Jorges Luis Borges was an Argentinian short story writer, poet, intellectual whose life
spanned the 20th century. He had an extraordinary imagination, an enviable gift for leading
the reader into impossible worlds in which chaos becomes a sort of order, and the
infinite supply of both space and time of necessity generates replicas both true and
false infinitely. Dr Who fan clubs will instantly recognise the paradox.
One such story was called The Library of Babel. The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel
is well-known. It says that God was not at all happy with the way the human race had
made a tower that reached so far up into the sky that it rivalled even his glory. So he
did what any self-respecting god would do, and razed the tower to the earth. And, just
for good measure, he scattered the human race so they would never unify and rise up to rebuild
the tower. More than that, he made each group speak a different language. Essentially that
was God's master stroke. The New Testament story of Pentecost is the story of how God
kind of reversed some of that. Some but not all, because not all consequences can be reversed.
Another stroke of genius. Well, Borges' story extrapolates the Old Testament post-tower
world into the far future, and this becomes the Library of Babel.
I was thinking about this story recently, and wondered whether or not the illusion of
valid multiple processes could be applied to a current dilemma in the Methodist Church
of New Zealand Te Haahi Weteriana O Aotearoa. Imagine a railway station.
There's a train all set to go route 2016. It's got some passengers on it. They all signed
up for this ride knowing that it would traverse some strange, difficult terrain, but it will
eventually arrive at the station called Just The Bees Knees.
Let's call them, as a group, the Hopefuls, because the end of the journey would see just
two of them declared the President and the Vice-President of the Conference, V&VP.
But just in case a decision couldn't be reached about the P&VP from among the Hopefuls, there
were included a couple of other passengers. These were the existing P&VP, and they had
signed up to a similar journey, back in the day. They knew that if none of this group
of Hopefuls made it, they would have to carry on as the P&VP.
The crew controlling this train are the Station-Master-General and a sort of track- Adviser who carries all
the information about the schedules and the rules for travel
That's Train 2016: it begins its scheduled journey. But there's a stop along the way
that few folk anticipated. The train stops at the dreaded station called the Point of
No Return. News has come, that none of the Hopefuls have been selected to become the
new P&VP. So they have to get off the train at the Point of No Return. And then train
2016 starts off to cruise along to journey's end, which might make for a very, very long
but satisfying track for existing P&VP. Now - imagine - a second train on a parallel
track. It's empty, there's no one aboard yet. It's not at the Conference terminus platforms
but elsewhere, a station just a short time away.
The same crowd that saw off 2016 are still milling around, knowing that 2016 has P&VP
aboard for the long haul. A voice over the loudspeakers announces a
new Hopefuls train will soon depart from a platform not far away.
It's unknown at present if any new Hopefuls will gather at the second platform to hop
on 2017's journey, which also promises to be quite eventful. But whether or not 2017
does get any Hopefuls on board, 2017 will have to include existing. P&VP.
But they are on 2016. Or are they? Their functions having been dispensed with
in 2017 rules and processes - they have achieved a quantum like status. They might be here.
They might be there. It is all oddly like another Borges' short
story. A library full of books about literary journeys announced and begun but where endings
have become ambiguous and the confusion of voices a paradox in itself.
The problems of an infinite universe and infinite multiverses are elegantly laid out in John
Barrow's The Infinite Book. But who knows how the problems of trains 2016 and 2017 will
end? Maybe in a train wreck? Maybe not.