Page last updated at 14:08 GMT, Friday, 23 October 2009 15:08 UK

In praise of scepticism

Oil wells
Claims over global warming are not accepted by all


In a light-hearted essay, Clive James takes a look at Montaigne, golf-ball crisps and our attitude towards climate change sceptics.

What do I know? Montaigne asked himself, and in answering that question during the course of several volumes of great essays he touched on many subjects. But he never touched on the subject of the golf-ball potato crisp.

As far as I know, this essay I am writing now is the first ever devoted to the subject of Montaigne's relationship to the golf-ball potato crisp, and my essay starts from my certain knowledge that he never ate one. Or anyway my almost certain knowledge. There's a difference, which I shall try to bring out.

Clive James
Or listen to it here later

But more of the golf-ball potato crisp in a moment. Let's get back to Montaigne and his attitude to knowledge. He was a sceptic. He didn't want to take things just on trust. As it happened, there were lots of things he did take on trust.

If he liked the sound of an ancient legend, he would refer to it as if it must have been true. He thought astrology had something to it, and his position on the religious quarrels of his own time was that all this Lutheranism could undermine the church and lead to atheism, substance abuse and the contemporary equivalent of reality television.


Shakespeare was only one of his many readers who caught fire at that idea. Shakespeare knew Montaigne's writings inside out. They helped set the standard for the way our greatest playwright separated what he knew from what he didn't know. But not even Shakespeare had an opinion about the golf-ball potato crisp, because it had not yet arrived in the world.

What remained constant was my scepticism, which is surely, as a human attitude, more valuable than gullibility
Clive James

Or it had probably not yet arrived in the world. There may well have been, at the time, some form of sliced and roasted potato, specially prepared for the king, that you could have called a crisp.

And there was possibly some primitive form of French golf already in existence, in which a ball of some kind was hit with some kind of stick towards some kind of hole. Peter Alliss, then in his first days as a commentator, might have said something like: "Typically delicate stroke there from the Duke of Guise. Finely judged. Taking full advantage of the new oblong ball, and it does roll much more smoothly than the old square one."

But the chances against the existence of an actual golf-ball potato crisp were overwhelming, because it needed a particular conjunction of circumstances.

The golf-ball potato crisp had to wait until our own time before it could come into being. What you must have is a golf course, and, nearby to the golf course, a potato field in which potatoes suitable for making crisps are mechanically harvested.

Potato errors?

And part of the mechanism must be an enormous machine that sorts through the plucked-up potatoes and removes any stones or other roughly potato-shaped objects that are not wanted. Apparently this machine, though highly sensitive to the presence of foreign objects, is not yet sensitive enough to detect a golf ball that has flown in from the adjacent golf course and settled among the potatoes.

The mistakenly harvested golf ball goes to the crisp-making factory along with the correctly harvested potatoes and in the factory it encounters another machine which, also unable to tell a potato from a golf ball, slices the golf ball as if it were a potato.

Apparently a golf ball yields precisely 18 slices. All 18 slices of the golf ball, along with the thousands of slices of potato, go into the cooking process and emerge at the other end as something hard to distinguish, visually, from crisps.

Golf Balls
Mmmm, golf balls

Indeed statistics indicate that some people, when they chance across a golf ball crisp in a packet of potato crisps, eat it, thinking, well, that one was a particularly crunchy crisp. Why don't you try one, darling? They're the ones with the dimpled edges. Really, really chewy.

I am not certain whether I myself have never done this. Famous in my family for eating anything, I usually think something is alright if I can swallow it. But some people have complained, with the result that the more responsible crisp manufacturers are now faced with the task of further developing the initial potato-sorting machine, the one out in the field, so that it can detect a golf ball.

The machine might need visual sensors, so it can read. If the object bears the brand name Tiger Woods Ultraflite Thunderball Mk 56, plus a short paragraph explaining how it was designed to be simultaneously long off the tee and responsive on the green, the machine will toss it back onto the golf course.

Such a development is not only possible, it is likely, in line with the standard progression by which the unforeseen deleterious effects of technology, once they are detected and protested against, are cured by further technology, just as it was the cleaning up of industry, and not the abandonment of industry, that brought fish back to the Thames.

Terminal trouble

If anyone said the infestation of packets of genuine crisps by golf-ball crisps was unstoppable, I would be sceptical, just as I would have been sceptical about the existence of a golf-ball crisp until I was presented with solid evidence.

Indeed, as I have suggested, I would probably have remained sceptical even after I ate one, thinking it to be the kind I like best, with a bit of tough skin in it for extra texture. But once I heard the facts - from my son in law, who has important contacts within the potato crisp industry - I altered my opinion.

What remained constant was my scepticism, which is surely, as a human attitude, more valuable than gullibility. In fact, in everyday life, everyone is sceptical. Even if they believe that the supreme being is watching over them personally, they still want to read the fine print before they sign their house away.

Montaigne wheeled out the odd legend as fact








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The golf-ball crisp might look like a crisp, and in a moment of delusion it might taste like a crisp, and you might even swallow the whole thing, rather proud of the strength it took to chew. But if there is a weird aftertaste, it might be time to ask yourself if you have not put too much value on your own opinion. The other way of saying "What do I know?" is "What do I know?" That shade of different meaning wasn't there in Montaigne's original language, but it is in ours.

A selection of your comments appears below.

I'm not sure a general argument for scepticism is all that useful when applied to the climate change debate. Most people understand there is uncertainty involved in climate modelling, the real issue is deciding how certain we need to be before we start taking action, given the potential risks involved. A large majority of climate scientists agree global warming is occurring now, is driven by human action, and has potentially devastating consequences. Waiting for absolute certainty is probably not the smart choice.
Mark Ancliff, Bucheon, South Korea

"In fact the number of scientists who voice scepticism has lately been increasing." Any source for that??
Jay, London

Clive James demonstrates, yet again, why he is one of my favourite social and political observers.
Murph, Blackheath

Predicting next week's weather is a totally different computing problem from predicting climate change over decades. The fact that CJ argues from one to the other makes me fairly sceptical about his level of scientific understanding.
George Hale, London UK

You are right about the science not yet being conclusive, but you fail to mention benefit of caution in this situation. If man-made climate change is not as bad as we think, then the worst that environmentalists have done is cleaned up some pollution and made our fossil fuels last longer. However if man-made climate change is real, then the worst we can do is make the planet much more difficult to live on. Caution dictates that we should consider climate change to be real, until proven otherwise once and for all.
Daniel Walker, Brighton, UK

Clive James says: "I still can't see that there is a scientific consensus. There are those for, and those against. Either side might well be right, but I think that if you have a division on that scale, you can't call it a consensus." Now, to use your own example, this is also true of the Holocaust. There are those for, and those against. I think, nevertheless, that there IS a consensus that it actually happened. There is a difference in the quality of the argument expounded by each side. To treat them as equal, and give them equal air time, is not "sceptical", it is biased.
Erica, London, UK

Clive James for Strictly Come Dancing - his ability to twist, bend, and ignore the vast majority of specialists (watch out Judges!) should make for great viewing. So, not all the scientists agree about Climate Change - ahh, I know, let's wait until they all do There will be loads of time to avoid massive hardship (at the least) for millions if not billions.
Headoutofthesand, Dumfries, Scotland

The pinnacle of this piece was this: "I know next to nothing about climate science." Unfortunately, there were bottomless ravines either side. It's a pity to see such a respected voice parroting concocted talking points about climate change. From one Aussie to another: You've been sucked in, Clive.
Gaz, Sydney Australia

Clive James invokes the skepticism of Montaigne ("What do I know?") in opposition to scientific consensus regarding climate change, while, at the same time, buying in to the canard that climate modelling is invalidated by the inability to predict the weather. He should know better. He said, she said...
Steve Sturgill, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Very nice to read this article based upon common sense and lack of dogmatic belief in the currently fashionable global warming religion.
Dr Know, Glasgow

I believe that the moon is made of green cheese. A lot of scientists (I'm too busy now to list them) also believe that the moon is made of green cheese. In fact, if anything, the balance of opinion has recently been shifting towards this view. While the general thrust of this article is admirable, the specific ground chosen upon which to make this stand does not look very solid to me. The idea that humanity's responsibility for climate change is still unsettled by science, is not itself as settled as the article relies upon. Does not "settlement" occur when the contrary arguments, although perhaps more numerous than ever, are increasingly loony, isolated, and easily disproved? Surely we are at that point now? Despite the existence of ever more imaginative counter-theories about sunspots and killer bees, I cannot settle on the idea insisted upon here that this debate is not yet meaningfully settled. I'm afraid, in the light of it all, I feel compelled to take a more sceptical view.
Richard Lanun, Swansea

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