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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 3, 2010
For nought
The good news, for those who woke Friday feeling a decade older, is that the decade which began Jan. 1, 2001, is not yet over. We may still have 12 months to clean up our act.Let me explain this, for it is 10 years since I last touched on this subject. No zeroes were harmed, or even employed when our era began. The first year was called Year One, from its beginning. Twelve months later began Year Two; 100 years later began Century Two. And the year before Year One A.D. was Year One B.C. No, and I repeat, no, Year Zero. It wasn't until the 9th century of our "common" (i.e. Christian) era that a numeral for "zero" was even invented -- and then only in distant India, where the scribes began using the "bindu," or dot, in a positional notation system developed by previous brilliant Indian mathematicians in tiny increments over more than a millennium. (But this is an oversimplification, bear with me.) If we want to fix our current "decade and century edging problem," we will have to correct everything in existence that has a year-date on it, and subtract one year from each of those dates. We might start by relabelling today "Jan. 2, 2009," and then move backwards. I recommend against this project, however, much though it would create a great deal of employment at a time of dubious economic recovery. It might make more sense than what we are doing under most of the other "stimulus" programs. But it would still be a terrible waste of precious human time. A Polish lady of my acquaintance inspired me to briefly consider this idea, however, by a remark she made to me in an elevator on New Year's Eve. Responding to a polite question about whether 2009 had gone well for her, she said (reader to supply stage Slavic accent): "It was a year to forget. There are other years I have forgotten. This helps to keep me young." Alas, "universal one-year subtractionism" would not make anyone younger. Time's arrow works to confute all such schemes. There are many things which, in the nature of things, we cannot do. Unfortunately, there is little in nature to prevent us from trying to do them. Study this issue, and my reader will soon see why all of the corrective measures proposed by reformers are essentially crack-headed; and therefore, why I am against all reforms without exception. (Another friend of mine, John Pepall, has written a most instructive book entitled Against Reform: look for it when it appears. While his opposition is only to reform in Canada, the principle applies everywhere.) There is a nice question whether a scheme to undo a previous reform constitutes, in itself, another reform. But this only goes to show how silly it was to get started: for every reform scheme will necessarily require reforms of the reform farther down the road. Persons of a tranquil disposition would instead simply adapt what they had inherited to the new circumstances, without making a fuss. Unfortunately, the proliferation of reforms in "late modern" or "post-modern" life has left us with a catastrophic shortage of persons of tranquil disposition. Now, the attentive reader will be inclined to ask whether the invention of the "bindu" to indicate "zero" was itself a reform, of the numerical system. To which I reply, it was not. It was merely an invention. And I am not against inventions, or at least, not against all of them. A "reform" attempts to eliminate one thing and replace it with another, which the reformers confidently assert will be better all around -- will contain bells, whistles, motorcycle outriders, hope, change, etc. But as the great English sage S.T. Coleridge and others have observed, one can never know what all the functions were of any institution one proposes to reform, let alone how these will be twisted by the new one. The law of unintended consequences, known also today as Murphy's Law ("anything that can go wrong will go wrong") goes into operation at that point -- and the reforms of the reform must begin. An "invention" provides us with a new tool for an old task. In the case of the numeral zero, it was a way to handle a poorly-served requirement of all place-notational counting systems -- whether the binary (base-2) or decimal (base-10) of the Indians and Chinese, the sexagesimal (base-60) of the Babylonians, the vigesimal (base-20) of the Mayans, etc. The "idea of zero" itself was hardly new. And, wrestling with this seemingly inconvenient idea had long been a goad to arithmetical advances. Various other place-holders had been tried, including, in almost every advanced culture, leaving a blank space. The Indian "bindu" was universally adopted, as the example of it spread, simply because it was the best available solution to the problem. Previous inferior solutions simply disappeared of their own accord. Reforms are never necessary. Remember this whenever anyone proposes one, and meanwhile, consider replacing all your New Year's resolutions with "leave well enough alone." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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