On the Curious Descent of Mathematics into Slumber

I confess that when this peculiar rumour reached me — carried, as it were, upon some improbable current from a distant future — I sat for a good while in my study at Down House, quite unable to decide whether to laugh or to weep. The dispatch claims that in the year 2026, men and women deliberately seek out lengthy expositions of the calculus and advanced natural philosophy not to sharpen their minds, but to lull themselves into sleep. Mathematics, that crowning labour of human intellect, reduced to a kind of auditory sedative — a white noise, as they call it, no different from the hum of wind through rigging or the ceaseless wash of waves against a wooden hull, sounds I knew intimately during those long years of voyaging. I hesitate before drawing conclusions. I have learned, through decades of patient observation — of barnacles, of finches upon certain volcanic islands whose beaks varied so instructively from isle to isle, of tortoises whose carapaces told stories older than any human chronicle — that one must never rush to judgement. A specimen must be turned over, measured, compared. And yet I cannot help but attempt a classification of this strange phenomenon. It would seem that the minds of future generations are subjected to such relentless stimulation — a ceaseless flood of information, if I understand the dispatch correctly — that they have become, in a manner of speaking, exhausted. They are like an organ overtaxed by use, seeking relief in the very complexity that ought to demand their keenest attention. There is a paradox here worthy of careful study: the mind fleeing from noise into noise, from complexity into complexity, yet finding in the latter a curious peace. I wonder whether this reflects a kind of variation in mental habit, inherited perhaps not through blood but through the accumulated customs of a civilisation. We know that organisms adapt to their environments over vast stretches of time — what I have ventured to call deep time. But here the environment itself appears to have changed with such rapidity that the organism cannot keep pace. The mind, overwhelmed, retreats. I do not pretend to understand the mechanisms by which lectures are transmitted without a lecturer present in the room. That is a mystery I must leave to others. But the underlying principle — that a creature will seek equilibrium when pressed beyond its natural capacity — this I recognise. I have seen it in every struggling species upon every shore I have walked. I shall file this specimen carefully, and wait for further evidence before I dare conclude.