The Consolations Of Philosophy

According to Siobhan Ni, the philosopher William Godwin conceived of a “a politically and socially reformed society populated by a people who had perfected their rational minds to the point where the mental process had gained supremacy over physiological nature.” I’m not at all sure of the mental processes involved in the creation of the new Mercedes Benz ML63 AMG except that most of them ought to be prefixed with “utterly.”

The AMG version of the new ML uses the twin-turbocharged V8 with a mental 525hp. Just to put that in context, the supercharged V8s eased gently under the bonnets of Range Rovers and Range Rover Sports have but 510hp. Poor things. So, you can kick sand in the windscreen and sparkly headlights of the two and a half ton weakling Range Rovers in your muscly new ML. That’s just the mental version. The utterly mental version, the one with the optional Performance Pack, has 557hp. Five hundred and fifty seven horse power. That sort of power deserves to be written out in full. It comes from turning up the boost on the turbos, chargecooling the air entering the engine and burning not quite as much fuel as you might have thought. Clever engine management can do a lot these days and Mercedes claims fuel consumption of 23.9mpg and 276g/km of carbon dioxide.

In the politically and socially reformed society of 2011, a twin-turbo petrol V8, hot rodded Chelsea tractor isn’t the wisest of purchases. Philosophy is literally the love of wisdom. What is wise about endowing a school run chariot with as much power as a supercar ad then pretending that it’s acceptable because you’ve given it some stop-start tech? It’s not exactly utilitarian, this one. Russian writers in the Nineteenth Century came up with the idea of the superfluous man and in the Twenty-first Century Russian oligarchs can roll around cities from Petersburg to Paris in superfluous cars like this.

There is still something to admire in this daft car. Getting one of these things to accelerate from 0-62mph in less than five seconds is worth cheering because fundamentally it is a silly thing to do and we need silliness in our lives as much as wisdom. Mercedes has sold 13,000 ML AMGs worldwide. I’d be surprised if there were more than a couple of hundred in the UK, most of which go nowhere at all. They do nothing much other than depreciate and make their owners look silly. They also act as a hate magnet for environ-mentalists. That in turn means that the rest of us can get on with sensible discussions, like who would win in a fight between the Hulk and pre-menstrual Wonderwoman?

Moderation in all things, especially moderation.

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*‘Why may not man one day be immortal?’ Population, perfectibility, and the immortality question in Godwin’s political justice (The History of European Ideas 33, 2007) **
** I’ve been practicing my academic referencing.