. He would abandon all thoughts of revenge against Ferguson. “You may later hear of some consequences from my conversion,” he wrote to Anne, “since I evidently was converted in order to accomplish certain work, of which part should become widely known.” Meanwhile, however, he had other duties to tend to. Annamarie and Kathleen and her baby, Dom, were scheduled to arrive on August 16 and planning to stay for a month. George was frantic. He was planning to convert them. If only he could find C. S. Lewis’s “Difficulties in Presenting the Christian Faith to Unbelievers.”
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“Selection and Covariance” was published in
Nature
on August 1, hardly noticed by anyone. Hamilton, it seemed, was the only person in the world who understood its significance. He’d been sending George drafts of his spite paper to allow him to check the math. Their meeting of minds had been so astoundingly familiar, he thought, that there was almost an “intellectual redundancy” in each other’s presence. Like him George was a loner, Hamilton would later write to Edison; almost immediately he felt toward him “a very great kinship.” Besides his obvious intellect, George’s “rejection of compromise and his dauntless humour” were admirable. He was American (though the most “un-American American” Hamilton had met), well dressed, talkative, and clearly not a nature man. They were entirely different, Bill thought, and yet strangely almost identical.
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In July, Bill invited him over the weekend to the Berkshires, where he was living now with Christine, Romilda, and Godo near his sister Janet and her family.
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Walking through the woods with dogs and children running beside them, stumbling through brambles and brackets, their shoes covered in mud, George told him about his conversion. Clearly George’s soul was not in tune with quotidian human realities. Just like his own it was someplace else, inspired. But how had it ended up with Jesus? Years beforehand, Darwin had gotten a scare when he heard that Alfred Russel Wallace, his codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, had turned to spiritualism and was now advocating the intervention of extrahuman intelligences in the evolution of man. “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child,” he’d written to him. A nonbeliever, gentle but firm, Bill now tried to grasp the scope of the affair, sending out his own feelers like Darwin before him:
I read your ESP article with great enthusiasm. It is wonderfully clear and very cleverly composed…. No doubt my enthusiasm is partly based on the fact that I am hostile to ESP. Like you I find the phenomenon just too fickle and too “magic like” to fit comfortably into my picture of the world. I hope that your recent change of view about the “supernatural” hasn’t changed the basic attitude you took in that article. Acceptance of ESP
and
religion seems to me to imply belief in a God who was omnipotent to fool and mislead people as well as being rather cruel, and that is repulsive.
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But George’s conversion was only deepening. In fact, it had been strengthened by an unexpected discovery. Marie Lynch and her family were visiting London from America, and came by Little Titchfield on August 8 to say hello. Marie was the daughter of Caroline Doherety, a devout Irish Catholic who had worked as a maid in the home of the Price’s neighbors in Scarsdale back in the 1920s and remained a close family friend, even becoming godmother to Annamarie and Kathleen. In fact Caroline had been George’s first visitor the day he was born. Religious herself, her daughter Marie was thrilled by his conversion. But what would William Edison Price have thought, she wondered out loud jokingly, in an off hand comment. After all—he was a Jew.
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George was shocked. Could this be true? He wrote frantically to Caroline back in New York and received a positive reply. Mother certainly had succeeded in keeping it a secret! Suddenly a host of memories fell into place: how Alice spoke out against Jews but always added cryptically that there were “some very fine ones” how most of his closest friends in high school were “Hebrews” his anti-Semitic comments at the Chicago Co-Op coupled with his will to live and eat among its friends. Clearly George had always had a kind of strange, unexplained attraction to Jews; now, he understood, it had all been part of a plan. After all, “St. Paul tells us that God has by no means forgotten about the Jews and we can be sure that many are intended to become Christians.” To Al Somit, the person who would be most tickled by the news, he wrote, wisecracking as usual: “I have the honour (note how I’m picking up British spelling) to inform you that I am both a Christian and a Jew…. Didn’t you always sense, subconsciously, that I was too intelligent to be a Gentile? (I suppose what threw you off from guessing the secret was that you felt I was too handsome to be a Jew. But, you see, that came from my mother’s side).”
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Annamarie, Kathleen, and Dom were arriving that Sunday. George was not planning on telling his girls the family secret yet; it would just be too confusing. Nor was he going to let them in on his plan. But to Caroline Doherety he laid out the truth:
The Lord is sending them over here at this time to give me an opportunity to try to correct the harm I did them in discouraging them from religion, and help lead them back to Christ…they won’t realize for a while what I’m up to…. I’m planning a big birthday party for Kathy where most of the guests will be very advanced Christians but who don’t particularly look it to an outsider.
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And then they arrived. His conversion, the girls thought, was something of a joke, just another facet of their father’s rather lovable quirkiness. Amused, Kathleen spent the night of her twenty-first-birthday dinner party arguing about the (non) existence of God with Kenneth Demain and Mr. and Mrs. Anand, all new recruits to the C. S. Lewis Society.
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It hadn’t exactly gone according to the program, but overall George was pleased. The Lord’s plan was coming into effect. Everything would fall into place in time.
He’d already begun trying to convert other people: the theater manager who ran
Oh! Calcutta!
in the West End, and the greengrocer down the street, Mr. Angelou. Most of all, though, he had determined to convert prominent scientists; that would be the most effective way to combat atheism and spread the Gospel.
31
He wanted to invite Hamilton to Kathy’s birthday party but ultimately decided against it; Bill’s father-in-law was a Lutheran minister, but Bill wasn’t yet ready to be in a group secretly assembled to sway George’s own family. No, Hamilton himself still needed to be won over. “My change of view about the supernatural,” George now replied to him as Wallace had to Darwin before him, “necessarily affected some of the views expressed in ‘Science and the Supernatural.’” Hamilton’s remark had been very perceptive, though the kind of “repulsive” violations of scientific law that happen in tricklike ESP experiments sounded to George “more like the work of the Devil than God.” Just as altruism required spite, it was impossible to construct Christianity without an “evil power.” For that reason, he explained,
I believe that ESP, if it occurs as Rhine and Soal have believed, involves the supernatural; and that the supernatural, if it occurs in the ways commonly understood, involves incorporeal intelligence(s). I think these are two possible alternatives to the consequences you suggest from belief both in ESP and religion.
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