The theory that six degrees of separation lie between any two people in the world is, courtesy of a new study from Cornell and Columbia universities, making a fresh outing. The principle involved is simply that at most six formally or informally interlinking networks connect everybody on earth.
So how difficult would it be for an Aran islander to interlink with a Tibetan monk? Well, the Aran islander will certainly know his TD and therefore be within the same network: the inescapable presence of your local politician is one of the more dubious boons of belonging to the Irish race. The TD might consider himself within the same network as the Taoiseach. The Taoiseach will have met the British prime minister, in a different network. Therefore, leap one. The British prime minister will have met the Indian prime minister. Leap two. The Indian prime minister will have met the Dalai Lama. Leap three. The Dalai Lama's emissary will have met the monk's prior. Leap four, and still two leaps to go.
But how far are any of us from characters in history? How far back do our own links go with the great and eminent of the past? Michael Collins, for example, must be at most only two networks away for most of us. For example, my Uncle Tom was Fianna Fail Attorney General under Dev. No journey at all. On the other side, how far removed am I from Queen Victoria? An easy journey again. My grandmother was presented to, I think, Princess Alexandra during a royal visit to Ireland about a century ago.
Blue blood
Now not merely does that link me with Queen Victoria, and the royal families of all of Europe, but at one remove, if they are not already so linked, it connects anybody I know with that continent-wide constellation of long-nosed incestuous haemophiliacs - Romanovs, Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns. And more than that, it connects me with the Duke of Wellington, at very few removes indeed. If you allow, perhaps generously, my grandmother and me to be one network, Princess Alexandra and Queen Victoria to be two, I am with Wellington, and in the middle of the Napoleonic wars in three; and I am only beginning.
Wellington shared his network with the ageing King George III, who was born in 1738, and that, in four steps, lands us in the middle of the Hanoverians, who began their Britannic tenure in 1714, after the death of Queen Anne. The fifth step takes us back to Anne's father, James II, born in 1633, son of Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV of France. There we can choose to step backwards into two different networks: the network in London, which connects me in my six steps to Elizabeth and Shakespeare and the Great O'Neill, to the battle of Kinsale and all else besides, or to Henri of Navarre, the Calvinist who became a Catholic and the first Bourbon king.
Back to the Boyne
Different lateral routes could have taken me in different directions, say to the guillotine or the Boyne. Such journeys are available to us all. Networks galore lie at our backward-reaching fingertips: Larkin and Connolly, Rossa and Parnell, are all no more than a couple of networks away. Anybody who falls within your network can make the vital synaptic connection which links you with some distantly historical cellular tissue.
Three - or so - US ambassadors have had the misfortune of making my acquaintance, but to their great relief, only briefly. They nonetheless thereby linked me directly with the American political establishment and before you can say, it must be summer, just look at that swallow, we have Monica Lewinsky. In a couple more bounds, we reach Abraham Lincoln, then George Washington and Jefferson. Equally, another route out of Washington and backwards in time will take me east to Stalin and Lenin, although I am already connected to their adversaries, the Romanovs, from another direction. We meet together at Yekaterinburg.
In fact, avoidance of such contacts is almost impossible. I once spent an afternoon with Leonard Cheshire VC, and in a bound, not merely was I in contact with the Nagasaki bombing, the Dambusters, a brace of Popes, Winston Churchill and Bomber Harris, but so too was everybody I know. For this business of interlinking networks is infinitely more contagious than HIV. Contact, once made, cannot be unmade; the most militant republican or the purest loyalist must inevitably be contaminated by a handshake.
Close to Divine
How many networks am I away from the truly fashionable, the comprehensively glamorous? Surprisingly few. I have friends who know Liz Hurley, which not merely opens up much of London and Hollywood life to me in a bound, but in a single further gulp, puts me in contact with Divine Brown and the delightful world she belongs to. But of course that world is my world, your world. The term, "the six degrees of separation" is incorrect. It should in reality be the six degrees of nearness.
For we are inescapably bound together in reticular consciousness and mortal consequence. My Cheshire connection links me to Churchill, and thus Chamberlain, then to Hitler, in just two bounds. My history teacher at school was Bert Orton, who had anglicised his name from Bert Oppenheimer in order to fight Hitler. He and his mother were Austrian Jews. They were the sole survivors from their family of the Final Solution. One bound.