Author Archives: Martin van Creveld

Apropos of Nothing

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Allen, Apropos of Nothing, Kindle ed., 2020.

To seize the bull by its horns, I suppose many people bought the book because they hoped for salacious details about the sexual abuse case in which the author was involved. Doing so, of course, is their good right. I myself, though, in spite of having gone through a divorce that, though not quite as terrible, was similar in many ways, found the chapters that deal with this affair the least interesting of all. Who cares about the accusations, which almost thirty years ago were proven utterly baseless, of a woman driven out of her mind by the green eyed monster? Whatever others may say, my own answer is, not I. Much less about all the various lawyers, judges, police officers, psychologists, etc. the case involved. Suffice it to say that Mr. Allen does not retaliate against the woman in question—she does not even deserve to have her name mentioned here—by criticizing her work as an actress. On the contrary, on page after page he has nothing but praise for it. For not allowing a private vendetta to cloud his judgment, hats off.

For me guilt by accusation, as it has been called, is not guilt at all. That said, I want to tell you, my readers, what I am sure you have deducted long ago: namely, that my own preferred way of keeping myself informed/and or amused is neither the movies nor TV. Having been a bookworm all my life, I cannot offer a well-informed critique of what Mr. Allen has to say about his numerous movies and, especially, the more technical problems they involve. Instead, what Apropos of Nothing did do was to teach me a lot about how movies are made. Things like writing the script, looking for a producer, casting, hiring actors, musicians, and experts of every sort, designing and erecting the set, directing, filming, editing, etc. It is enough to make anyone’s head spin. At any rate my head.

By comparison, I thought, writing a book is simple. All the greater my respect for Mr. Allen’s extraordinary productivity during a career that got under way when he was in his late teens and has continued with hardly any interruption for almost seven decades. His book has not only enabled me to gain a better insight into the nature of creativity but confirmed what I had long suspected. Namely, that it is roughly the same across many artistic–and, presumably, scientific—fields; including, besides history, literature, music, the plastic arts, movies, and what not.
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Like Mr. Allen, my one goal in my working life has always been to produce the best book I could about the topic in which I was interested. Like Mr. Allen, I picked those topics either because others mentioned them to me or more or less out of thin air following a sudden inspiration from God knows where. Like Mr. Allen, I have never allowed anyone to interfere with any aspect of my work I considered important. Like Mr. Allen, I know what it is like to get stuck—in my case, for months and even more—only to be set free by a sudden idea, or event, or, on some occasions, a meeting with a friend or with a woman I found fascinating. Like Mr. Allen, looking backward I feel I never succeeded in writing the real masterpiece I had aimed at. Like Mr. Allen, I hardly ever look at my old books. I must confess I do take an occasional look at the reviews and have even put together a list of the most positive passages in case anyone asks for references. To repeat, all this is part and parcel of being, well, I’ll say it, creative. And, as such, very much worth thinking about.

On the negative side, Mr. Allen is an extremely prolific writer, actor, and director who has worked with a great many people and met with even more. That is why several of his chapters comprise little but endless lists of actors, directors, producers, and other people in- and outside the movie industry of whom I had never heard and whose names I could not remember for five seconds after he mentioned them. Their number must be in the hundreds. As a result, in many cases I could not really appreciate either the persons in question or Mr. Allen’s efforts, such as they were, to describe them. As he himself says, no once but twice, he is blabbering.

Finally, not being a great movie fan I did not intend to buy the book. What made me do so nevertheless was the news that Hachette had broken its contract with the author and refused to publish it.  I myself, owing to my views on women and feminism, have been the target of similar treatment. Some publishers have rejected my work simply for that reason; others refused even to consider it in the first place. Such being the case, let me take this opportunity to thank Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Reaktion, and Castalia House for not allowing themselves to be intimidated. Also, Amazon.com for enabling me to publish two extremely politically incorrect books (The Privileged Sex and Pussycats) no English-language publisher wanted. Incidentally, both of these books were taken up by respectable German-language publishers. The first even appeared on the front cover of leading magazines in Germany and Brazil. As Mr. Allen says, you never know what is going to be successful, where, and why. Cast your bread upon the waters, hoping you will indeed find it after many days.

Thank you, Mr. Allen, for teaching me a lot about the world of movie-making, and any number of other things. Including, not least, the nature of creativity and the fact that I am not the only one to find grappling with it difficult. And for doing so in a way that, on the whole and in spite of my ignorance, kept me not merely interested but amused as well.

What is Life?

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The question how dead matter could have given rise to conscious, sentient living beings such as ourselves has been preoccupying people for millennia past. So much so, indeed, that our inability to answer it remains one of the great constants of our history. Just think of the book of Genesis which has God first making man and then breathing into his nostrils “the breath of life.” Thereby turning him into “a living soul” out of whose rib He later fashioned a woman, too; meaning, perhaps, that the process by which Adam was created “out of the dust of the ground” was one of a kind which not even He could replicate

However, many of us moderns do not believe in God and may not even be familiar with the Bible. Let alone know what the Buddha, Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, and many other philosophers and/or psychologists, biologists and computer engineers had to say about the matter and do so still. So I thought I would try to put together a short list of things which, by their presence or absence, will indicate whether X, or Y, or Z, is or isn’t alive. If not for the benefit others, at any rate for my own.

*

  1. Cellular structure. Starting with germs—but not including viruses, which for that very reason are not always included under the rubric, life—all living matter is made up of cells. Cells fall into two basic types, prokaryotic and eukaryotic. Prokaryotic cells do not have a nucleus; eukaryotic ones do. Living organisms are built either of single cells, as bacteria and amoeba are, or of multiple ones.
  2. Self-repair. A cardinal quality only life has is its ability to repair itself. A locomotive, or an automobile, or a computer for that matter, cannot do this. Once something goes wrong, it will either stay wrong or get worse. Not so living organisms. A wound, provided it is not too serious, will start healing itself almost as soon as it is inflicted. Provided there is no infection, a hard object embedded in our flesh will be surrounded by scar tissue and can remain in place for many years without giving rise to any further trouble. In quite some animals even the loss of a tail, or tentacle, or limb, or teeth, will be compensated for by new growth. These are things no inanimate object, natural or artificial, can do. Or, presumably, will ever be able to do.
  3. Metabolism (from the Greek: beyond change); meaning, the sum total of life-sustaining chemical reactionsin organisms. It is generally divided into three parts. First, the conversion of food/fuel into energyon which all physiological processes run. Second, the conversion of food/fuel into building blocks for various kinds of tissue of which the body consists. And third, the elimination of wastes. These enzyme-catalyzed reactions allow organisms to grow, reproduce, maintain their structures, and respond to their environments. All living organisms necessarily have such chemical reactions; non-living ones do not.
  4. Growth. Given the opportunity, i.e food and a favorable environment, all living creatures grow. A chicken grows into a chick, a human baby into a man or woman many times its size and weight. This is not simply a matter of material being added from outside, as when two or more droplets, bubbles or particles merge during contact to form a single daughter droplet, bubble or particle. Nor of crystallization, as when a solution of certain materials, such as Epsom salt in boiling water, is allowed to cool, causing the salt atoms to run into each other and join together in a crystal. Rather, of a creature growing according to its own internal laws as embedded in its DNA.

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  5. Reproduction. Starting with germs and ending with trees and whales, what all living creatures have in common is their ability to reproduce, i.e make more or less faithful copies of themselves. Not so inanimate objects, not one of which has ever performed that feat. A spoon does not divide to form two spoons, a telephone does not become pregnant and give birth to another telephone. True, a three-dimensional printer can be used to produce as many copies as desired of many objects, parts of itself specifically included. Two printers can even made to work in tandem, producing parts that can then be used to build a third not identical to either of them. What they cannot do is assemble those parts until they form a third printer; that must be done by hand. As long as this is the case the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, where a broom is first broken in two and then starts reproducing itself and refuses to stop, will remain just that—a story.
  6. Evolution. Reproduction means creating more organisms of the same kind. Not so evolution which, over time, results in the emergence of organisms that, on occasion, can be so different from the original as to be barely recognizable. As, for example, when terrestrial animals evolved out of maritime ones, birds, out of dinosaurs, and humans, out of some ape-like ancestor.
    Changes brought about by evolution are hereditary, which means that they are not simply the product of the natural environment and the organism’s attempt to adapt to it. As far as present-day scientific knowledge goes, what drives evolution is random changes (mutations). Such changes are brought about by errors in a creature’s DNA. The errors themselves can be caused by a. External factors, i.e certain chemicals or high energy particles hitting the DNA molecule in question; b. DNA’s failure to properly mate with its opposite number during conception; and c. DNA being an extremely complicated molecule, it may fail to replicate (copy) itself properly during cell division. Provided they are beneficial rather than harmful, in which case the creature that carries them will be selected out, a long sequence of such changes, known as genetic drift, can result in a new species emerging, at feat no non-living object has ever been able to emulate. That even applies to the so-called evolvabots built by robot-engineer John Long. Evolvabots do mimic some aspects of living systems such as sensing gradients, foraging, maneuvering, evading predators, and attacking prey. However, not one of them has ever changed themselves into something it was not
  7. Consciousness. Just what consciousness is no one knows. Starting with Democritus around 450 BCE, many philosophers and scientists have gone so far as to insist that it is an illusion and that, “in reality,” there is no such thing; all there is are patterns of electric (and chemical, a point that those who claim that brains are just computers often overlook) activity in the brain. However, few if any of them would agree that they themselves do not have it.
    Consciousness is what accounts for our ability to think—cogito ergo sum, as Descartes put it. Not just to answer questions, which properly programmed computers can do as well as, and much faster than, we, but to formulae them. Also, which may be even more important, to experience such feelings as awe, elation, fatigue, fear, joy, hatred, hunger, love, pain, pleasure, and any number of others right down to the end of the alphabet. Though one may doubt whether all these are present in all living creatures—whether, for example, germs can think and trees, experience fear—one thing seems abundantly clear: inanimate objects to not have it.
  8. Purposefulness. Two things can cause the status quo to change; a cause, and a purpose. A cause is exemplified by a push we get from behind, making us move, stagger or fall down. A purpose is something we first set up for ourselves and then, relying on our will, pursue. A cause works from the past into the present; a purpose, from the present into the future. A cause can affect both an inanimate object and a living one. Not so a purpose, which is limited to the latter alone. Whether all forms of life act on purpose we do not know. Some, however, clearly do.

*

Conclusion: Note that each one of the above articles refers to an essential characteristic of life. Joined together in a single object, or contraption, or organism, they would actually be life. Yet we still do know how life grew out of inanimate matter. Let alone what it is. Whether or not it is based on ignorance or on fact, it is this gap which, by forcing us to resort to the idea of the free will, governs our systems of education, morality, justice, trade, and much more. As long as it persists, so will we.

Give Me Machiavelli Any Time

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To anyone at all familiar with Indian history and philosophy, the Arthashatra needs no introduction. I myself was introduced to it over a decade ago by a German-American friend, Dr. Michael Liebig, who now teaches Indian cultural history at the University of Heidelberg. He told me that the author was widely considered the Indian Machiavelli, only much more cynical and much more callous. Later I discovered that one of his admirers is former U.S Secretary of State and Chief of the National Security Council Henry Kissinger, himself no small follower of the famous Florentine. It was, however, only during these corona-infested days that I finally got around to actually reading him. And writing down some comments on him, for my own benefit and, hopefully, my readers too.

First, the author. He has been the subject, not just of a single tradition but of at least half a dozen. Each associated with one of India’s subcultures, religions, and regions. As a result, there is very little about him that can be firmly established. Apparently his period of activity started about 330 and ended around 280 BCE. For part of that period he served as chief minister to at least two Mauri Emperors. As such he was involved in every aspect of contemporary statecraft—royal succession, intrigue (including the kind of intrigue that originates in harems), politics, economics, war (both internal, to put down insurrections, and external, against every kind of king, big and small), and what not. Many of the details appear fantastic. For example, that he once took a royal baby from his dying mother’s womb and placed it inside a goat, keeping it alive. And that, at one point in his career when he was living as an ascetic in a forest, he used a secret formula to manufacture no fewer than 800 million gold coins.

Next, the text. Long considered lost, it was known only from references in other works. Including a Greek-language one, Megasthenes’ Indika, which dates to the years around Kautilya’s death. In 1905 a copy, written on palm leaves, was discovered by a librarian in the Oriental Research Institute at Mysore. Internal evidence suggests that it was not, in fact, composed by a single person. Rather, in the form we have it, it is a compilation written, expanded and explained by various people at various times. The title, Arthashastra, is often translated as Politics. In fact, however, it refers to the acquisition and maintenance of material, or perhaps one should say worldly, gain—mainly wealth on the one hand and power on the other. As such it is on a par with two other traditions: Dharma (ethics, religious duty) on one hand and Kama (pleasure, desire) on the other. Joined together, these three are seen as the sum of human life. If not in all incarnations, at any rate in the kind in which not just Indians but all of us live to the present day.

To me the most intriguing aspect of the work, rarely noted by other commentators I have looked at, is the profound contradiction it seems to contain. At peak, the Mauri Empire comprised some two million square miles. More than the present-day state of India and including, in addition to today’s Central and Northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Its population, which modern scholars have estimated at 50-60 million, was comparable to that of Rome at its height. To administer such a vast realm a sophisticated bureaucracy was needed; such as is, in fact, described by Kautilya. The top layer of the bureaucracy in question was formed by a royal council which was supported by a secretariat or chancellery. There were specialist departments responsible for, among other things, defense, intelligence (including espionage, a field that seems to have fascinated the author and on which he has much advice to offer), the treasury, commerce, auditing, weights and measures, the measurement of space and time, agriculture, mining, forestry (specifically including elephant-forestry), fisheries, and public works, weaving, liquor, and the supervision of prostitutes. Much business was transacted in writing, including secret writing. Rulers were surrounded by elaborate ritual and kept, or were supposed to keep, regular hours devoted to work, worship and leisure. Order and regularity seem to have been the watchwords; albeit that unexpected events on one hand and the peculiarities of individual rulers on the other might cause them to be disrupted.

There is, however, another side to this coin. From beginning to end, the emperor about and for whom Kautilya is writing is referred to as a “king.” That is OK—I do not claim to be a Sanskrit linguist. What I find surprising is that the king’s realm, a huge one by any standard, is said to be surrounded by those of other “kings.” So much so that they form first, second, and even third, four, fifth and sixth degree neighbors. Though not of equal strength, all are addressed by the same title. All are independent of each other, constantly negotiating with each other, stabbing each other in the back, and often fighting each other tooth and nail. Not to mention any number of “wild” peoples who keep rising against the kings and must be kept in check. In other words, what the text really describes is not an empire at all. It is, rather, an international system—a quilt made up of separate realms, many of them as small as they are diverse.

Those who are taking this are more likely to cialis generic tabs have a hemorrhagic stroke. This leads to a widening of blood vessels which supports in adequate blood supply to the sexual organs of the body. cialis 5mg price Complication of dysfunction problem There are a lot of complications of diabetes, which include impotence, neuropathy (loss of sensation or abnormal sensation). viagra brand No doubt, it sildenafil generic viagra is one of the known troubles and is faced by men at one pointof time or the other. However that may be, the text is meandering and, in its attempts to take the reader by the hand and lead him, often truly picayune. In this respect it is as unlike Machiavelli, who was a brilliant writer and stylist, as unlike can be. The following passage is typical:

When a friend does not come to terms, intrigue should be frequently resorted to. Through the agency of spies, the friend should be won over after separating him from the enemy. Or attempts may be made to win him over who is the last among combined friends; for when he who is the last among combined friends is secured, those who occupy the middle rank will be separated from each other; or attempts may be made to win over a friend who occupies middle rank; for when a friend occupying middle rank among combined kings is secured, friends, occupying the extreme ranks cannot keep the union.

This kind of text is about as exciting and as transparent as mud. Personally I find it hard to believe that even a Dr. Kissinger, however brainy he may be, can make himself read it without falling asleep. Consider the following:

A virtuous king may be conciliated by praising his birth, family, learning and character, and by pointing out the relationship which his ancestors had (with the proposer of peace), or by describing the benefits and absence of enmity shown to him. Or a king who is of good intentions, or who has lost his enthusiastic spirits, or whose strategic mean are all exhausted and thwarted in a number of wars, or who has lost his men and wealth, or who has suffered from sojourning abroad, or who is desirous of gaining a friend in good faith, or who is apprehensive of danger from another, or who cares more for friendship than anything else, many be won over by conciliation. Or a king who is greedy, or who has lost his men may be won over by giving gifts through the medium of ascetics and chiefs who have been previously kept with him for the purpose.

Or, or, or, or. The number of possibilities is endless. Each one is divided into branches, and each branch, having been further subdivided, must be explored in some depth. Here as in a great many other traditional Indian philosophical texts, the Kama Sutra specifically included, what we see is the author’s wish to be as systematic and as comprehensive as possible. No set of circumstances, no combination, and no eventuality must be left out. Even at the expense of clarity and readability.

I am reminded of what Clausewitz, in his introduction to On War, has to say about this kind of writing:

It is, perhaps, not impossible to write a systematic theory of war full of spirit and substance, but ours, hitherto, have been very much the reverse. To say nothing of their unscientific spirit, in their striving after coherence and completeness of system, they overflow with commonplaces, truisms, and twaddle of every kind. If we want a striking picture of them we have only to read Lichtenberg’s extract from a code of regulations in case of fire. “If a house takes fire,” he writes, “we must seek, above all things, to protect the right side of the house standing on the left, and, on the other hand, the left side of the house on the right; for if we, for example, should protect the left side of the house on the left, then the right side of the house lies to the right of the left, and consequently as the fire lies to the right of this side, and of the right side (for we have assumed that the house is situated to the left of the fire), therefore the right side is situated nearer to the fire than the left, and the right side of the house might catch fire if it was not protected before it came to the left, which is protected. Consequently, something might be burnt that is not protected, and that sooner than something else would be burnt, even if it was not protected; consequently we must let alone the latter and protect the former. In order to impress the thing on one’s mind, we have only to note if the house is situated to the right of the fire, then it is the left side, and if the house is to the left it is the right side.”

To return to the Arthashastra, give me Machiavelli any time.

Nothing New Under the Sun

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“In the year… there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which whether disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us mortals by God in His just wrath by way of retribution for our inequities, had had its origins some years before in the East, whence, after destroying an innumerable multitude of living beings, it had propagated itself without respite from place to place, and so, calamitously, had spread into the West…

Despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities by officials appointed for the purpose, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health, despite also humble supplication addressed to God, and often repeated both in public procession and otherwise, by the devout; toward the beginning of the spring of that year the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent by symptoms that showed as if miraculous…

Which malady seemed to set entirely at naught both the art of the physicians and the virtues of physic; indeed, whether it was that the disorder was of a nature or defy such treatment, or that the physicians were at fault—besides the qualified there was not a multitude both of men and of women who practiced without having received the slightest tincture of medical science—and, being in ignorance of is source, failed to apply the proper remedies…

Moreover, the virulence of the pest was the greater by reason that intercourse was apt to convey it from the sick to the whole, just as fire devours things dry to greasy when they are brought close to it. Nay, the evil went yet further, for not merely by speech or association with the sick as the malady communicated to the healthy with consequent peril of common death; but any that touched the cloth of the sick or aught else that had been touched or used by them, seemed thereby to contract the disease…

Such was the energy of the contagion of the said pestilence, that it was not merely propagate from man to man but, what is much more startling, it was frequently observed that things which had belonged to one sick or dead of the disease, if touched by some other living creature, not of the human species, were the occasion, not only of sickening, but of an almost instantaneous death…

Proper http://deeprootsmag.org/category/departments/bordercrossings/ discount levitra breathing techniques are firmly rooted in these philosophies. Upon application of the lotion, it’s claimed to work cialis without prescription within 10 to 30 seconds. Thus, it is vital that cialis prescription online if you feel no pleasure or lack of it during intercourse, resulting in ED, the problem may be medical, rather mental health related. One more component that accelerates the threat is smoking cigarettes; a distinct habitual pattern that many men and girls grow to canadian cialis pharmacy be acustomed these days. In which circumstances, not to speak of many others of a similar or even graver complexion, divers apprehensions and imaginations were engendered in the minds of such as were left alive, including almost all of them to the same harsh resolution, to wit, to shun and abhor all contact with the sick and all that belonged to them, thinking thereby each to make his own health secure. Among whom were those who thought that to live temperately and avoid all excess would count for much as a preservative against seizure of this kind. Wherefore they banded together, and dissociating themselves from all others, formed communities in houses where there were no sick, and lived a separate and secluded life, which they regulated with the utmost care, avoiding every kind of luxury and drinking very moderately of the most delicate viands and the finest wines, holding converse with none but one another, lest tidings of sickness or death should reach them, and diverting their minds with music and such other delights as they could devise. Others, the bias of whose minds was in the opposite direction, maintained that to drink freely, frequent places of public resort, and take their pleasure with song and revel, sparing to satisfy no appetite, and to laugh and mock at no event, was the sovereign remedy for so great an evil: and that which they affirmed they also put in practice, so far they were able, resorting day and night, now to this tavern, now to that, drinking with an entire disregard of rule or measure, and by preference making the house of others, as it were, their inns, if they but saw in them aught that was particularly to their taste or liking; which they were readily able to do, because the owners, seeing death imminent, had become as reckless of their property as of their lives; so that most of the houses were open to all comers… Thus, adhering ever to heir inhuman determination to shun the sick, as far as possible, they ordered their life. In this extremity of our city’s suffering and tribulation the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved, for lack of those who should have administered and enforced them, most of whom, like the rest of the citizens, were either dead or sick, or so hard bested for servants that they were unable to execute any office; whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes.

Not a few there were who belonged to neither of the two said parties but kept a middle course between them, neither laying the same restraint upon their diet as the former, not allowing themselves the same license in drinking and other dissipations at the latter, but living with a degree of freedom sufficient to satisfy their appetites, and not as recluses. They therefore walked abroad, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses, deeming it an excellent thing thus to comfort the grain with such perfumes, because the air seemed to be everywhere laden and reeking with the stench emitted by the dead and the dying and the odors of drugs.

Some again, the most sound, perhaps, in judgment, as they were also the harshest in temper of all, affirmed that there was no medicine for the disease superior or equal in efficacy to flight; following which prescription a multitude of men and women, negligent of all but themselves, deserted their city, their houses, their estate, their kinsfolk, their goods, and went into voluntary exile, or migrated to the country parts, as if God in visiting men with this pestilence in requital of their iniquities would not pursue them with His wrath, wherever they might be, intended the destruction of such alone as remained within the circuit of the walls of the city; or deeming, perchance, that it was now time for all to flee from it, and that its last hour was come.

Of the adherents of these various opinions not all died, neither did all escape; but rather there were, of each sort and in every place, many that sickened, and by those who retained their health were rated after the example which they themselves, while whole, had set, being everywhere left to languish in almost total neglect. Tedious were it to recount how citizen avoided citizen, now among neighbors was scarce fond any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsmen held aloof, and never met, or but rarely; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror therefore brother was forsaken by brother, nephew by uncle, brother by sister, and often times husbands by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended unvisited, to their fate, as if they had been strangers. Wherefore the sick of both sexes, whose number could not be estimated, were left without resource but in the charity of friends (and few such there were), or in the interest of servants, who were hardly to be had at high rates and on unseemly terms… In consequence of which dearth of servants and dereliction of the sick by neighbors, kinsfolk and friends, it came to pass—a thing, perhaps never before heard of that no woman, however dainty, fair or well-born she might be, shrank, when stricken with the disease, from the ministrations of a man, no matter whether he were young or no, or scrupled to expose to him every part of her body, with no more shame than if he had been a woman, submitting of necessity to that which her malady required; whereupon, perchance, there resulted in after some loss of modesty in such as recovered. Besides which many succumbed, who with proper attendance would, perhaps, have escaped death; so that, what with the virulence of the plague and the lack of due tendance of the sick, the multitude of the deaths that daily and nightly took place in the city, was such that those who heard the tale–not to say witnessed the fact—were struck dumb with amazement.”

You thought there is anything new under the sun? Think again.

The Unbearable Lightness of Lying

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Some time ago on this blog I confessed to a “crime:” namely that, for over thirty-five years now, I have been living with a woman with whom I had an affair while I was still her teacher and she, my student.

Today I want to confess to another “crime.”

This happened about twenty years ago, shortly after I had returned from a year I spent abroad on a sabbatical. I was talking over the phone to a former student of mine, let’s call him X, who had since become a colleague. Suddenly, out of the blue, I heard him say: “Did you know there was a complaint concerning sexual harassment against you?”

“No,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

“He: Do you remember this Colombian student you had?”

“I do” I said. She had been in my class two years earlier. Rumor had it that she was the daughter of some billionaire who had made his money in all kinds of interesting ways. But that was something I only learned after the class had ended.

“Well,” he said, “she launched a complaint. She said you made a pass at her, but she had refused. So you gave her bad grades.” She had, in fact, written three papers, each of which was worse than the last.

“So what did you do?” I asked. At the time, he was in charge of the Hebrew University’s School of Overseas Students where I taught.
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“Very simple,” he answered. “I asked her to let me have the papers in question. I took them, removed both your names, and handed them to a colleague of ours who is an expert on the topic. Having read them, he concluded that the grades you gave her were perfectly OK. Whereupon the matter was closed.”

Now, consider how lucky I was:

First, in that she still had the papers and, instead of hiding them, handed them over.

Second, in that I made a point of always writing down extensive comments on every paper by every student so as to let them know why I had given them the grades I did.

Third, in that X was X. Someone else might have said: “OK, so there is nothing wrong with the grades. But this still does not prove that no sexual harassment took place. Let’s launch an investigation.” Of the kind in which, as we all know, a man is practically certain to be found guilty. And which will taint him forever even if he is acquitted.

Fourth, in that she left the country, which limited the damage she could do me.

So, to let me off the hook, no fewer than four separate strokes of luck were needed. Looking back, I’d put my chances of emerging unscathed at 1 in 104. Others have not been so fortunate.

Just for the record: I only knew she was Colombian because, as I asked everyone for their country of origin at the beginning of the course, she had said so. That apart, I do not recall ever having exchanged a single word with her, either in- or out of class.

Impossible?

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Introduction

Want to know what the strangest thing about modern feminism is? Not the derogatory things many feminists say about other women (“only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition:” Mary Wollstonecraft). Not the foolishness of many of the claims its proponents keep on making, e.g. that men designed the famous qwerty keyboard specifically to make the lives of female secretaries hard. Nor the fact that it often comes at the cost of women’s health and welfare, as when they try to compete with men in fields where the latter’s greater physical force and resistance to dirt gives them a clear advantage; thereby inviting injury and shortening their own lives. Nor the truly nauseating combination of aggression and self-pity which has become its trademark. But the fact that so many men tolerate it, abet it, and even help push it forward.

Consider. When men demonstrate for their rights, which is something they have done many, many times throughout history, they are often shot dead. In the words of a nineteenth-century German proverb, gegen Demokraten helfen nur Soldaten (against democrats, the only remedy is soldiers). When women do the same as, qua women, some of them started doing during the last decades of the nineteenth century, normally the very worst they can expect is a short and relatively comfortable prison sentence. As, for example, happened to “the Pankhursts,” meaning mainly Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, when they adopted arson as their tactic. Even the Nazis, notorious for ruthlessness, did not treat their German male and female opponents equally. It was only in 1938, five years after “the seizure of power,” that the first female victim of National Socialist “justice” was put to death (along with two male comrades with whom she had been passing state secrets to the Russians). It was only in the same year that the first concentration camp for women, Moehringen, opened its gates. Later Ravensbrueck, the most important camp for women, was distinguished by its relatively low mortality rate. So much better did the Nazis treat male homosexuals than lesbians that, come 1942-43, some ministry of justice officials asked their superiors to please explain the rationale behind the policy. To that request, they never received an answer.

The Road to Herland

Starting around 1890 and continuing thereafter, the greatest single victory feminists have ever gained was that of the suffragettes. Today in every country where men are allowed to vote, women enjoy the same right. By the ordinary rules of social life, it should never have happened. Why? Because, at the time, men occupied all positions and held all the cards. So in the executive. So in the legislature, and so in the judiciary. So in the military and so in the police. So in the universities. And so in the media, of course. Not to mention the financial world. As late as 1999, when eleven countries formally inaugurated the Euro, the assembled ministers of finance did not include a single woman; it was only in 2018 that a woman became head of the NYSE for the first time. It happened because, women being women, men did not have it in their hearts to fight them. Least of all in the way they often fight each other.

The fact that men are so reluctant to fight women/feminists as ruthlessly and as brutally as they do each other has been taken for granted much more often than it has been investigated. Perhaps it is because they well know that, had they done so, the human race would have come to a quick and inglorious end; after all, they themselves started life inside women’s wombs and almost all of them sucked at women’s breasts. Or because, nature having made them physically stronger, for a long time they closed their eyes and refused to take women seriously. Or because, bemused by the ocean of accusations aimed at them by modern feminists, they could not believe it had anything to do with them. After all, almost every one of them thought, he had never done women any harm. On the contrary, wishing to attract them and please them and keep them he had done them all the good he could. Perhaps, as Aristophanes’ Lysistrate put it, it was because, when everything is said and done, a man’s pleasure is in a woman’s hand. Or because, since most men are considerably stronger than most women, when a man fights a woman and loses, he loses; when he wins, he also loses.

A century later, the tables have been turned. Feminist bloodhounds and their self-hating male supporters have constructed a monstrous propaganda machine, trained it straight at men, and made them pay heavily for the gratuitous concessions their great-grandfathers made. Day by day, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them are being penalized for offenses they did not commit and which, even a few years ago, not even the victims themselves would have considered offenses at all. They are prosecuted, put on trial, convicted, and incarcerated and/or fined. So much so that, as used to be the case and sometimes remains the case in Muslim societies, even looking at a woman in the “wrong” way can be considered sexual harassment. And so much so that defending the accused in court has almost become a crime in itself; which is one reason why so many lawyers who specialize in doing so are themselves female. As to the alleged victims, so mentally retarded are some of them that they take years, decades even, to understand that whatever was done to them; or which they thought was done to them; or which (in at least one famous case) they dreamt had been done to them; or which others told them had been done to them; did indeed constitute rape, or abuse, or harassment, or whatever.

Though there was no trial, a perfect example of the way this kind of retroactive accusations work is provided by Ilona Staller, AKA Cicciolina. Born in 1951, no sooner had she reached adulthood then she started épater la bourgeoisie. Publicly exposing her every orifice, sleeping with more men than she could remember, and loudly proclaiming her “free-thinking” woman’s right to (ab)use her body just as much as she wanted to. To do her bit for peace, and presumably gain some publicity a well, she proposed sleeping first with Saddam Hussein and then with Osama Bin Laden. On the way she wed a well-known artist, Jeff Koon, had a son with him, and was twice divorced. Looking back at her career, much of it as a pornographer and performer of bawdy songs (“Il Cazzo,” The Prick), she says it has all been a mistake; how much better to be married for thirty years and look after grandchildren. Now that she is a lonely old woman—her own words—whom does she blame? Men, of course. None of whom had understood her sensitive nature and truly loved her; and all of whom were out only to bed her and make money out of her.

President Clinton at one point engaged in some consensual, repeat consensual, sexual games with a woman, Monica Lewinsky. She actively pursued him—as he later said, the reason why he did it was because he could. Not only that, but she refused to give up even after he told her it was over. For this he was impeached and came close to being removed from office. Why? Because he should have known better. If a woman says no, then “it” is clearly rape. If she says yes, many modern feminists claim, then “it” is also rape. This time because she considered, or looking back considers herself, too weak or too much of a ninny to tell him so.

The latest example is Harvey Weinstein. His alleged crime? Sleeping with two young women. Hoping for advancement and money they, along with any number of others like them, followed him literally to the end of the world with the express intention of getting him to do just that. The evidence that he used force on them or abused them in any way? These are one on one situations. Hence, none whatsoever; except for what the women themselves said. That is why a third woman had to be enlisted so she could testify about something that, so she claimed, Weinstein had done to her decades ago. So long, in fact, that the statute of limitations should have been applied (but was not). Why was she brought in? To establish a “pattern” of sexual behavior on the accused’s part. All this, at a time when looking into a woman’s past in order to establish a similar pattern is specifically prohibited by law. Incidentally, so “courageous” and “intrepid” was this particular women that, even as the trial went on, she refused to be identified; this, while half the world’s journalists, always more than ready to cast the first stone, were doing his name harm that is in some ways worse than the 27-year prison term to which he has been sentenced.

A woman who has been raped or otherwise abused might be expected to be afraid of the perpetrator and keep her distance from him. This is a point many courts have recognized by allowing such a woman to testify without having to confront the accused face to face; so delicate are women’s souls said to be that any defense attorney who dares to cross-examine a female “victim” of abuse in earnest will ipso facto find himself at a disadvantage. Not so in this case as well as many others. Claiming to have been raped, the two continued to see Weinstein and sleep with him. From this, the prosecution argued, it was clear, not that the alleged abuse was not abuse at all, which is the logical conclusion, but that they were “in thrall” to him. A mysterious kind of thrall, previously seen only in witches, which he was somehow able to project over time and right across the globe.

Going further still, some states will refuse either to prosecute a woman for coming up with false accusations or allow the victim to sue her for defamation. At this point the entire system of justice, supposed to be fair and free and open to all, starts to totter. Any man is at the mercy of any woman, with no redress in sight. All he can do is keep saying that whatever he did, if he did it, was consensual. To no avail; as Woody Allen and many others found out, once an accusation has been made even a formal acquittal, in court, may not prevent a man from being hounded half to death. By now even boys as young as ten learn that girls are capricious, perfidious, and potentially very, very dangerous creatures. Always capable of returning the slightest sign of affection by stabbing their authors in the back and raising accusations against them, whether true or false.

But nothing lasts forever. Long ago, I had the honor of studying Hegel, Marx and Engels with one of the world’s greatest experts on those thinkers. As well as Lenin, the man who lit the fuse and turned his predecessors’ vision into a gigantic bloodbath. From them I learnt that history, unlike most physical and chemical processes, does not move in a straight line as a bullet does. Instead, it is a question of action/reaction. X comes up with an idea. A new force (such as feminism) appears out of nowhere, as it seems, and starts spreading across the historical stage. Hardly has it done so than a countertheory or counterforce emerges. As the two grow they recognize each other as opponents and wrestle. Out of this struggle a synthesis is born. That synthesis in turn forms a new force or argument, provoking a reaction. And so on, in a process broadly known as dialectics.

Having gained momentum, feminism now forms as powerful a social force as may be found in the contemporary world. For good or ill, a reaction is bound to happen. In Brazil (Jair Messias Bolsonaro), in Italy (Matteo Salvini), and in the U.S (Donald Trump) it had already begun. The number of anti-feminist organizations is growing. So, according to Google Ngram, is the use of expressions such as “Feminazis.” As well as statements like “feminism is cancer” (14,400,000 hits on Google, most by men but some by women too). Much to the loss of both sexes, probably never in history have so many men hated women as much as do so today. And the other way around.

And this is only the beginning. Being 74 years old, I consider myself lucky in that I am unlikely to live long enough to see the movement unfold in its full fury. I am, however, afraid that, unless something drastic happens, my children and grandchildren, both male and female, very likely will. What might such a reaction look like? I am a historian, not a novelist. That is why, looking for an answer, I turn to Margaret Atwood’s 1984 masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as its 2019 sequel, The Testaments.

Into the Breach

Should it occur to anyone to start curbing the excesses of feminism in earnest, then obviously the most important step will be to deprive women of the right to vote. In itself, doing so ought not to be too difficult. In most modern countries, feeding in the right computer program and pressing a few buttons would suffice to do the job. No longer will my wife and I receive our Israeli, blue and white, voting cards in tandem. Instead of pinning two cards to the fridge as, in the past year, we have done no fewer than three times, I shall do so only with one. To prevent disenfranchised women from disrupting the voting process, as some of them regularly did at the turn of the twentieth century, perhaps a few of the noisiest ones should be placed under protective custody for a couple of days. Having each polling station watched by a policeman or two would not present a problem either.

The real problem is a different one. In ancient Greece, women’s rights and democracy were entirely separate. Neither in Athens nor in any other city were women allowed either to vote or to hold public office. To the extent that it was democratic, as in some respects it was, the same applied to republican Rome. Not so in the modern world. In it, right from the beginning the demand for women’s enfranchisement has been riding piggyback on democracy. When Congress issued the Declaration of Independence Abigail Adams, wife of president to-be John Adams, complained that it mentioned men but not women. As the French Revolution broke out more than one woman insisted that the newly-adopted rights of men should be extended to women too. The best-known one was no other than Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Another, Olympe de Gouges, was actually executed; though less for denouncing the “despotic” rule of men over women than for advocating a return of the monarchy. Not accidentally did John Stuart Mill, the most ardent male feminist of all time, publish The Subjection of Women in 1869, the year that marked a vast extension of the British electorate. To this day it is almost exclusively democratic countries that pay attention to women’s rights. Neither Putin, nor Xi, nor Khamenei, nor Kim Jong-un seems to be very interested in them. Nor, since they do not put great store on attracting female voters, or any voters for that matter, is there any reason why they should.

The long and the short of it is, if women are to be disenfranchised democracy will have to be abolished as well. Given its deep roots in Western civilization, that is a much harder proposition. Who could make the attempt? For Ms. Atwood the answer is clear: the armed forces which, throughout history and until very recently, used to be the bastions of masculinity. Or, more specifically, some secret group active within them and ready to take the bit between its teeth. Perhaps we might add elements of the police, the intelligence services, and various private security organizations. Here it is important to realize that many of those organizations’ CEOs are themselves former generals and senior police officers, making it easier for them to communicate and cooperate.

Whatever their precise nature, what makes these organizations potentially dangerous is not just the fact that they are authorized to carry weapons and, in certain cases, use them. It is their members’ detailed grasp of the way the state security organs work and, therefore, how they can be subverted and/or harnessed to the conspirators’ purpose. Who is in charge of what? Whom does he report to? What channels does he use, and how to ensure that those channels either remain open or are blocked?
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Mounting a coup is not cheap. In this case the money may come from the kind of billionaire worried about being made to share Harvey Weinstein’s fate—and, given the brave new judiciary climate as well as the growing menace of #MeToo, what billionaire shouldn’t be? In the novels, all we really know about the conspirators is that they call themselves the Sons of Jacob. The reference is to the patriarch of that name. Tricked into marrying two sisters, he discovered that the younger one was unable to have children. Jealous of her sister, she nagged him (“give me children, or else I die”) until he gave way and slept with her handmaid. Now it was the turn of the older one to become jealous, so he impregnated her as well.

Here it is worth recalling that, whatever feminists have said and done, all the above-mentioned forces, agencies, firms, etc. remain almost as male-dominated as they were five or six decades ago. Not only is the number of their female members fairly limited, but few of them occupy key positions. As one top Pentagon official in a position to know told me years ago when it was still relatively safe to do so, basically they cause little but trouble. Not simply by complaining; that is something women have no monopoly on. But because their complaints are so often self-contradictory. If female soldiers are not treated on an equal basis with men, e.g in respect to pay, promotion, and conditions of service, they complain about discrimination. If they are treated on an equal basis with men, e.g in respect to training and deployment, they also complain; this time because their femininity, meaning weaker physiques, greater susceptibility to certain diseases, pregnancy and motherhood is not given due consideration and does not lead to the privileges, such as shorter hours and better conditions, to which they feel entitled.

As anyone who has ever watched men and women engaged in co-ed training knows, there simply is no way out. If the same exercises are prescribed for people of both sexes, far more women will be injured and far fewer will graduate whereas the men, being stronger, will get hardly any training at all. If, to the contrary, trainees of each sex are made to perform to different standards, then the men will complain that, to gain credit, they must work harder than women. As, for example, by running longer distances, carrying heavier loads, and the like. The worst thing those responsible can do is to put men and women trainees into a situation where they have to physically touch each other. As, for example, in the now world-famous Israeli form of hand-to-hand combat known as krav maga (literally, “body-to-body battle”). Under such circumstances serious training becomes impossible. All that is left is a something more like Tai Chi or a ballet.

In some armies, these problems and others like them have long brought about a situation where male personnel are more afraid of their female colleagues than of the enemy. And no wonder: the U.S military e.g has more sexual assault response coordinators (SARCs) than it does recruiters. In my experience this fear has even spread to retired male officers; they are worried that walls may have ears. Responses to the problem vary. With Vice President Mike Pence providing the example, in- and out of the military a growing number of men refuse to be alone with any woman other than their wives, thus opening the door to complaints about discrimination. Many others will not meet with female co-workers unless a third person is present, thereby opening the door to even more complaints, this time about the violation of privacy.

Through all this, one thing remains clear. Should those in charge gird their loins and decide that enough is enough, then both in the military and in the civilian world a great many working women could be dispensed with fairly quickly and sent home. The place they occupied until 1965 or so; and which, to the mind of many men and such women as consider their children too precious to be raised by strangers, they should never have left to begin with.

Brave New World

To carry out a successful coup, four things are needed. First, a leader; as one of my professors used to say, would there really have been a Russian Revolution without Lenin? Second, a cause or ideology that will make others rally around him. Third, a polarized and paralyzed political system that will fail to act as quickly and as decisively as it should have. And fourth, a large number of ordinary people sufficiently disgruntled with the existing state of things to tolerate an uprising. What I am suggesting is not that such a coup is right around the corner either in the U.S or in any other democratic country. Rather that, when the time comes, restoring the balance between men and women could well be a central part of the cause in question. One for which a growing number of men, dismayed by the countless privileges women are enjoying and feeling at risk by the Niagara of often false accusations feminists are directing at them, might rally and fight.

As Ms. Atwood says, the Bible, especially the Old Testament with its strong patriarchal bias, might well be used to provide such a coup with the religious sanction it needs. That applies both to the Old Testament (“a fitting helper for him”) and the new one (“let woman in Church keep silent”). If victory comes quickly, as it did in Brazil in 1964, Greece in 1967, Chile in 1970, and Argentina in 1976 then the rest will be relatively simple. But if—and in quite some countries this is the more likely outcome—it does not, then the sequel will be about as kind and as gentle as the French Terror under Robespierre. This in turn may escalate into full-scale civil war complete with widespread destruction, countless atrocities, and heavy loss of life. As, for example, happened in Spain in 1936-39. Opponents who do not surrender will be exterminated. If necessary, as Ms. Atwood also says, with the aid of poison gas.

Having won, she goes on, the rebels will set up a dictatorial/clerical government. Living standards will drop dramatically. Civil liberties and every kind of privacy will be abolished. So will the kind of courts that are responsible for safeguarding them; in their place, we shall see the growth of bodies much more like the KGB or the Gestapo. As far as women are concerned, the most important measure the new government will put into effect will be to prohibit them from taking on high-level work outside the home. Also, from owning bank accounts, inheriting property, and generally handling any but the trifling sums needed for running a household day to day.

Children over the age of six or eight will be educated separately, just as they have been throughout most of history. It may be that Ms. Atwood is exaggerating—as a novelist, that is her good right. Contrary to what she says, I think that women may still be allowed to study for occupations such as teaching, nursing, nutrition, all kinds of therapy, and the like. However, everything they do will be under male supervision and control. To prevent feminism from reemerging women will be barred from acquiring a higher education in the humanities, the social sciences, and, above all, the law. In fact both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments point to female lawyers as the new regime’s worst enemies, most likely not only to be suspended from school but arrested and shot as well.

Still loosely following in Ms. Atwood’s footsteps, every woman will be assigned a male guardian. Either a relative—father, husband, brother, son—or, in the case of single women and widows and divorcees who do not have them, a Miniwowe (Ministry of Women’s Welfare) official. In case, which seems likely, there are more such women than bureaucrats, the outcome will be a modern form of polygamy. In whatever way it is done, inevitably the best-looking young women will be rounded up for the officers’ exclusive use. Whether as wives, or concubines, or baby-bearing machines—handmaid’s, to use Ms. Atwood’s terminology—or elite prostitutes. Or else, in case they do not have a man or a male bureaucrat to protect them, simply as prey. Of the kind that is seduced with presents if possible and violently hunted down if it is not. As to the rest, who cares? Let the Economen, as Ms. Atwood calls them, look after their Econowives as best they can.

The doctrine of separate spheres having been firmly reestablished in this way, another measure the Junta will definitely take will be to recruit some women as auxiliaries. Not so they can rule or wield weapons, as feminists demand; never at any time have men had much need of women to help them either to govern or to kill one another. But to help control the others while at the same time gaining legitimacy and putting it on show. A few of the women in question will no doubt be given high rank, at any rate on paper. In return they will be required not to appear, or behave, in too feminine a manner. No expensive jewelry to make other women jealous. No ballroom gowns, nor cleavages, nor hand kissing, nor all kinds of wiles women have always used and will always go on using to get their way. Think of Lenin’s wife, Nadezha Krupskaya. Think, too, of Stalin’s alleged mistress Alexandra Kollontai. Not to mention Hitler’s Reichsfrauenfuehrerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. All three paid for what modest power they wielded, and the privileged lives they led, by serving some of the most terrifying men who ever lived.

Of the remaining women, many will be herded into a quasi-military organization and made to wear uniform. Judging by what previous totalitarian regimes have done and are doing, the uniforms themselves will likely fall into two kinds. Either such as make their wearers almost indistinguishable from men, complete with camouflage patterns, Kevlar helmets, heavy boots, and similar items that will conceal their femininity and create the illusion that they are more than just half soldiers. Or else a more feminine type with brightly colored skirts, nylon stockings, a unique kind of headgear to make them look nice on parade, and what in some cases appear to be plastic guns. As Russian, Chinese and North Korean female soldiers, goose-stepping past their invariably male, benignly smiling, superiors already do.

Amidst all this, feminists who refuse to recant will have clamps (branks as, back in the seventeenth century, they used to be known) pushed into their mouths if they are lucky and be burnt as witches if they are not. Or else they will be sent to the camps, the colonies as Ms. Atwood calls them, from which few if any of them will ever return. What makes these measures more plausible is the fact that few of them are really new; quite some were implemented in the past. Not just among illiterate tribespeople in their natural habitat, but in the democratic and enlightened Athens so many of us claim as our spiritual ancestor. And not just ages ago, but in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. In the latter, the English economist Harriet Martineau reported, the very idea of his wife working was enough to make a man’s hair stand on end.

Writing in the late 1920s, Virginia Woolf described how a beadle, or security guard, prevented her from walking on the grass at “Oxbridge” university as male students did. It was only in the mid-1970s that, in some Western countries, married women could so much as open a bank account under their own names. Not until 1976, when Swiss women were finally granted the vote, was the process of enfranchisement complete even in Europe. As I have seen with my own eyes, even today some Muslim women wear a bit-like piece of clothing, known as a battoullah, which makes it hard for them to speak. As Mao wrote, even a journey of ten thousand miles must start with a single step. In many countries, political polarization is growing and democracy is in serious trouble already.

Conclusion

What factor or event could trigger off such a change? In The Handmaid’s Tale it is a shortage of fertile women, brought about by a host of environmental problems that render most of them barren. In reality, it is perhaps more likely to be provoked precisely by something many feminists have been eagerly waiting for: namely, the development of artificial wombs. Such as will not only save the lives of babies, which is the declared objective of many research groups, but free women from the need to conceive and bear and deliver children; thus enabling them to focus on their careers the way men have always done. However, such a device might also open another possibility. Namely that, if women cease doing any of these things, men will need them much less; and that, as a result, their treatment of them, far from improving, will become worse than even feminists claim it has ever been.

A nightmare? For most of us Westerners who value the right of both men and women to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I myself emphatically included, very much so. But for the growing number of men who are being targeted, as well as their wives and mothers and daughters and sisters who partake of the injustices inflicted on them? Less and less. Unlikely? Considering the way history seems to work, not necessarily. Action, reaction; movement, countermovement. As inevitable, as inexorable, as the tides of the sea.

Impossible? Once upon a time there was a man called Domitian, son of Vespasian. From 81 to 96 CE he was the absolute ruler of Rome and, as such, perhaps the most powerful man in the world. Always something of a paranoid, his spies were everywhere and his victims, countless. On one occasion, asked about his motives, he said that no one believes there could be a conspiracy to kill the emperor until he is killed. Not long thereafter, he was.

At Six after the Corona Crisis

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An old/new game has emerged and is being played by millions from Norway to New Zealand. It is called guess as you can, and it is played on paper, in the aether, and every kind of screen from the smallest to the largest. Its objective? To divine what the world will be like once the current corona crisis is gone (for gone, and even more or less forgotten, it will be). At six after the war, as the good soldier Švejk put it long ago. Having spent much of the last eighteen months or so researching the methods people use in their attempts to look into the future, I cannot say I am impressed by their efforts. Almost all of which appear to be ill-supported, superficial, and biased—very often, without the authors even being aware that they are.

Such being the case, probably at least as useful, and certainly far easier, to list some of the things which, unless I am badly mistaken, almost certainly will not change. Not in the short- or medium term, whatever those much-abused expressions may mean. And not in the long one either.

So here goes.

Religion

* For those who believe that God exists, His ways will remain as mysterious as they have been since He spoke to Job out of the whirlwind. For those who don’t, the most important questions of all—whether the world has always existed, who or what was responsible for our appearance on earth, where we are going, how we are supposed to live, and what the point of all of it may be—will stay open.

History

* The main reason the corona outbreak will not push history off its rails is because, as I said, it will be almost entirely forgotten. The reason why it will be almost entirely forgotten is because it will be displaced by other events; whatever is happening today is always considered the most important of all. Not necessarily because it is, but because that is the way people’s minds work.

* Furthermore loose talk about pandemics notwithstanding, the number of those who die of coronavirus will hardly make a dent in global demographics. In that sense, at any rate, life seems to be stronger than death. Ergo, history will not come to an end any more than it did in 1347-51 when people thought that the Day of Judgement had come. And in 1991, when Francis Fukuyama published his famous article by that title. Instead it will continue to work as it has always done and as Hegel wrote: namely, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, And so on, by fits and starts, towards a millennium which, as he did not write, will never arrive.

Politics, International Relations, and War

* As if to prove that nothing ever changes, the world will continue to function in exactly the way Thucydides, Kautilya, Machiavelli and Hobbes said it does. Rivalry between communities, governments and states, specifically including the one between the U.S and China but also between various regional actors, will continue and be as intensive as it has always been.

* Pace the American psychologist Steven Pinker and the political scientists from whom he took his figures, wars will still be there. Most, but probably not all, civil ones in what is euphemistically known as the “developing” world. While I am willing to bet that there will be no nuclear world war, some of the wars in question will continue to be very bloody; but not nearly enough so as to destroy “civilization as we know it,” as Cold-War era people used to say. All technological progress notwithstanding, the vast majority of wars will continue to be fought on land, not at sea or in outer space. And they will be won, not by the belligerent with the most sophisticated technology but by the one that is most determined and, often enough, most brutal.

Social and Economic Affairs

* Emerging from the crisis, some people will go on working from home. But not those who matter. Why? Because the principle, les absents ont toujours tort (those who are absent are always wrong) will continue to apply.

* Contrary to the vision of a few people who foresee greater equality, the contrast between what Plato called plutos, wealth, and penia, want, will continue just as it always has. Here and there the outcome will be insurrections and civil wars. However, even the most successful of those efforts will only be effective for more than a few decades at most. The majority will only produce greater misery for almost everyone involved.

This also acts as a natural stress reliever and you generic vs viagra have got chosen a Texas driver ed course, the next major choice you have to make is whether or not to require that course on-line or to require that course face to face domestically. These generic tadalafil india are the most known process that you have to fill up. If ED oral overnight generic viagra medications doesn’t work and other risk factors such as hypertension, physical inactivity, or diabetes, with a risk serious chronic illness and death is huge. If the pill doesn’t produce the results you are levitra canada exactly looking for, let your doctor know everything do not feel embarrassed to discuss your sexual problem with your doctor. * Regardless of whether the world stays capitalist or inclines more towards some form of socialism, large fish will go on taking every opportunity to swallow smaller ones. Governments, as the largest fish of all, will continue to generate vast deficits and look for new ways to defraud their citizens so as to pay for them.

* Though some restrictions on travel will remain in force, globalization will continue. And masses of refugees, both real and fake, will continue to do whatever they can to cross national borders in search of a better life. A great many of them will succeed, causing all kinds of cultural, social, economic, legal and political problems.

Surveillance

* From my former student, the famous Yuval Harari, down, many people believe that the present crisis will accelerate the trend towards greater state surveillance and interference in our lives. Probably so; but this very trend will also accelerate the development of countermeasures such as quantum-based passwords, certain kinds of glasses and makeup, and the like. Even now, some apps will show drivers the location of mobile disease-testing stations so as to enable drivers to avoid them in case that’s what they want. In the end, surveillance is likely to be neither more nor less tight, more or less able to prevent dissension and even revolution, than it has ever been. Long-time Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu thought he had it made. Yet in the end, so oppressive was his regime that all it took to topple him was a few hostile catcalls rising from a crowd he himself had summoned to celebrate his rule. Xi Jinping, be warned.

Human Development

* Corona having gone, and further advances in computer- and brain science notwithstanding, we still won’t have the foggiest idea how dead matter can produce a mind capable of thought, emotion, and, last not least, such mysterious states as dreaming, hypnosis and comma. Nor how mind, i.e the will, can cause the body to act. Meanwhile every single human quality, starting with affection and ending with zeal, will continue to do as much as to shape our lives as it has always done. And our understanding of ourselves will remain as limited as it has always been.

* The most important social problems, meaning those associated with birth, marriage, death, and health (both physiological and mental) will persist. So will those arising out of envy and hatred as well as justice and its opposite, injustice. People will continue to earn their bread with the sweat of their brows, just as they have always done. They will also go on enjoying love, ex, company, leisure, sport, festivities of every kind, music, literature, art, etc. As a result of all this, the post-corona world will be neither more nor less happy than the one we have always inhabited.

* Finally, environmentalists, vegans and any number of other spoilsports will continue to blame mankind (themselves only excepted) for breathing, eating, drinking, farting, excreting, consuming, traveling, and having children; in short, for daring to exist on this earth.

Sex and Gender

* Sex is one of the most powerful—Freud thought, the most powerful of all—forces shaping society. It is also the method by which we humans produce offspring. As a result, no society has ever ceased thinking about it and interfering with it. As by telling people with whom they are allowed to have it, under what circumstances, and what they are and are not allowed to do while engaging in it. And that will remain the case in the future too.

* Women will continue to conceive, bear children, labor and give birth, whereas men will not. Partly for that reason, partly because they are stronger, physically, by and large men will continue to act as the defenders and feeders (qawwamun, as the Koran puts it) of women rather than the other way around. After corona as before it, a man who lays down his life to save a woman will be praised. After corona as before it, a man who allows a woman to lay down her life for him will be dishonored.

* Notwithstanding these and other privileges women enjoy, feminists, claiming to represent half of the population, will continue to complain about the other half. And the more they complain, the more their penis envy will show through.

Looking into the Future

A great many people devote much of their working lives to trying to look into the future. In the past, doing so was the province of prophets, soothsayers, magicians, and astrologists. Today we are as likely to turn to physicists, astronomers, evolutionists, physicians, economists, sociologists and futurologists of every kind. Nevertheless, our ability to understand, let alone control, our destiny will remain as feeble as it was when the first homo sapiens wondered whether or not he would still be alive on the next day.

Guest Article: Lessons for America from COVID-19.

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By

Larry Kummer*

Summary: A crisis strips away the pretense and reputations to shows a nation’s true self. COVID-19 revealed two stories about America. First, how the nation best prepared in January became one of the worst affected. Second, how our reaction to this showed America’s senescence. That is, we have become the equivalent of a cranky old guy – dysfunctional but certain that others cause all his problems. Perhaps it will help ignite a spirit of reform.

America at the beginning of the pandemic

“Obviously you need to take it seriously and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing. But this is not a major threat to the people in the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”
— Dr. Anthony Fauci on Newsmax, January 21.

That day the first case in the US was confirmed and immediately isolated. Then the CDC activated its Emergency Response System and deployed a team to Washington. Read the transcript of the press conference with health officials of the CDC and Washington State. They were confident that everything necessary was being done. This was also the consensus of US health care experts at that time (e.g., on January 21 by Vanderbilt professor William Schaffner, on February 8 by USC professor David Agus).

Were Fauci and others right, based on available information?

This post described America’s large (and expensive) preparations for an epidemic, including stockpiles of drugs and equipment. Several simulations tested America’s preparations for an epidemic – producing useful recommendations (e.g., Dark Winter in 2001, Crimson Contagion in 2019). A 2016 report on America’s response to Ebola also gave valuable recommendations.

We have the largest and most sophisticated health care system in the world. Not just our large number of ICU beds and high-tech devices per capita), but also of talent and infrastructure in the health sciences. Also, in 2009 the USAID began the PREDICT program to monitor zoonotic infectious diseases around the world (capable of jumping from animals to humans) to help provide early warning of pandemics.

The 2019 Global Health Security Index calculated that America was by far the nation best prepared for an epidemic. Statista wrote more about this on 28 February 2020. Also see “The Countries Best Prepared To Deal With A Pandemic” by Niall McCarthy at Statista, October 2019.

Plus, we had two months to mobilize our material resources and people. WHO gave early warnings (see page 2 of this), and CDC accordingly quickly responded. On January 6, the CDC issued a travel watch at Level 1 for China. On January 7, the CDC established a 2019-nCoV Incident Management group. On January 8, The CDC began alerting clinicians to watch for patients with respiratory symptoms and a history of travel to Wuhan. On January 15, a leading scientist at the CDC assured local and state public health officials “that there would soon be a test.” On January 17, the CDC issued an updated interim Health Alert Notice (HAN) Advisory to inform state and local health departments and health care providers about this outbreak and begin screening of passengers on flights from Wuhan to five major US airports. On January 31, the Trump administration announced that they were blocking the entry of Chinese nationals and requiring mandatory quarantines on US citizens returned in affected parts of China (this was widely mocked as panicky and foolish).

On January 29, Trump formed the White House Coronavirus Task Force. On February 26, Trump announced that VP Pence was “in charge.”

See my summary timeline and the larger one at Wikipedia. Fauci’s optimism on January 21, and that of other health care officials and experts in the next two weeks, was reasonable.

What went wrong?

Yet all this early action was followed by epic inaction and mistakes by Federal agencies through late March. These stories are now well known.

“As early indications of China’s coronavirus outbreak emerged in late December, the Trump administration notified Congress it would still follow through with its plan to shutter a US Agency for International Development surveillance program tasked with detecting new, potentially dangerous infectious diseases and helping foreign labs stop emerging pandemic threats around the world.” (From CNN.)

Little effort was made to screen people at our borders. Screening at airports of people from hot spots was grossly inadequate – usually none. There are reports that the Diamond Princess’ passengers were quarantined at Travis by people inadequately trained and equipped (details here).

There was no planning for a large epidemic by Federal and State health agencies. There was not even good coordination among the many Federal and State health care agencies, all running business-as-usual in their bureaucratic orbits until mid-March.

There was no mobilization of America’s vast resources of medical personnel, inventories of medical equipment, and manufacturing.

The FDA and CDC totally screwed up the provision of desperately needed tests (see a WaPo article about this sad story). As late as March 16, the CDC and FDA are announcing there is an inadequate supply of reagents used in the tests, a bottleneck that should have been recognized in January. This is inexcusable, since the rest of the world has run hundreds of thousands of tests by now.

It was quickly apparent that only forced quarantines (not absurd “self-quarantines) and cordons sanitaire are the most effective containment methods. China proved their effectiveness. Yet the US government made little of them, allowing hot spots to form and the virus to spread from these across the nation. So they used lock-downs, with their devastating effect on the economy.

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From the start, Trump’s statements have varied from calls to war against COVID-19 to saying its little more than the flu (even as late as March 9). See this “Timeline: Trump’s efforts to downplay the coronavirus threat.” Also see the Trump’s many factually false statements about COVID-19 (e.g., this list) and the warnings from his experts that he ignored. I showed these quotes to a brilliant conservative with long experience in government service. His reply: “fake news.” This is America, where only tribal truths are seen.

Much of the Right followed his lead. For example, see this about coverage by Fox News. Also this article putting Fox News’ coverage in a larger context: “The network has conditioned its viewers to hate experts and to trust miracle cures for 25 years.”

This lack of leadership from the President and VP had ill effects at all levels of America. Federal agencies were slow to mobilize. Key responses were an uncoordinated mess by State governments.

To demonstrate that this senescence affects the full US political leadership – not just Republicans – Biden and Sanders (Trump’s equally elderly challengers) were dormant, and the Democrats fought the epidemic riding their hobbyhorses of racism and climate change.

Without strong support for experts from US leaders, the public fell prey to rumors and misinformation. Many quickly turned to amateurs for information – so that the most ignorant and boldest claims dominated. See this debunking of a nonsensical theory by a right-wing historian cosplaying an epidemiologist: bogus but went “viral” anyway. For more examples, see The info superhighway makes us stupid about COVID-19). This inevitably leading to panic. As with the hysteria about masks. WHO and CDC said that the general public should not use masks unless required (e.g., when caring for someone infected) while medical personnel lacked them (e.g. see this statement). Rabble-rousing hysterics screamed that experts at CDC and WHO were lying about masks and putting us in danger!

The US was slow to provide funds for a global response. Worse, we seized vital medical supplies manufactured here purchased by our allies – while triumphantly concluding that nations were foolish to rely on China for vital medical supplies. They will not soon forget this. See Canada’s reaction here and here. A German minister condemned as “piracy” the US seizure of masks going to Berlin. Rather than a leader of a coordinated response of the West, Americans attempted to outbid France for masks already loaded on a plane for export from China.

This may be another step in the world seeing America differently, as described by Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in Foreign Affairs.

“Just as consequential as U.S. policy choices is the power of America’s example. Long before COVID-19 ravaged the earth, there had already been a precipitous decline in the appeal of the American model. Thanks to persistent political gridlock, gun violence, the mismanagement that led to the 2008 global financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and more, what America represented grew increasingly unattractive to many. The federal government’s slow, incoherent, and all too often ineffective response to the pandemic will reinforce the already widespread view that the United States has lost its way.”

A competent response: Germany

Many nations competently responded. For example, we could have learned much from the successful responses by East Asian nations. And we could learn from Germany. NYT describes their success as “The German Exception.,” with this summary by Professor Kräusslich.

“Maybe our biggest strength in Germany is the rational decision-making at the highest level of government combined with the trust the government enjoys in the population.“

China: first hit, its success copied by others

On March 10, China closed the last of its 16 temporary hospitals in Wuhan. As I wrote on March 30, China is restarting – slowly, carefully – its economy. On April 7, China ended Wuhan’s 76 day lockdown. US media reported this mournfully (e.g., NYT and CBS), rather than as a success.

The more obvious the gap between their effective response and our clownshow, the stronger the need to create an Potemkin Village reality (easy since no matter how often our leaders lie, we believe what we are told). Right-thinking Americans know that all numbers by China are probably wrong. If more were infected than China reported, that means that their success was even larger – so their success must be doubted. Tell an American that there are many foreign observers in China confirming their approximate accuracy and see the incredulous response (after all, what about the Bamboo Curtain between China and the rest of the world).

American’s were told of that the response of China and WHO were terrible with no supporting evidence. Compare this timeline of China’s response to COVID-19 with the CDC’s timeline of the US response to the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) epidemic – remembering that the US has almost 4x China’s per capita income and spends 2x to 3x more of its GDP on health care than its peer nations. We were told that the epidemic was China’s fault, for which it should be punished. Just as the 2009 Swine Flu epidemic emerged in the US and spread across the globe. There is also evidence that the first appearance of the H1N1 influenza virus in 1918 also originated in the US (details here and here). Whatever the source of the virus, we contributed to its spread (see “How {US} Generals Fueled 1918 Flu Pandemic To Win Their World War”).

As the clownish response by the US government became brutally obvious, the search for others to blame became more intense. Conservatives’ suspicion of international agencies was exploited to blame WHO. With its broad range of responsibilities and microscopic $4.2 billion budget, they blame it for not performing miracles. In the real world, WHO ably performed its primary roles as a global collector of information and coordinator of national responses.

All this probably will make impossible much effective learning from COVID-19 by America.

Conclusions

COVID-19 is a dress rehearsal for more serious crises that lie ahead. It has shown America’s senescence. Top to bottom, leaders to followers, nothing worked well. This makes our pretense of global leadership a sad joke, like somebody attempting to wear too-large shoes. If this decline continues, even our prosperity will be at risk.

Posted by permission of Larry Kummer, owner of the Fabius Maximus website.

Guest Article: Biden’s Rendezvous with Destiny

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by Jason Pack*

These are scary and unprecedented times. Our subconscious evolutionary biology makes us crave trustworthy and decisive leadership during a crisis.

I know this intuitively having gone through more than my fair share of crises. As a native Manhattanite who mostly grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey, 9/11 changed everything about my life. In its wake, I abandoned my undergrad in biology and chose to move to the Middle East.

During my six years in the region, I studied historical texts, memorized Arabic root words, authored scholarly articles, and forged life-long friendships. Yet, there were also more than a few unexpected struggles. I was tortured by the Syrian secret police and kidnapped by Kurdish separatists. I witnessed death at a car bombing in Jerusalem, stood less than ten meters from an IED in Fallujah, and cowered under the sink when my hotel took mortar fire in Baghdad. Yet to be honest, I’ve never been as worried for the future as I am now.

Over the past few days, a high school classmate in his late-30s has been hospitalized and then intubated for COVID-19, while a 25-year-old former all-American lacrosse player who lives within a mile of my house languishes at death’s door, unable to get the medications he needs. Personally, I’ve experienced increasing bouts of shortness of breath, wheezing and bone-dry coughs. Am I sick or just having a normal — albeit delayed onset — reaction to our way of life, the global economy, and my personal savings collapsing in unison? (The answer may or may not lie in the fact that my temperature hovers around 97.5 F = 36.4 C.)

I feel every bone of my body yearning for leadership. Yet, it is tragically lacking at the national and international levels.

As the certainties we hold dear appear to be shifting beneath our feet, one man is uniquely positioned to step into the void. Yet, despite his position as the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, Joe Biden appears to be balking at the chance. Now with Bernie Sanders announcing the end of his candidacy on April 8th, Joe Biden has become our leader by default — not just of the Democratic Party, but of our whole country and the free world.

We need a coordinated global response to this virus; Joe, please show us how it is done. You seem to have disappeared over the last month or so since the primaries have been postponed. This is the wrong approach, Joe. We need to see more of you on our TV screens than the ever-present Dr. Anthony Fauci. Bizarrely, the polls say Americans are more satisfied with Trump’s leadership style towards the pandemic than your own. This means you must change tack.
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Individuals don’t choose the history they get to live. But history does choose those few individuals who get to shape it. The anointed are never perfectly suited for the job, but they must let the moment mold them to its demands. Biden is now history’s instrument. And, despite any reservations we might still hold regarding his candidacy, history can give us some perspective here.

Cincinnatus was a farmer without political experience (he saved Ancient Rome) and Winston Churchill (who saved the British Empire) was a lifelong drunk and gambler. He also came into WWII with a checkered wartime record. As First Lord of the Admiralty twenty-four years earlier, he doubled down on Gallipoli leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary Commonwealth casualties. So, Joe is occasionally tongue-tied and has shifted his views on healthcare, the Hyde Amendment, and criminal justice reform. He has also been known to plagiarize his stump speeches from third-rate British politicians. No matter.

Such are the ways of history. To increase his chance of success, Biden should now hew closely to the path of our nation’s most revered wartime leaders, while selectively copying from the playbooks of our closest allies.

During the 1864 Presidential contest, Abraham Lincoln created the National Unity Party to appeal to Democrats who feared that the Republican Party was too statist. By following Lincoln’s example, Biden can unite America during the COVID-19 crisis. He must simultaneously unify the fissures within the Democratic Party and reach out to independents by continuing to stress a return to our nation’s founding principles. Just as he has promised to pick a female vice president, he should now announce the rest of his major cabinet picks in advance, prominently including both Senator Bernie Sanders and anti-Trump Republican figures.

Then he should take a page from British parliamentary practice, holding virtual shadow cabinet meetings to present fully-formulated alternatives to Trump’s policies on how to manage the healthcare system, the economy, and international cooperation to halt the virus’s spread. He should explain to the nation what measures have worked to mitigate the virus’s damage in South Korea, Germany, and Taiwan and how we might copy them.

Imagine how different this moment would feel if we had a President who could genuinely calm the nation by saying, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” Joe, if you are listening, please brush up on your corny FDR and Lincoln quotes, and get to work.

* Jason Pack a Non-Resident Fellow at the Middle East Institute and the Founder of Libya-Analysis LLC. (A version of this article appeared first on Inkstick on April 1st. Its main policy prescriptions were then loosely copied by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times on April 7th.)

Reaching for Immortality

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As anyone who has ever watched a cockroach or spider running for its life knows, all creatures, swimming, crawling, walking, running, leaping, and flying fear death as only death can be feared. However, as far as we know at present or are likely to know in the future, we are the only species whose members, once they have achieved a certain maturity, are aware that their own death is both inevitable and coming closer. Such being the case, and given the sapientia, (Latin: understanding, knowledge, wisdom) on which we pride ourselves so much, we are in a position to develop strategies to deal with it; or try to deal with it; or persuade ourselves that we are dealing with it. In these days when the dangers of corona are raising concern among billions of people around the world, I thought that outlining some of the strategies that have been or are being used for the purpose might be of some interest to my readers.

  1. Fame, power and wealth have always been interchangeable. However, of the three the first is the only one that can outlast death. Presumably that is why, as far back into history as we look and right down to the present day, people have sought it quite as eagerly as they did the second and the third. Some built pyramids, which considering that they have now lasted for forty-five centuries was not a bad investment. Some set out to conquer the world, as Alexander, Genghis Khan, and any number of lesser men did. Entire hosts of others ought immortality by means of literary, artistic, religious, philosophical and scientific achievement; as Thucydides, Horace and John Milton (all of whom explicitly said so), Phidias, the Buddha, Plato, and Newton did.
  2. Mummification. Famously, this is the method the ancient Egyptians, and by no means the Egyptians only, used. Some societies, especially in southeast Africa and parts of Indonesia, keep using it right down to the present day. The bodies, or should I say cadavers, are stripped. They are then cut open to remove the internal organs, specifically including the intestines and the brain (which, using a hook, is extracted by way of the nostrils). The body is then immersed in a special solution meant to extract its moisture—hence, its dried-up, wrinkled appearance—and stuffed so as to preserve its outline. Finally, it is wrapped in copious amounts of linen. The entire rather unwieldy thing may then be put into a coffin or several coffins that fit inside each other. Some mummies are accompanied by food, drink, household utensils, money, furniture, and the like. In China at any rate they were also attended by male and female personnel killed especially for the purpose; later statutes or statuettes, made of terra cotta or wood respectively, were substituted. Here it is not out of place to add that mummification is not limited to the ancient world but was also carried out on modern leaders such a Lenin, Stalin and Mao. In all three cases, with very mixed results.
  3. Reincarnation. The underlying idea of reincarnation is that, while the body may die, at least parts of the soul, or spirit (psyche, in Greek, anima, in Latin) do not. Instead, having left the body, it enters into another; though just how it does so and how much time elapses until it does is not very clear. In particular, Hindis and Buddhists believe that the souls of the deceased may enter not just into the bodies of men and women but into those of creatures of any kind. The soul of a person who has transgressed against religion, or perhaps one should say the proper way of life, may find himself in the body of a grasshopper. That of a person who has behaved himself, e.g by giving alms to monks or by contributing money towards the construction of a pagoda, in that of a higher-ranking man or woman. Reincarnation need not be a one-time affair. Instead, like the Energizer, will go on and on and on until Nirvanna, meaning either perfection and/or total oblivion, is achieved.
  4. Resurrection. At the heart of reincarnation is the idea that some part of the spirit remains alive even after death and that, doing so, it passes from one body to the next. Not so in the case of resurrection, at the core of which is the belief that people do in fact die but will be resurrected at some time thereafter. The role of resurrection in the Old Testament is fairly minor. Not so in the new one, where the reappearance of Jesus three days after he had been taken down from the cross and buried became an important, if not the most important, proof that he was indeed God’s son and appointed messenger. As Christianity solidified and spread during the coming centuries and millennia belief in resurrection became very widespread. In particular, two questions kept being debated and, at times, fought over. One was just when the end of days would arrive, an issue to which even the great Isaac Newton devoted much attention. The other, precisely who would be resurrected, on the strength of what (faith, good deeds, or predestination), what would happen to him or her after being resurrected (go to hell? partake of the leviathan? shelter in the bosom of Abraham?) and so on.
  5. Cryonics. A modern form of mummification is represented by a science, or perhaps it would be better to call it a pseudoscience, known as cryonics. The fact that extreme cold can greatly slow down or halt the pace at which the body disintegrates (rots away) after death has been known for a long, long time. Francis Bacon, the early seventeenth-century English lawyer, philosopher and experimentalist, died of bronchytis after trying to do just that by stuffing a dead chicken with snow. Now that the climate is warming up, repeatedly the frozen bodies of people and animals who died thousands of years ago are being found in places such as the Alps and Siberia. Routinely for several decades past eggs and sperms, both human and animal, have been frozen and stored for future use. More and more often stem cells are being treated in the same way, the idea being that they might one day be used to grow new organs in place of such as have been lost. Just as, in the past, one could pay monks to say masses for the soul of the deceased “in perpetuity,” so now there are quite some companies which, for a fee, will preserve a deceased person’s corpse by cooling it to minus 130 degrees Celsius. Having done so, they promise to keep it in its frozen state until, at some time in the future, technology will have advanced sufficiently for the person in question to be defrozen and reanimated.

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  6. Uploading. The most recent method for avoiding death is uploading. On one hand, brain scientists claim, there is little doubt that thought and emotion are, at bottom, nothing but electronic pulses which are passed by almost 100 billion cells, which are interlinked by at least 100 trillion connections. On the other, advances in computer science for the first time have resulted in hardware that may one day make it possible for computers to be provided with direct links to our brains. Not only might the contents—all the memories, all the thoughts, all the feelings, all the emotions—of each brain be put on a hard disk, or cloud, or some similar device, but we could preserve it for as long, and make as many copies of it as, we like. In this way what used to be known as our soul and is presently known as our personality would be preserved; whereas the rest of our bodies could be dispensed with.
  7. Replication/reassembly. As assorted gurus never stop saying, we live in the age of information. Meaning that, if only we could get to know the precise structure and characteristics of every single cell, molecule, and atom in our body, complete with the links between each of them and all the rest, we should be able to either replicate it—make exact copies—or reassemble it ex nihilo. Perhaps by using nanotechnology and/or some super-sophisticated three-dimensional printer?

Each of these approaches has its problems. Those surrounding the first were perhaps best described by Woody Allen. As he once said, “I do not want to live in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live in my apartment.” The second, mummification, may go a tiny little bit towards preserving the body’s outline. However, it cannot do anything at all to ensure the survival of the spirit; no mummy has ever moved, felt, thought, or spoken. The third, reincarnation, is based on pure belief and, since the soul is invisible, can never be proved to have taken place. How do you know that the fly buzzing around your desk has the soul that once belonged to your late grandfather, or that the grandfather you love so much used to be a horse in his previous life? The same applies to the fourth, resurrection; in this case proof, if it is possible at all, will have to wait until the Day of Judgment. The fifth, cryonics, the sixth, uploading, and the seventh replication/reassembly, are beset by all sorts of technical problems that make it more than doubtful whether they can ever succeed in their purpose.

My own conclusion from all this? Though good evidence is lacking, attempts to draw death’s sting probably got under way almost as soon as homo sapiens made his appearance 100-200,000 years ago. Probably the most successful one has been the first. As for the rest, not one of them has come even close to success, at least not the kind of experimentally-verifiable success that modern science would recognize as such; and chances are that none of them are going to do so anytime soon either.

Such being the case, we might as well return to the advice of Ecclesiastics:

Have a life with the woman you love all the days of your fleeting life, which has been given to you under the sun, all your fleeting days. For that is your portion in life and in your struggle under the sun.