Characters. The Hard Problem. SCENE ONE

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Characters

Spike

Hilary

Amal

Leo

Julia

Ursula

Jerry

Cathy

Elaine

(on screen)

The Hard Problem

SCENE ONE

Hilary’s bedsit. Evening.

Hilary, twenty-two, and Spike, about thirty, with mugs of coffee.

Spike You’re looking at two years. The jewellery was under the floorboards. The police have nothing to connect you to the scene of the robbery.

Hilary I’m going to vomit.

Spike If you stick to the story, they can only charge you with receiving. With good behaviour, you’ll be out in a year. On the other hand –

Hilary performs exaggerated boredom, a collapse of unloosened joints.

Hilary I’m warning you, Spike. Projectile vomiting. If I hear the words ‘prisoner’s dilemma’, I’m going to puke into that bin.

Spike You’re being childish. The Krohl is a plum ticket and the psychology department has published a dozen papers on the Dilemma, so hang in. The question is, can you trust Bob?

Hilary Who’s Bob?

Spike Bob is who smashed the jeweller’s window while you grabbed the rings and watches.

Hilary Oh, Bob.

Spike Bob is who’s sticking to the story, you hope. Bob is who’s asking himself, can I trust Luanne to stick to the story?

Hilary Luanne?

Spike There’s never been a smash-and-grab jewel raider called Hilary. If Bob turns state’s evidence he’ll get off and you’ll get seven years because you stuck to the story, you muggins.

Hilary Why would Bob do that except in the Ladybird Book of Game Theory?

Spike In case you do it to him. That’s what this is about. That’s why the game is called the prisoner’s dilemma. Two rational prisoners will betray each other even though they know they would have done better to trust each other.

Hilary Rational? You have to be a person to be rational. You’ve left out everything about Bob and me except we’re each out for ourselves and we’ve got two buttons to push. Actually, Bob loves me.

Spike Hold on.

Hilary I did it. Bob had nothing to do with it, he wasn’t even there.

Spike That’s not one of the options.

Hilary I smashed the window, grabbed the jewellery and hid it under the floorboards.

Spike It’s not an option in the game.

Hilary I’m confessing anyway. I’m going to give Bob a chance to go straight.

Spike (beat) Why?

Hilary Because I’m good.

Spike Right. Promise me one thing. Don’t pull this one if it comes up in your interview. The game is not about you and Bob, it’s about a statistical tendency. It’s about survival strategies hard-wired into our brains millions of years ago. Who eats, who gets eaten, who gets to advance their genes into the next generation. Competition is the natural order. Self-interest is bedrock. Co-operation is a strategy. Altruism is an outlier unless you’re an ant or a bee. You’re not an ant or a bee, you’re competing to do a doctorate at the Krohl Institute where they’re basically seeing first-class honours degrees and you’re in line for a two-one, so don’t be a smart arse, and above all don’t use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science.

Spike tastes his coffee.

Horrible. Haven’t you even got sweetener?

Hilary Don’t you believe in good, Spike?

Spike I believe in it, it’s just not what you think it is.

Hilary What do you think it is?

Spike Behaviour. It takes millions of years to evolve, but it’s evolved behaviour, whether you’re a person or a vampire bat. Every night, vampire bats leave the cave in search of warm blood. When they get back to the cave, the ones who were lucky cough up for the ones who weren’t. Literally. They regurgitate some of the blood to feed the bats who came home hungry. Do you think these are good vampire bats?

Hilary No. I don’t. But I don’t think they’re little people with wings and sonar, either.

Spike I didn’t want to be the one to break it to you. How many times do you think a bat will refuse to share its dinner before it finds out next time it comes home hungry the other bats won’t cough up?

Hilary I don’t know.

Spike I don’t know either, but off the top of my head... four. Four times, say. That’ll teach the selfish little bastard how to behave. I don’t see that we have much to feel superior about, as a species. Altruism is always self-interest, it just needs a little working out.

Hilary Like you going miles out of your way to give me a lift home?

Spike Exactly. It’s a cost-benefit thing. I go miles out of my way because you might invite me in for coffee, and I throw in a tutorial to get into your –

Hilary Pants.

Spike Good graces, I was going to say. But you’re basically right on the biology.

Hilary I’d rather not complicate...

Spike Hey, I’m your tutor, it would be an abuse of trust without precedent in higher education.

Hilary It’s a cost-benefit thing. I’m sorry about the coffee, too. But giving something to get something isn’t altruism, anyway.

Spike That’s what I’m saying.

Hilary No, you’re not, you’re saying there’s no such thing, and I’m saying there is. I’m saying Rose of Sharon giving her milk to a starving man is different from bats.

Spike Rose of Sharon. Is she in the Bible?

Hilary No, she’s in The Grapes of Wrath, you pillock.

Spike Oh, fiction. If you want a tip, don’t cite works of fiction.

Hilary Rose of Sharon’s baby is born dead, so she gives her breast to an old man dying of hunger, a stranger, just some old man they find lying in a barn where the family are sheltering from the rainstorm. That’s how the story ends, with Rosasharn holding a starving man to her breast. Altruism means being good for its own sake.

Spike Didn’t it make her feel better, though, about her life, her baby, didn’t it give her the courage to go on, and have more babies?

Hilary (beat) Fuck you, Spike.

Spike (laughs) Darwin doesn’t do sentimental. If you want something cuddly, try business studies. Here, there’s nothing but evolutionary biology. Breastfeeding a starving man? Evo-bio. The Good Samaritan? Evo-bio. Culture, empathy, faith, hope and charity, all the flip-sides of egoism, come back to biology, because there just ain’t anywhere else to come from except three pounds of grey matter wired up in your head like a map of the London Underground with eighty-six billion stations connected thirty trillion ways, hard-wired for me first. How many times do you think I’d drive you home for a mug of what isn’t even proper coffee before I give up on the sweetener and let you go home on the bus?

Hilary Four?

Spike Yeah. At least.

Hilary At least?

Spike Yes. At least four.

He tries another mouthful of coffee, grimaces, and picks up his outdoor coat.

Hilary Oh.

She considers him. He offers a handshake and leaves. She starts getting undressed.

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