Bradman's first XI is enough to make you think . . . about Plato and Aristotle and even Kant

FRANK JOHNSON

The Tunes has revealed posthumously the late Donald Bradman's ideal cricket XI of all time. Few political scoops have inspired so much conversation, and argument.

Admittedly, mainly among males; more women seem to like cricket than any other important sport, apart from tennis. But the compiling of lists of the greatest, in various fields, seems to be an almost exclusively male activity. If a paper had a list of the ideal couturier XI, it would almost certainly be from a male hand. The male is the listmaker of the species.

An old journalistic mentor of mine, the late Colin Welch, deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, used to compile ideal cricket XIs with the late Desmond Williams, an Irish historian. Williams was one of those rare people who think great or interesting thoughts long before they are thought by the famous. Apparently, he produced the thesis of A.J.P. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War quite a few years before Taylor did. But Williams did so in a learned journal, and in any case he made no effort through his prose to excite the lay reader. He was also unfamous. Taylor had a propulsive way of writing — all staccato and aphorism — and the fame derived from his being the first television don. Williams did not mind. He seemed content to write his academic prose, and to sit from time to time with Welch in the Kings & Keys — the pub of ill repute next to the old Telegraph building in Fleet Street — compiling their cricket teams; both contentedly, and not at all obnoxiously, drunk.

Except that the teams would not be made up of cricketers, though Welch certainly knew much about the game, and perhaps Williams did too; he seemed to know about everything interesting. Instead, their teams comprised, say. German philosophers (both had a knowledge of German culture). I would go into the pub of an evening after a hard day's, or rather a soft day's, leader writing.

Welch: 'I have decided to put in Hegel at number one.'

Williams: 'Are you mad?'

Welch: 'What's wrong with that? Slogger Hegel will get us off to a good start against the new ball.'

Williams: 'My dear Colin, that's all Hegel is. A slogger. He is at least as likely to be out first ball as hit the pavilion. His theory of the dialectic was wide enough of the boundary to be taken up by Marx.' Welch: 'Be that as it may. There remains the question of the captaincy. I suggest Schopenhauer.'

Me: 'But he was a leader of the Pessimist School of German philosophy, wasn't he? Fancy having to listen to him just before you got out to field: "Right, lads. Time to go out there and lose!"' Welch: don't think you know anything about this sport.'

Bradman's list is similarly contentious. There are only two English names on it: Bedser and (only as 12th man) Hammond; another humiliation for English cricket at Australian hands in this dreadful summer. But at this point we English should stop conceding that, at this or that, we are not world class. What is the most important and hardest of Man's functions? It is to think. The selection of an international, dream thinking XI would tell a different story about the English. Yet we often concede a lack of world-class players in thinking as well. Some of us assume that the French think better than us. Some even think that Welch's and Williams's Germans were better thinkers than ours. (Neither Welch nor Williams did: both admired the intellectual achievement of the Englishspeaking peoples.)

Some might assume that Greeks would dominate some cosmic Test and County Thinking Board ideal team just as Australians dominate Bradman's. Plato and Aristotle would be there, either as captain. Perhaps the Greeks would have a third, if the selectors decided that Socrates, whose thought exists only in the writings of Plato, was separate from the latter, though some of us would vigorously contest that ruling. But even if we concede, as we should, that Aristotle and Plato are as superior to all other thinkers as Bradman was to all other batsmen, which other Greeks should be in the dream XI? There is Pythagoras. But he belongs to the higher mathematics about which most of us know nothing, though we are happy to accept that he was second to none at it. In the area of thinking in general, his main thought seems to be belief in the transmigration of souls. In Twelfth Night, Malvolio, when Clown asks him what he thinks of Pythagoras's view that a human soul might happily inhabit a bird, rightly

replies, think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.'

Aristotle and Plato left a lot of work for us to ponder. The histories of philosophy invariably describe the work of the other Greeks — all those Parmenideses, Heraclituses, Empedocleses, and the rest — as 'fragments'. They do not seem to lead very far. As Bertrand Russell's history puts it, 'Heraclitus maintained that everything changes: Parmenides retorted that nothing changes.' Russell devotes a chapter to both — brief chapters.

Contrast this with the performance of English-speaking thinkers. If the world wants a philosopher who shows how to prove things rationally, there is Francis Bacon, with his Advancement of Learning. If the world wants an apologia for might being right, there is no one to equal Hobbes. If it wants a refutation of Hobbes, there is no one to equal Locke. France's Voltaire wins his selection. But Locke had the same ideas as him in the century before. Descartes? He skilfully proved that we could not prove the existence of matter. Despite that being a rather useless thing to have done, he must be in the team because so many lovers of the game think it clever, and none of us can think of a way of refuting it except Dr Johnson, who did so —to Berkeley's version — by kicking a stone, and few of us have the intellectual self-confidence to refute it thus. Berkeley did the same sort of thing as Descartes at around the same time, and is selected because he did so more lucidly, though perhaps just as uselessly. In the century in which the Germans mounted a strong challenge among all these sceptics, Scotland's David Hume beat them. Russell said that Hume's refutation of almost everything had never been convincingly refuted. Again, there is some question as to whether Hume's refutations, or refuting Hume, was worth doing in the first place. But the Germans thought so, and Hume did it more readably, if you take it a few pages at a time.

Most of us cannot understand Kant, but would include him for the sake of a quiet life, though if we ever understand him, and decide that he is not worth it after all, he will be dropped. Rousseau makes the team, not because he is convincing, but because he is the father of sentimentality, and therefore of much of modern thinking, or rather, modern emoting.

Five English-speakers; three Frenchmen; two Greeks; one German. No Australians were selected.