44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith [120]
The bulk of Big Lou’s library consisted of the volumes which she had acquired when she had purchased the second-hand bookstore out of which she had made her coffee bar. There were books, however, which she bought herself from the dealers in whose shops she had taken to browsing on Saturday afternoons, when the coffee bar was closed. There were several shops in the West Port which she now frequented, although the increasing number of rowdy and vulgar bars in the vicinity was beginning to distress her. Lothian Road, not far away, was now an open sewer as far as Big Lou was concerned – innocent enough during the day, but at night the haunt of bands of drunken young men and girls in impossibly short skirts and absurd high heels. And at the entrance to each of these bars stood threatening men with thick necks, shaved heads, and radio mikes clipped onto their ears. There had been nothing like that in Arbroath, and very little of it in Aberdeen. Mind you, she thought, Aberdeen is too cold to hang about on street corners. And those girls with their very short skirts would freeze quickly enough if they tried to wear them on Union Street in the winter. Was climate the reason why Scotland had always been so respectable?
Big Lou was beginning to have doubts about Proust. She was proud of her edition, which was the Scott-Moncrieff translation, published in a pleasing format in the early Fifties (Big Lou liked books which felt good). She was now on volume six, and was reading about the Duchesse de Guermantes and her decision to travel to the Norwegian fjords at the height of the social season. Proust said that this had an effect on people which was similar Big Lou Receives a Phone Call
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to the discovery, after reading Kant, that above the world of necessity there was a world of freedom. Was this not a slight exaggeration? Big Lou asked herself. But with whatever levity Proust invoked images of determinism, Big Lou herself took the subject seriously enough. She had several books on the subject in her collection, and after reading them – not with a great deal of enjoyment – she had come out in favour of free will. She was particularly persuaded by the argument that even if we cannot be shown to be free, we have to behave as if freedom of the will existed, because otherwise social life would be impossible. And that meant, in her view, that determinism was false, because it did not fit the facts of human life.
There was no good in having a theory that bore no relation to reality as it was understood and acted upon by people. That is what she thought about determinism. But then she asked herself about God, and became confused. If it were the case that people thought that they needed a concept of God in order to get by in life, then would that mean that only those theories of reality which had a place for God would be defensible? This, she thought, was doubtful. Unless, of course, one made a sharp distinction between social theories – which need not be provable, but which must at least work for the purposes we require of them – and other theories, which can be true and correct but which we do not need to be able to apply to day-to-day life. That was it, she thought.
The problem was that some people preached social philosophies that paid no attention to reality. Some French philosophers had a tendency to do this, Big Lou had noted: they did not care in the slightest if their theories could have disastrous consequences
– because they considered themselves to be above such consequences. It was perfectly possible to portray scientific knowledge as socially determined – and therefore not true in any real sense
– when one was safe on the ground in Paris; but would you ask the same question in a jet aircraft at thirty-five thousand feet, when that same knowledge underpinned the very engineering that was keeping one up in the air? By the same token, French philosophers had been able to admire Mao and his