Johnny Has a Hobby Horse

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Martin van Creveld

As I have written before, I get quite some feedback to my posts. Some praise them, others condemn. Some ask for permission to re-post them on their own blogs, which I almost always grant. I am grateful for all of them, for they make me think. Specifically for one of the last, sent by M. E. in response to “Sickly, Sick, Widowed.” It went as follows:

“About feminism, have you ever wondered/suspected that you are riding a hobbyhorse?”

A hobbyhorse, my correspondent was kind enough to explain, “is a polite way of saying that the rider is not entirely compos mentis… You are making a fool of yourself with your grand theory about feminism. From your title I infer that you are widowed and ailing. This seems to be hinting that what you’re writing is not to be taken as entirely (or at all?) seriously but that can’t be so if you went to the trouble to write a book on this subject.”

Thank God, I am neither widowed nor ailing. Not yet, any rate. But never mind. Twenty-four centuries ago, there was an Athenian named Socrates. He was poor, but not because he did not know how to look after himself. In fact the sources present him as a man who was perfectly able to make money had he wanted to. And so brave in battle that no one dared stand in his way. But instead of exercising these talents he had a hobbyhorse. He used to go around the agorai (public squares) and streets, buttonholing people and asking them to tell him the meaning of such things as justice, beauty, truth, etc. For riding that hobbyhorse he was executed.

Four hundred years ago, there was a Dominican monk called Giordano Bruno. A follower of Copernicus, he argued that the earth revolved around the sun, instead of vice versa. Much worse still, he raised the possibility that the universe might be infinite and have no center. It might even contain other suns with planets with life on them. For riding that hobbyhorse, he was burnt at the stake.

A hundred and sixty-two years ago there was born, in the little known Dutch village of Zundert, a man by the name of Vincent van Gogh. Growing up, he started painting like no one has ever painted before or since. However, the fact that he painted like no one else meant that no one wanted his work. He lived in dire poverty—but for his brother’s support, he would have starved. Frustrated because no one understood what he was trying to do, he became “not entirely compos mentis.” He spent time in various lunatic asylums and at one point cut off his ear, offering it to a prostitute he met in a brothel. At the age of 36 he put a gun to his chest and fired. He, too, rode a hobbyhorse. As he is supposed to have said, what would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Fifty years ago there was an American woman journalist named Betty Friedan. As she told me during an interview she gave me in May 2002, she lost her job because she was pregnant. Not once but twice. That made her seethe with anger. Turning her face against the prevailing wisdom of the time, which considered that women’s proper place was the home, she wrote The Feminine Mystique. This hobbyhorse made her world famous. Based on our conversation, though, I suspect that, had she risen to witness today’s feminism which, seeing every woman as a victim, makes a mockery of the equality she sought, she would have returned to the grave as fast as she could.

Briefly, it is hobbyhorses that make the world go round. That does not mean that anyone who rides a hobbyhorse will necessarily turn out to be a Socrates, a Bruno, a van Gogh, or a Friedan. Of course not. For every titan there are a thousand, perhaps ten thousand, dwarfs. Yet it is also true that, but for the dwarfs, the titans almost certainly could never have grown as titanic as they did. Who ever heard of the painters Willem Roelofs? Or of Anton Mauve? Yet in their own time they did their best and enjoyed modest success. More important to our purpose, they were among van Gogh’s earliest teachers and had quite some influence on him. To Mauve he even dedicated one of his own paintings.

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Having studied Mars for so long, I became interested in Venus. After all, it was she who required protection, often instigated the enterprises he undertook, and loved him after he had successfully completed them. That is why I devote a considerable part of my time and energy to trying to understand the respective natures of men and women and the relationship between them. Past, present, and, if possible, future. I studied this subject just as I did all the rest: meaning, by doing it my way. Not that of certain others, however learned and however aggressive in pushing their views while trying to ridicule or shut up everyone else.

Nietzsche says that no one grows up until he recaptures the absolute earnestness of a child at play. Like the anonymous toddler in the photograph, I am very proud of my hobbyhorse. The following Dutch rhyme, which I remember from my childhood, sums it all up:

Johnny has a hobby horse

Without a purpose, without a cause.

Around he rides, without effect

Quite naked, just like that.

Sickly Sick, Widowed

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

If feminists are right and women are really oppressed, exploited and discriminated against in countless ways, why do women live longer than men? And why, for every widower in the U.S, there are four widows? Ask any doctor, and chances are that he or she will mumble something about estrogen providing protection for the female body.

The doctors are wrong. True, lack of statistical information makes it hard to calculate the relative life-expectancy of men and women before about 1800. However, other kinds of evidence, such as archaeological remains, church records, and the like do enable us to evaluate the situation in certain communities at certain times. Almost unanimously, studies of the subject point to a single conclusion: from Neolithic times through Greek and Roman ones right down to the end of the eighteenth century, in all known societies men seem to have outlived women.

Since then, what a change! The first two countries in which women started outliving men were France and Sweden just before 1800. As the nineteenth century went on, other Western European ones as well as the United States followed suit. By 1900, the only West European/North American country in which that was not the case was poor, backward Ireland. South and East Europe, both of which were equally poor, followed during the first decades of the twentieth century.

After 1945 it was the turn of Asia and Africa. By 1990 men still outlived women in only ten countries. The largest one, Bangla Desh, accounted for two hundred million out of the three hundred million people involved. All ten had a per capita GDP of less than one thousand dollars a year. In 2011, according to United Nations figures, the one country where men still outlived women was Swaziland, home to fewer than 1,400,000 people out of about seven billion on this earth. Even there the gap between the sexes was small—about six months—and shrinking.

Has the hormonal makeup of men and women changed? Or are the doctors wrong, and do hormones have nothing to do with the issue? Keep in mind that the change got under way a hundred and fifty years before women started taking estrogen. Also that most doctors know nothing about history; making them think that what they see in the present has always been there in the past too. Hence the second answer seems much more likely than the first.

In fact, two factors account for the process. One is the very great decline in the death rate of women during, or soon after, giving birth. Here it must be pointed out that, until the middle of the sixteenth century, whenever a baby was about to come into the world men were thrown out of the room, if not the house. Child-delivery was the near-exclusive domain of women, midwives in particular. The latter’s ignorance was proverbial.

The first vernacular manual on childbirth was published in 1513. Originally written in German by a male doctor, Eucharius Roeslin, it was translated into many languages and became a European best-seller. The introduction contains the following limerick:

I’m talking about the midwives all

Whose heads are empty as a hall.

And through their dreadful negligence

Cause babies’ deaths devoid of sense.

So thus we see far and about

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Official murder, there’s no doubt.

That was the state of the art before male doctors started taking over. To be sure, at that time and for centuries thereafter medical education left something to be desired. However, in comparison with the midwives, many of whom had received no formal training at all, the doctors were geniuses indeed. At least they could read! First in Zurich and then in other European cities, gradually they assumed responsibility for training, examining, and licensing midwives.

Since the universities did not take female students, all doctors were male. Later in the century they themselves started delivering children or at least supervising midwives while they did so. In 1569 a male French Huguenot doctor living in England, William Chamberlen, invented the principal instrument used for the purpose, the forceps. For a century and a half it was kept a family secret.

Even in Europe, let alone other continents, male doctors did not take over everywhere at once. Since doctors cost money, the first to hire them were high-class women. Queen Anne of England (1665-1714) may have been the first royal person to employ a male doctor to help her give birth. Her subsequent decision to knight him led to numerous scurrilous jokes. Progress, though slow, was steady. By 1800 the incidence of so-called peri-natal deaths among mothers had declined to about half of what it had been three hundred years earlier.

Not all women followed the queen’s example. In 1797 the founding mother of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, then thirty-seven years old, refused her friends’ suggestion that she call a doctor to help her deliver. Trusting to a midwife instead, she died while giving birth to her second child, Mary—who later became famous as the author of Frankenstein.

The second factor that caused the balance in life expectancy between men and women to shift was the industrial revolution. As long as most people made their living in agriculture, both men and women worked in the muck out of doors (though women always did so less than men). The onset of industrial revolution around 1800 changed the situation. Moving to the cities, many men engaged in such trades as construction and transportation, which meant that they continued to work out of doors in all sorts of weather and under all sorts of conditions. Others moved from the healthy countryside into the filthy, noisy factories; others still faced the hardest lot of all by descending into the mines that provided coal for them.

As nineteenth-century English statisticians working for insurance companies realized full well, the more industrialized any district the more women tended to outlive men. Here and there, “progress” actually caused men’s life expectancy to decline. By contrast, contemporary norms dictated that all but the poorest women should not work at all. Even the few city-women who did work outside the home almost always did so indoors as servants, governesses, seamstresses, etc. Unlike men, they were spared both the rigors of the climate and the worst effects of the factories.

Both factors continue to operate today. All over the world efforts to reduce women’s peri-natal death have caused it to decline to a minute fraction of what it used to be even a few decades ago. For men the situation is entirely different. The tradition under which they do practically all the hardest, dirtiest, most dangerous work remains in force; in the U.S, for example, the one job in which there are no women at all is garbage-collection. Female miners, divers, fishermen, miners, and lumberjacks are not exactly common either. That is why, though about as many women as men work outside the home, men are thirteen times more likely to die following an industrial accident than women.

You might think that, since men work in more hazardous occupations than women and have a lower life expectancy, they would and should get more medical attention. If so, think again. In every modern country women receive far more medical attention than men. There is nothing new about this. Ancient Egyptian doctors wrote books on female diseases; but when it comes to male ones all we have is blank papyrus. The situation in antiquity and the middle ages was similar. The term gynecology, women’s medicine, was invented over a century and a half ago. However, to this day my word processor, courtesy of Bill Gates, has never heard of andrology.

Go to any hospital, and you are almost certain to find a women’s ward responsible for treating such diseases as breast cancer, cancer of the cervix, and so on. But the same hospital is almost equally certain not to have a department specializing in men’s diseases. Perhaps because society expects men “to take it,” as the saying goes, men also visit psychologists and psychiatrists far less often than women do. From the time of Charcot and Freud on, but for female patients most practitioners in these fields would have had to close shop. And who pays for it all? Men, of course, by means of their taxes and social security contributions.

Thus a virtuous cycle (for women) and a vicious one (for men) is created. The more money is spent to treat women, the more they outlive men. The more they outlive men, the more treatment they need. For example, as of 2000 in the US out of every three dollars spent on health two were spent to treat women. In the same country three out of every four dollars spent on medical research were accounted for by women’s diseases. Four times as much is spent on finding a cure for breast cancer as on doing the same for prostate cancer. Yet whereas one in eight women will get breast cancer during her life, a man’s chances of contracting prostate cancer are actually somewhat higher (one in six). If that is not discrimination, I’d dearly like to know what is.

In respect to the field of medicine as to so many others, those who invented the myth of women’s “oppression,” “exploitation,” and “discrimination” deserve the Joseph Goebbels Award for deceptive propaganda. As has been said, one can mislead some of the people some of the time. But one cannot mislead all the people all of the time.

The feminist narrative has now misled far too many people for far too long. It is high time that it be exposed for what it really is, the lie of the century.

Guest Article: The SECDEF Lied

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

by Bill Lind*

In announcing that all positions in the U.S. armed forces would be opened to women, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter lied. According to the December 4 New York Times, he said,

They’ll [women] be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers, and everything else that was previously open only to men.

That statement is false. Women will not be able to do those things. Their bodies are not designed to do many of the tasks those positions entail. So long as realistic standards are maintained for those specialties, women will not be able even to qualify for them much less perform adequately in them. Men and women are different, physically and mentally, and their traditional social roles reflect their inherent differences.

Had the Truth Fairy landed on the SECDEF’s tongue as he was about to make his announcement, he would have said,

We are opening all positions in the armed forces to women. Women will not be able to do many of the duties entailed especially in the combat arms. We–the Obama administration–don’t care about that. Our ideology of cultural Marxism demands we pretend men and women are interchangeable. We will do whatever is necessary to maintain that illusion. In this case, if women cannot meet the standards, we will change the standards. If not enough women make it into the combat arms, we will establish quotas.

If, in combat, women cannot perform the mission, that’s not our problem. If it means lost engagements and unnecessary American casualties, what is that to us? Our ideology comes first. Get with the party’s program–or else.

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Here again we see the slide of state armed forces into history’s wastebasket. Playthings of a political establishment that knows nothing of war, they exist for every purpose except fighting. Many of those inside them have figured this out. An Army study done at least ten years ago found that two-thirds of the Army’s women and one-third of its men disagreed with the statement, “The Army’s main purpose is to fight.” Most state armed forces produce so few fighters from their total manpower that they could not fight if they wanted to, not against any serious opponent.

So why do we keep them around, at immense cost? Mostly from habit. Few politicians know enough to see their obsolescence, and fewer still would take the political risks involved in pruning them back to budgets that reflect their military utility. The public, wallowing in the usual “Support the troops” rhetoric, cannot see their uselessness, and the air shows are fun to watch.

For the establishment, state militaries remain highly useful. They provide jobs and money that can be steered to political allies. Defense companies are big political donors. If you vote right, when you leave office many will offer you paid seats on their boards, plus lobbying contracts.

Senior officers feed from the same troughs, not to mention pensions that most people can only dream about (paid for by those dreamers). Once you make it to lieutenant colonel, the pay is great and the duties are easy, so long as you don’t object to working on vast staffs that produce nothing but contentless briefings which you must pretend to take seriously. If you hope to keep moving on up the career ladder, don’t forget the knee pads and the vaseline.

So to this dysfunctional and militarily impotent stew let’s now add women. Why not? Can anything make it worse than it already is? Actually, in this case yes, because putting women in combat units undermines the basic reason why they fight, unit cohesion. Instead of forming a band of brothers, the men fight each other over the women. When I asked the captain of an amphib with a male/female crew the fraternization rate, he replied, “100% of course. I have male sailors in knife fights over women officers.”

But in the end, it doesn’t matter much. These institutions are finished. Every time they take on non-state, Fourth Generation opponents they get their butts kicked.

4GW forces are about fighting. They don’t have much gear and their technical skills often aren’t great. But they and the men in them want to fight. Most of their personnel are fighters. Senior officers regularly get killed. Some of them seriously study war, a practice virtually unknown among our officers.

So the wheel of fortune turns. The fat, dumb, and happy careerists in their pressed camis are on the way down, and the lean and hungry believers with their AKs and IEDs are on the way up. Unserious, womanized state armed forces will vanish with the states they cannot protect and their ideologies not worth defending.

* Bill Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4^th Generation Warfare Handbook (2011) as well as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRIGHT on 11.12.2015.

How My Family Survived the Holocaust

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

How did your family survive the Holocaust? Is a question I have heard many, many times. So this week, instead of addressing the usual topics, let me say a few words about that.

My maternal grandfather, Louis Wijler (1890-1977), was a self-made man He was also a very rich one, having worked his way up from practically zero to become the largest grain-dealer in the Netherlands. When the Germans came in 1940 they took his business, Granaria NV, away from him, appointing a Verwalter, administrator, in his place. However, the Verwalter only showed himself occasionally. My grandfather had always been a generous employer and the other directors, most of whom were gentiles, remained loyal to him.

Towards the end of 1942, when the deportations were already forging ahead, he succeeded in having himself and most of his family put on a list of a thousand “prominent” Jews. Including businessmen, artists, former politicians and officials, etc. In January 1943—it was a cold winter—these people were interned in De Schaffelaar, a large country house in the Eastern Netherlands, on the understanding that they would be allowed to remain there until after the war. But this promise the Germans broke. In November they and their Dutch collaborators came to evacuate the camp and transfer its inhabitants to Westerbork. Westerbork had been erected by the Dutch government before 1939 as a camp for Jewish refugees from Germany. During the war it was where trains went to “the east.” Meaning, Auschwitz. But that was a name no one at De Schaffelaar seems to have heard

Most of the interned Jews went docilely enough. No one like the Dutch in bowing to “de overheid” (the authorities) and following orders! Not so my family. My grandfather, fully expecting that the Germans would break their promise, prepared accordingly. When the day came, he, his wife, their children four daughters, one in-law, two future in-laws, and two nephews) all managed to escape. My father, who had golden hands, used to work as a handyman in camp, simply put on his overalls, picked up his tools—my son Eldad still has his electric tester, which still works—and walked out. What nerve! But to this day he feels a little guilty about having left his fiancé, my mother to be, behind.

In the event, my mother and a cousin of hers hid under the floor of a wooden barrack used by the internees to wash and perform their ablutions. Listening to the Germans and the Dutch police looting, drinking and partying, they waited until nightfall. Then they crept out and left. Later this same man, along with his brother, succeeded in reaching the Swiss border, only to be turned away by the Swiss police. Both of them died at Auschwitz.

Others, including an aunt of mine who had just given birth, made their way out by similar methods. But that was only the first step. Next, two things were needed. First, a place to stay; second, money. Both were provided by my grandfather by way of the business. As an importer of cattle feed, he had many clients in the eastern, less developed, agricultural part of the country. Some he had known for decades. He was thus able to compile a list of “addresses,” as the saying went; meaning, people of whom he knew that they were reliable and would be willing to take him and members of his family in. Money, too, came from Granaria NV. In his memoirs, which he wrote in 1974, he laconically said that they used “all kinds of methods” to get the money out of the business without drawing the Verwalter’s attention.

Not having IDs—their own, stamped with a large “J” for “Jood,” they had hidden or thrown away—they could not show themselves on the streets. Not before they got false papers. First, fake ones, some of them produced by another relative who was a chemist and knew how to do these things; later, “real” ones. Real in the sense that the personal details and photograph were entered on official blanks the Underground had stolen from the Dutch ministry of the interior.

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Even so it was a risky business. For example, at one point my grandparents were betrayed by a company employee who had a gun put to this head. They were having their afternoon tea when the house in which they were staying was surrounded; they were barely able to hide in a pre-prepared hole between the first and second floors when the door was broken in. “Wo sind die Wijlers,” “waar zijn de Wijlers” (where are the Wijlers, in German and Dutch.) “Just left”, came the answer. Whereupon the man of the house was beaten up and taken to a concentration camp. Fortunately he survived.

My aunt, who had just given birth, and her husband stayed with friends from his university days. As he later wrote, the hardest part was not being able to return a favor to your hosts, who had hidden you at great risk to themselves. At one point, they too learnt that they had been betrayed and that the Germans were looking for a young couple with a baby. Whereupon they hid the girl—she was about a year old, and fast asleep—in a box, shoved her under a bed, and walked out, hand in hand. Fortunately she did not wake up and survived. But that was not the end of the story. At one point, to hide her, they gave her to a non-Jewish couple for safekeeping. When the war ended the couple, having become strongly attached to the girl, refused to give her back. In the end, give her back they did—but what a tragedy for both sides.

And so it went. Each family member had his or her own narrow escapes. Here is one story my father told me. He was living in the underground when a German soldier knocked on the door. He had been sent, he explained, by the Ortskommandant (local commander) who wanted to see my father. The German was elderly, perhaps fifty years old (my father was 26), carried an old carbine, and did not look terribly dangerous. This gave my father courage. Courage, or was it chuztpah, impudence, was what you needed most. He answered that he would not allow himself to be coerced. Whereupon the German burst out and said that he too had been coerced. His wife was German, and that was how the Wehrmacht had got him in his native Czechoslovakia! My father gave his word that he would visit the Kommandant next day. He knew better than to keep his promise and disappeared.

He had several similar escapes. On two occasions he was stopped by Dutch SS men. On the first one they wanted to requisition his bicycle (with tires made out of old automobile tires). On the second they were looking for young males to send to Germany as forced labor. Both times he was able to outwit the men by claiming that he was not just an accountant, which he was, but an accountant working for het Rijk (the Reich, i.e. the government, in Dutch).

The others used similar methods. Always keeping an eye open. Always changing “addresses,” bluffing their way through when they were stopped and questioned, almost all of them were able to hold out until the end of the war. Almost of them are dead now. Not so my father, who is 97 years old and a widower. I visit him once a week and push him around in his wheelchair.

The moral he drew from his experience? That he could have made a good actor.

Women Outperforming Men

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

As per grades, first at school and now at the universities as well, women are increasingly outperforming men. To some that fact, allegedly coming after millennia of subjugation and oppression, is a blessing. Others see it as a danger-sign that points to the feminization of society which, on pain of losing the competition with other, more virile, nations must be avoided at all cost. But is the claim true? Fifty-two years after Betty Friedan first raised the standard of revolt, only about 5 percent of heads of state are female; out of Forbes’ ten best-paid American business executives, not a single one is. Further down the list, the situation is hardly any different. The gap in earnings remains almost as large as it was in ancient Rome where, everything else being equal, female slaves were valued at about two thirds of male ones. Similar facts could be cited almost indefinitely. They show that, now as ever, the higher on the greasy pole one climbs the fewer women one encounters. By one calculation, should present trends continue, it will take another 150 years for the gap in earnings to close. If, which I personally doubt very much, it ever does.

How to explain these facts? The standard interpretation, put forward by countless feminists the world over, is discrimination. This idea has the advantage that it enables women to occupy the high moral ground. Often it also enables them to harass and even bully men in- and out of court; few things are harder to refute, and more likely to damage a man’s career, than being accused of discriminating against a female employee.

The difficulty with this argument is that, in every developed country, women now form a majority of the population. Their share in the workforce is also very close to that of men. How, in a democracy, a majority can discriminate against a minority is easy to see; parts of the US Constitution were expressly designed to prevent just that. But the opposite is not true. This fact makes the explanation appear unlikely. Unless—and as we shall see in a moment, there are some reasons to think so—a number of those who do the discriminating are themselves women.

Follow some other possible explanations:

Grades do not mean nearly as much as most people believe. Or why else have girls been outperforming boys at school for over a century? One could even argue that the qualities needed to succeed at school, primarily the ability to sit still and repeat what the teacher has said, are very different from those needed to do the same in life. Consider the careers of such super-performers as Bill Gates and Steven Jobs, both of who dropped out of college before going on to change the world. Or of George Bush, Jr., a very mediocre student who, it is said, only made it through Harvard by daddy’s money; and any number of similar cases both ancient and modern.
At school, and later at the universities, women tend to go for fields that are associated with low incomes. Such as the humanities, teaching, social work, and the like. Fields that are, or at any rate are perceived as being, easy and “soft.” One result, in the words of one scholar, is that “the available evidence indicates that women are less knowledgeable than men in areas of personal finance, and these findings appear to hold true for a variety of populations.” Attempts to change the situation by making more women take up science and technology go back at least as far as the 1930s, when Stalin tried to use his iron first for the purpose. To little avail, as far as anyone can see.
Women on the average are less competitive and less motivated to “succeed” than men are. One possible reason for this is that they have less testosterone in their bodies; another, that they can always opt out of the rat race by finding a man who will pay the rent. The opposite is not true. Statistics clearly show that marriages in which the woman make more than her husband are much more likely to fall apart than those in which that is not the case. In the words of an American acquaintance of mine, “twice I married women who earned more than me—and twice they divorced me.”

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Following up on this argument, Douglas Kinnaird, managing director of UK recruitment consultancy MacDonald Kinnaird, argues that women are discriminating against themselves. “Fifty-three per cent of lawyers graduating are female and 52 per cent of chartered accountants graduating are female,” says Kinnaird. “The response we’ve seen to advertised jobs on average from women over 25 years is 3.7 per cent, so for every 100 applications, only three are female. That tells me that it’s women who discriminate against themselves.”
Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook and one of the very few self-made female billionaires around, explains there are three reasons behind the small number of women in senior management positions. At first it was good old male chauvinism. Men didn’t want to recruit females; but, fascinatingly, females did not want to work for females in some cases. They must have known why. The second reason was that, when a job came up internally, women just didn’t apply; this links up well with the previous paragraph. The third was that most people who get ahead in large companies do so thanks to a mentor who smooths the way and encourages them. However, senior men are no longer prepared to do that with young women because of the potential for gossip and worse. As a result, women can’t get a mentor.
See on this, incidentally, my post, “Here They Go Again,” of 28.5.2015.
There still remain, in contemporary society, many jobs that require physical force, coping with dirt, and/or facing danger. The number of women who take up these jobs is almost zero; often enabling men with less formal schooling to make as much, or more, as better-educated women do.
The drive, on pain of becoming one of nature’s duds, to get pregnant, deliver and raise children. It is true that the age at which women have their first child is going up. Nevertheless, about four out of five women will have one or more of them at some point in their lives. And invest much time and energy in raising them, of course. That explains why women, who during their early years at work often earn as much as their male colleagues, tend to fall behind later on. Also why, the more “successful” a woman, the fewer children she is likely to have.
More and more men seem to be going GALT. They do not go to college, do not look for a career, and refuse to marry. As used to be the case in much of pre-modern Africa, and often remains the case today, they form temporary liaisons with women—this is called “hooking up”—before leaving them to raise whatever children they may have on their own. Whereas they themselves flutter from one woman to the next. The outcome, in the words of author Ruth Sidel, is “women and children last.” Left without male protection, such women are the poorest, least successful, part of the entire population.

In sum, women may be outperforming men at school. But definitely not where it matters, i.e. life. So it is, and so it is likely to remain for all time to come.

The Idiots

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

For the purpose at hand, it all started in Israel. Back in the early 1980s General (ret.) Ariel Sharon was minister of defense under Prime Minister Menahem Begin. Assisted by a Hebrew University Professor whose field was Islamic studies, he came up with the bright idea of forming a religious-conservative opposition to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The center of the movement was to be in Hebron, the principal city of the southern, and socio-economically less developed, part of the West Bank. In return for the right to rule over their people’s day-to-day affairs, the so-called “Rural Societies” were to oppose the PLO and tacitly accept Israeli rule. The outcome? Hamas, meaning Islamic Resistance Movement. In 2006 it took over control of the Gaza Strip. Having done so, for years on end it waged a terrorist campaign against Israel. Though apparently cowed by Operation Protective Edge in 2014, it is even now threatening to renew the rocket attacks at any time it feels like doing so.

Others, the Americans in particular, have committed similar errors. First, during the early 1980s, came their attempts to resist the Soviets in Afghanistan. This meant supporting the Mujahedeen, a movement that combined nationalism and religion in fighting the Red Army which had invaded the country. And, yes, it worked. After almost ten years of warfare the Soviets were forced to retreat. And what happened? Some Afghan “freedom fighters” spread all over the world, promoting terrorism wherever they went. Others joined the Taliban and, later, Al Qaeda. Enough said.

Next, in 2003, came the invasion of Iraq. In the name of democracy, women’s rights, and, some dared suggest, oil. To be sure, Saddam Hussein was not exactly a nice man. In 1990 he invaded and occupied Kuwait; defeated, he continued to tyrannize his own people. Earlier he had even used gas to asphyxiate his enemies. Yet he was neither a religious fanatic nor, it seems, more involved in terrorism than many other states are. Sitting in his “box,” constantly attacked from the air, and laboring under sanctions that severely hurt his economy he had long ceased to present a danger to any of his neighbors. The invasion of Iraq, followed by his own execution, destabilized the country. It also stoked the religious antagonisms that had been waiting just under the surface of his secular rule. The outcome: massive terrorism committed by Shi’ites against Sunnis and by Sunnis against Shi’ites. Not to mention the birth of Daesh which started in Iraq and has since spread to Syria as well.

One might think that the West, with the US at its head, should have learnt something from its disastrous attempts to support religious Islamic movements. But no, no way. The next war in which the West intervened was the one in Libya. Again it was done in the name of democracy, humanity, and women’s rights—the dictator and his collaborators, it was later claimed, had been raping their own female soldiers left and right. Again the opponent was a secular dictator. Muamar Gadhafi was as cruel as many and more quirky than most. But at any rate he was able to maintain order in his own country. During his last decade or so in power he even opposed terrorism. Following a civil war that lasted some six months, he was defeated and killed. With the result that his country fell apart and is now one of the happiest stamping grounds where Daesh is having a field day recruiting supporters and threatening Europe with terrorism.

Next, Syria. Like Iraq, Syria was ruled by a military dictator, Bashir Assad. As a ruler he was neither better nor worse than Hussein and Gadhafi had been. He supported Hezbollah against Israel and allied himself with Iran, in many ways acting as the latter’s long arm on the shore of the Mediterranean. However, like the other two, he ruled his country with an iron fist and does not seem to have engaged in international terrorism. Not perfect, one would have thought, but as good a regime as a country like Syria can have. In May 2011 civil war broke out. In this war the West, and less actively Israel, found themselves siding with Assad’s opponents. They even invented a “liberal” opposition which, as it turned out, hardly existed. Three years passed before Washington suddenly woke up to the existence of Daesh, a Sunni-led terrorist organization that had spread from Iraq. Again, enough said.

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Yet another country, one in which a similar error was narrowly avoided, is Egypt. Coming to power, President Obama promised to reach out to the peoples of Islamic countries even if—partly because—it meant going over the heads of their loathsome despots. Feeble as it was, the attempt does seem to have played some role in the so-called Arab Spring. One country in which it did so was Egypt whose population rose against President Mubarak and toppled his regime. And what happened? In the only more or less free elections ever held in Egypt’s 5,000 years’ history, the Moslem Brotherhood won. The outcome for Israel, and therefore for the Middle East, in particular could have been catastrophic. Mounting a coup, General Assisi prevented the worst. But no thanks either to Obama or to the West as a whole.

Let’s finally cease kidding ourselves. Arab countries, all of them without exception, are backward. Most are still tribal. That means that they are organized on lines other, more developed countries, have left behind centuries ago. Very few have what one would call a civil society consisting of a solid middle class. None has ever known the meaning either of democracy, or of the rule of law, or of human rights, or of freedom as Westerners understand it. During the middle ages they set up a brilliant civilization, or so historians say. Next, however, they missed the Renaissance. And the Reformation; and the Scientific Revolution; and the Enlightenment; and democracy in the form of the American and French Revolutions; and finally the Industrial Revolution as well. Not to mention the great and glorious Feminist Revolution, of course. Apart from that, they are the most progressive people in the world. Especially when yelling Allahu Akbar before sticking a knife into someone, or shooting him, or blowing themselves up.

Such is the situation. That is why, when it comes to an Arab country, the choice is always between a dictator—either hereditary or other, either with a moustache or not—and anarchy. A dictator may mean war. But that is something which, as the Israeli-Arab wars and the two successful campaigns (1991 and the first few weeks of 2003) against Saddam Hussein have shown, can be handled if necessary. What the West, and indeed the world as a whole, cannot handle is anarchy and the terrorism it spouts indiscriminately in all directions.

Will the idiots, and I don’t mean the Arabs of whom nothing can be expected, ever, ever learn?

Guest Article — Men are “going Galt”. Marriage is dying. Will society survive?

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

By the Editor of the Fabius Maximus website

Summary: Gender roles are changing at a rate not seen since the invention of agriculture. Marriage, the institution most affected, must also change or wither away. Here are reports with facts about marriage today and speculation about their meaning. All we know is that the future of marriage will be different than what we think of as “traditional” marriage.

Marriage: an institution in flux.
The facts about marriage.
One theory about the cause: men are “going Galt”.
Will it be the end of civilization?
Clear thinking about the problem.
The 1st shot in next phase of the gender revolution.
Conclusions.
For More Information.

(1) Marriage: an institution in flux

Marriage has been an institution in flux for centuries, but the rate of change accelerated after California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the revolutionary Family Law Act of 1969, retroactively abolishing the “traditional” binding contract of marriage and replacing it with no-fault divorce. This created our present system of serial monogamy (a series of monogamous pairings with the pretense of being for life). The feminist revolutions which followed forced further changes in marriage. Since then we’ve slid along the slippery slope, and still cannot see what lies at the end.

Let’s start this examination at an interview with Janice Shaw Crouse. She gives a status report on marriage today: “Bachelor Nation: 70% of Men Aged 20-34 Are Not Married“…

“Far too many young men have failed to make a normal progression into adult roles of responsibility and self-sufficiency, roles generally associated with marriage and fatherhood” … The high percentage of bachelors means bleak prospects for millions of young women who dream about a wedding day that may never come. “It’s very, very depressing … They’re not understanding how important it is for the culture, for society, for the strength of the nation to have strong families.”

Crouse sees the present but only in terms of yesterday’s norms. Today many young men reject the “normal progression into adult roles”. Many young women no longer “dream about a wedding day”, or are unwilling to make the compromises with a man to make that happen. As for the effect on society, it is just another of great experiments that we’re conducting — with our society as the lab rat.

Janice Shaw Crouse is a senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute at Concerned Women for America. She is the author of Marriage Matters: Perspectives on the Private and Public Importance of Marriage (2012), Children at Risk: The Precarious State of Children’s Well-Being in America and The Strength of a Godly Woman: Finding Your Unique Place in God’s Plan.

(2) The facts about marriage

For more about the facts Crouse describes, see the Pew Research report “Record Share of Americans Have Never Married As Values, Economics and Gender Patterns Change” (September 2014). It’s weak about the causes. For example, they don’t mention that increasing rates of obesity take many young people off the “market” for marriage, that the increased availability of sex outside marriage reduces men’s incentives to marry, or the increased “competition” of games and porn as alternatives to women.

Pew’s research shows that men’s weakening economic status vs. women renders many of them unmarriageable. The widening education gap guarantees that the economic gap will continue to widen. We already can see the effects rippling across society as women are moving on top of men in America.

But although the role of each of these factors remains obscure, the results are obvious and even predictable.

(a) More young people remain unmarried

(b) More young people will never marry: a 5x increase between 1960 and 2030

(3) One theory about the cause: men are “going Galt”

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In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged the wealthy “go Galt” and stepping away from the rat race to let the rest of society fend for itself. But now, in one of the most unanticipated turns of history, it appears that young men are doing so, preferring the easy enjoyments of porn and computer games instead of pursuit of career advancement and women.

Hundreds of websites for men espouse these new values. It’s described by psychologist Helen Smith in Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters (2013).

American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are consciously and unconsciously going “on strike.” They are dropping out of college, leaving the workforce and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this “man-child” phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility simply because they can. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them?

As Men on Strike demonstrates, men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the twenty-first century. Men are starting to fight back against the backlash. Men on Strike explains their battle cry.

For a more explicit version of this thinking see “Why men won’t marry you” by Suzanne Venker at Fox News and “Why You’re Not Married” by Tracy McMillan at the Huffington Post.

(4) Will it be the end of civilization?

Left and Right offer us competing visions of a post-marriage (traditional) society. The Left hopes for a more egalitarian society, with government assistance substituting for the family (as is happening in Scandinavia).

The Right fears that continued decay in the current family structure means the decay of civilization — as George Gilder explains in Sexual Suicide (1973). These trends continued for another decade without an apocalypse, so he reissued the book in 1986 as Men and Marriage. It’s time for a new edition! But we should not ignore Gilder’s warnings. Perhaps he was just early, not wrong.

Drug Addiction, lack of education, welfare, children in poverty, violence, unemployment, single-parent homes-these critical problems facing our country today. Many ideas have been presented regarding the cause of these problems, but only George Gilder speaks directly and with authority about their one undeniable source: the disintegration of the American family.

Men and Marriage examines the loss of the family and the well-defined sex roles it used to offer and how this loss has changed the focus of our society. Poverty, for instance, comes from the destruction of the family when single parents are abandoned by their lovers or older women are suddenly divorced because society approves of the husband’s new, younger girlfriend.

Gilder claims that men will only own up to their paternal obligations when the women lead them to do so and that this civilizing influence, balanced with, proper economic support, is the most important part of maintaining a productive, healthy, loving society.

(5) One woman’s clear thinking about the problem

Unlike the above analysts, who see the decline of marriage as resulting from men’s weakening interest and ability to marry, here’s a woman warning that women are a cause of falling marriage rates.

When people complain of men not marrying (even they who are able), they forget how little women offer in exchange for all they get by marriage. Girls are seldom taught to be of any use whatever to a man, so that I am astonished only at the numbers of men who do marry! Many girls do not even try to be agreeable to look at, much less to live with. They forget how numerous they are, and the small absolute need men have of wives; but, nevertheless, men do still marry, and would oftener marry could they find mates — women who are either helpful to them, or amusing, or pleasing to their eye.

This is from The Art of Beauty by Mary Eliza Joy Haweis (1883). Concerns about the state of marriage — like worries about the younger generation — are a commonplace of history. That doesn’t mean her worries were foolish. A stable functional society requires constant thought and effort about its basic institutions.

To see women building a post-marriage society, look to the Nordic nations with their high numbers of single mothers. For example, Denmark — with its strong government financial support for single mothers, where donated sperm to single mothers is a rapidly-growing trend because women don’t need men — or perhaps men don’t want to become fathers (expressed in that article with a feminist spin: many men are “not ready for parenthood”, at least on the terms women offer).

(6) He fired the first shot in this next phase of the gender revolution

To understand what’s happening I recommend the book that started the backlash to the feminist victory: The Myth of Male Power (1993).

The Myth of Male Power explains how almost all societies (American society in particular) are both matriarchal and patriarchal, how men’s and women’s roles provide unique benefits and limitations on each gender. Both men and women may be seen to be privileged and disadvantaged, each in different ways. The focus of the book, as the title suggests, is on the male role. This is done not to slight women’s issues, but rather to supplement the ever-growing body of literature and research on gender issues which tends to frame the problems from an essentially female perspective.

(7) Conclusions

Today every society grapples with these questions. Saudi Arabia, Japan, Denmark, America — there are scores of paths to new structures for the family. I recommend learning from the successes and failures of others, remaining open to new ideas, and only slowly making changes to the legal structure of our core institutions. But I predict that America will do none of these things, and instead drift thoughtlessly into the future.

It is too soon for predictions, other than that interesting times lie ahead.

How to Fight Daesh

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Ever since Daesh first burst on the international scene back in the spring of 2014, a vast amount of ink has been spilt over its relationship with its parent organization, Al Qaeda; its objectives; its peculiar ability to attract Muslim volunteers from all over the world; as well as its methods—the latter, it turns out, taken straight from the days Mohammed and his followers first started their campaign of terror and conquest. Including beheadings, crucifixion, and the enslavement of both men and women. Let those who are interested consult the literature in question; here I want to focus on the most important problem of all, i.e. how to fight and win.

Four separate theaters of war must be distinguished, viz:

Syria and Iraq. Daesh is essentially the product of the foolish American invasion of Iraq. As former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, drawing on a traditional Islamic image, predicted, it “opened the gates of hell.” It is in these countries that Daesh was formed and where most its fighters are concentrated. The essence of the problem is political. Let Presidents Obama, Putin and Arduan finally decide on who the main enemy is and start cooperating against him. Even if it means leaving President Assad in place, at least for the time being. Let the US, Russia, and Turkey mount a combined air offensive against Daesh, targeting its forces in Syria as well as the oilfields from which it draws its revenue in Iraq. However, as over a year of strikes by aircraft and drones has shown all too clearly, air operations on their own will not do the trick. For that the assistance of Syria’s ground forces is needed. To be sure, all this means teaming up with some pretty unsavory people and countries. But what other choice is there? As long as Daesh’s main forces and leadership are not smashed, terrorism will continue. If not here then there, and if not there then here.
France and Europe. Stop shilly-shallying and start controlling immigration by every available means with the objective of bringing it to a halt. Also at sea to take care of Libya. Net install passive defenses. That means guards, metal detectors and surveillance cameras at every parking house, shopping center, theater, university, school, etc. If considered appropriate, arm them and train them in self-defense. Such measures need not be as expensive as they sound. Europe has plenty of unemployed. They should be happy to work, and their wages can be offset against the benefits they currently receive. At the most sensitive installations, such as airports, use profiling, i.e. separate people into various classes so as to identify those considered particularly dangerous and subject them to extra scrutiny. Profiling may not be very democratic. However, experience shows that it works. Set up volunteer neighborhood watches—no one knows neighborhoods better than the people who live in them. Provide them with good communications to call in reinforcements if necessary and have them cooperate closely with the local police. This method has the additional advantage of engaging people and make them feel they can do something to help. Repair any damage terrorists cause as quickly as possible so as to restore normal life and enable it to continue.
The intelligence services. Passive measures on their own are insufficient. What is needed is a high-quality organization capable of identifying terrorists, tracking them, and foiling their plots ahead of time by arresting or killing them if necessary. Also, of tracing the financial flows on which they depend and making them dry up. So beef up your intelligence services. Provide them with the most modern surveillance equipment and pass the laws that will allow them to use it. Focus on communications; by making it hard for terrorists and their supporters to talk and work together, you will draw much of their sting. Inside the national borders, make sure the various departments work in tandem. Across such borders, make sure that the borders do not stand in the way of the information flow. In other words, that the services cooperate closely both with their counterparts in other countries and with the police. A Pan-European Intelligence Czar, responsible for overall coordination, would surely be useful. Do the political problems facing the establishment of such an office turn it into an impossible dream? If so, tant pis.
The courts. An essential part of any anti-terrorist campaign is deterrence. So make sure judges have the necessary authority to do what has to be done. The establishment of special courts with augmented authority for the purpose should be considered. Punishments of the guilty should be appropriate and follow swiftly after terrorists are apprehended. They should also be well publicized.

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The above are the main elements of any successful anti-terrorist campaign. Let me conclude by listing, in addition to the does, some of the don’ts:

At all cost, don’t allow mobs to attack real and suspected terrorists and lynch them without due process of law. Uninformed and undirected, such attacks can mean gross injustices in the form of mistaken identities etc. Worse still, they will encourage the populations from which terrorists come to unite and fight back. You may end up with just what you want to prevent, i.e. civil war.
For the same reason, do refrain from using collective punishments. There is a good chance that they will turn out to be counter-productive.
Finally, the war on terror will not be won quickly. So do not expect quick results and do not allow yourself to be discouraged by possible setbacks. To be sure people are not, mount a sustained public relations campaign to explain why all those measures, as well as the inconveniences they inevitably cause, are needed.

Good luck.

The Clash of Civilizations and the End of History*

Posted on November 12, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Each year at this time, I teach a course about the Future of War at Tel Aviv University. Each year for several years, I look for an alternative to the late Samuel Huntington’s 1994 essay, “The Clash of Civilizations.” And to its progenitor, Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, “The End of History,” to which it was a response. Each year I fail to find anything as well written, as sweeping, as provocative, and as scintillating to make my students break their teeth on. And so it pleases me to devote today’s post to the question, where do those two pieces stand in the contemporary world?

To start with Fukuyama, the argument, following in the footsteps of Hegel, goes roughly as follows. History consists of man’s unceasing search for the best system of government as an indispensable step towards The Good Life. In 1776 (the American Revolution) and 1789 (the French one) that system, in the form of liberal democracy, was discovered. In October 1806, following Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia at Jena, it triumphantly asserted itself. Since then, in spite of many ups and downs, it had continued to make progress by overcoming the challenges, first of Fascism and then of Communism. Now that the latter had followed the former into the dustbin of history, it was poised to take over the entire earth. This is made evident by the spread of globalization and, with it, the invasion of McDonald, Coca-Cola, and Toshiba; nowadays, no doubt, Fukuyama would have added Google, Facebook, and Amazon.com. To be sure, the road ahead would be rough. There were still many islands of backwardness around, plenty of hurdles to overcome. But the shining goal, liberal democracy, had become clear to all or almost all. As it spread and asserted itself war would wane way, giving birth to a peaceful, if somewhat “sad” and boring, world.

Not so, answered Fukuyama’s former teacher at Harvard, Samuel Huntington. Globalization is at bottom a superficial phenomenon, unable to paper over what he calls differences in identity. By that he meant “history, language, culture, tradition, and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, he citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the products of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes.” Such differences need not, but often will, lead to armed conflict and bloodshed. Particularly now that the influence of universal ideologies has been decisively weakened, “Conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization; violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between ‘the West and the Rest;’ the elites in some torn non-Western countries will try to make their countries part of the West, but in most cases face major obstacles to accomplishing this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.”

Who was right, who was wrong, how and why? To proceed in reverse order, Huntington’s prediction that “a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states” has come to pass. Had he added Russia, he would have been spot-on. Nevertheless, these differences in civilization have not led to large-scale war. Let alone to “global wars” (an oxymoron, that; while a global war is possible, global wars are not). Instead, today’s largest and most bloody wars are fought within civilizations, often with foreign “help.” So in parts of Africa; so, even more, in the vast area that reaches from Latakia on the Mediterranean to Basra on the Persian Gulf. Not to mention Afghanistan and the surrounding countries. Huntington’s claim that states would array themselves according to their cultural preferences has not come true either. To the contrary; as China’s rise continues more of its neighbors, ignoring such considerations as much as they can, are seeking closer ties with the United States.

Another cardinal error Huntington committed was to make the Ukraine part of Christian-Orthodox civilization. To the contrary: with its population made up partly of westward-looking Catholics and partly of eastward-looking Orthodox, it is currently involved in civil war. The Ukraine, to use Huntington’s own terminology, is a torn, or split, state. As he himself pointed out, such states are particularly likely to witness a clash of civilizations within their borders. As, for example, is currently happening in Egypt; and as may still happen in Turkey.

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And how about Fukuyama? Writing in 1989 he grossly, if understandably, underestimated the ability of “Islamic Confucian States” (in reality, Islamic fundamentalist movements and one paramount Confucian State) to challenge the West. As of 2015, the day when liberal democracy will triumph in places such as the Middle East, North Africa, Russia and China remains a long way off. Still in other ways he was not entirely off the mark. First, a quarter century since “The End of History” was published, neither Islam nor Confucianism—supposing that is what China is all about—is in any position to challenge the West on the ideological level. All around the world it is to Washington DC, not to Mecca or Beijing, that people seeking a political framework that will make The Good Life possible turn their face; when everything is said and done, neither Islam nor Confucianism have made broad inroads beyond their own adherents. If anything, in fact, Islam’s attempts to spread its message beyond those adherents have led to a sharp, at times paranoid, reaction. Second and perhaps even more important, no liberal democratic states have gone to war against one another. A fact which suggests that a war-less world and the end of history are, if not yet at hand, at any rate possible in principle.

So far the protagonists, their relationship, their differences, the points on which they were right, and the points on which they were wrong. But is there anything they have in common? I think there is. First, both assume that the end of the Cold War did in fact represent a critical turning point in history. Either such as marked the end of one kind of conflict and the beginning of another (Huntington); or that represented the beginning of a process which would eventually culminate in a world without war and thus to the End of History (Fukuyama).

Second and perhaps even more important, both focus on what, for lack of a better term, I shall call spiritual factors. For Fukuyama, the paramount one is ideology. For Huntington, it is identity. In doing so they leave out any other number of factors that have always led, and presumably will continue to lead, to war in the future too. Chief among them are technological developments; competition for economic resources in a world where such resources are said to become less and less plentiful; and, over-arching everything else, the “perpetual and restless desire for power after power that ceaseth only in death” (Thomas Hobbes). The least one can say is that, in any attempt to understand the future of war, these factors must take a paramount place side by side with those Fukuyama and Huntington have focused on.

Is anyone ready to take up the challenge?

* Thanks to my students at the Program for Security and Diplomacy, Tel Aviv University, who stimulated me to write the present essay.

Last Week I Cleaned My House

Posted on November 5, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Last week I cleaned my house. And tomorrow I shall clean it again. As I do every Friday morning.

When my wife goes to the pool, that is, so neither of us will get in the other’s way. I start by sweeping the steps in front of the house (a townhouse, incidentally) taking care not to touch the flower bed. Next I go upstairs, vacuum the carpets, shake them a few times, and leave them hanging out of the window. Having moved aside various objects—chairs, coat racks, dustbins, etc—I vacuum the floor and wipe it with a wet rag. To make sure the rag is clean, I periodically put it in a pail full of water, take it out, and squeeze it until it stops dripping. That done, I take up paper towels and dust the furniture with two different liquids. One for wood, the other for glass. Then I go downstairs and repeat the procedure, more or less.

${C721AB0D-2625-44AA-B159-333C1B95E73A}_450$ I have tried out some of the floor-sweeping robots available for sale today. None can do what I really need, which is to clean my rugs. Rugs that have tassels, mind you. Even if they could, I still would have to take the rugs out to the balcony so as to allow me to reach the stone tiles of the floor.

To be sure, I could vacuum the rugs first and take them out, leaving the robot to do the rest. Since the robot is rather slow, though, the entire operation would take considerably longer than it does today. I would find myself spending hours alternately getting up and sitting down to move rugs now here, now there. Furthermore, the robot could not wipe stains off the floor, as I do. Nor, that accomplished, could it take the rugs and put them back in their place.

So what is the problem, someone would say? Throw away your rugs and install wall to wall carpeting. However, in a hot climate such as ours here in Israel carpets are hardly the ideal solution. Not to mention the fact that, compared with a carpeted room, a tiled one can be really cleaned.

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There are plenty of other things around the house robots cannot do either. Such as cleaning bathrooms with their taps and showers. Or making a bed. Or laying a table. Or taking away the plates and the cutlery after the meal. Or putting them into their place after the dishwasher has finished cleaning them. Or disposing of leftovers by moving them into smaller containers (the refrigerator only has limited capacity, doesn’t it?). Let alone cook one percent as well as my wife does.

With the exception of the last, all these are simple tasks anyone could do, they say. Tasks that do not require thought, they say. That is true enough; actually the fact that they do not require thought is one reason why I like doing them as much as I do. Once you get used to the work it is done almost automatically, allowing thought to roam where it will. A bit like runners’ high for old professors, I suppose.

Work that proceeds almost automatically without requiring thought? If so, why can’t robots do it? Hardly a day passes without us being told, not once but a thousand times over, that super-intelligent robots are coming. They are going to take over from us, making us superfluous. Should we try to stand in their way, they may even gird their loins—imagine a robot doing that—make war on us, destroy our species, and inherit the earth. Yet the same robots cannot do what my eleven year old grandson does easily enough—lay a table the way it should be laid?

As the example of the dishwasher shows, the problem is not to build machines capable of taking the place of humans in this or that capacity. That has been done for thousands of years past; at least, say, since the first water- or wind driven mill took the place of the hand-operated grindstones of old. Nor do I doubt that machines will take over additional tasks in the future. The problem, rather, is to have machines sufficiently versatile to take on a number of different tasks; one, for example, which will lay the table, sweep the carpet, and clean the bathroom as well. And which will continue to do so even when I move house.

Robots in their present state of development cannot even do what my eleven years old grandson—a highly intelligent little guy, let me add, with a good sense of humor and excellent social skills a—does not only easily but gracefully. Rebus sic stantibus, such being the situation, will anyone please explain why I, and you, should fear the coming singularity?

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