WILD SURMISE
AUGUST 1981 #17
AN ALMOST ANONYMOUS INFORMAL NOTE
MATERIALISM
Like George Washington, indeed in characteristic form for the Scotch Irish, Thomas Jefferson was rather indifferent toward wealth, enjoying it when it was available, failing to take decisive steps to secure it, and dying in proud poverty. Before he died, he took the time to lay the foundation stone of modern American thinking by remarking that people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable" (He also endeared himself to some of us by remarking that he had "nothing but contempt for a man who knows only one way to spell a word.") " rights. And among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Of course, we have tightened up the words some. For instance we have, in our hearts, deleted the words "by their Creator.' Not that the majority of us to do not believe in a creator of some sort, but the majority of those who take it upon themselves to represent us - our writers, our artists, our lawyers, our judges, our legislators - regard with horror the notion that Cod be recognized in public by anyone but a paid specialist.
A second bit of tidying up has be the dropping, in principle, of the word "among." If we have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then no one has a right to anything else, because anything else that is a right is in potential conflict with these cardinal three. There is no right to love, loyalty, beauty, security or hope of honor. For any further demand on the system might get in the way of somebody's happiness and thus frustrate one of the inalienable three.
Having done that much, the next step is a matter of course. What is liberty? Why liberty is the opportunity to pursue happiness.
And what is life? well life is the Opportunity to pursue happiness. It is upon the kingpin of happiness, then, that the whole edifice of public life turns. People have governments, people have clubs, people take jobs, people have families. They pursue art and science. They behave honestly and try to manage to think of themselves as good people; serve their Cod, serve their culture, serve their fellow mortal. It is all in the name of happiness.
And now there is only one more step in the cleaning up of the initial statement. The modern rendition is: Life. Liberty. And the pursuit of Property. It makes (as p0g0e5 friend Beauregard remarked) a man proud to be a dog.
It is no novel thing to remark on the profoundly materialistic spirit of modern American life. If nothing else, just look at how much more money there is floating around now days. Someone pointed out that the great flepression of the nineteen thirties was marked by a fall in the stock market. They then took the highest point of the market in the twenties, the lowest point in the thirties and multiplied it by the number of shares of stock that were available to be tradedb The resulting very large number was reckoned to the the dollar amount of the depression. They then took the number of shares of stock now being traded and decided that when the stock market rises or falls by a single point (however you care to measure it, say the Dow-Jones Industrial Average) it is the dollar equivalent of the great depression. At the time it was pointed out. with awe that the market might bounce up and down. a half dozen points in an afternoon, creating or destroying enough wealth to alleviate a half century of depression in just a few hours. And since that time we have seen the market swing a thousand points in a few weeks, let us all say solemnly, 'The dollar equivalent of ten thousand years of historical growth." And yet it hardly made a difference to anybody. Nobody went hungry. Nobody jumped out of a window. Hemlines did not change. People did not go into monastic life. It was not that big a deal. There is so much money around that such a little amount did not make a detectable difference in the working of things.
On a smaller scale, I understand that there are a couple of men in this country who control a business the business of which is to buy other businesses. Usually such things are . done in a friendly manner. One company buys another in order to reorganize it and take care of some problem that may be threatening financial viability of a basically sound enterprise. Suppose, for instance, General Electric had bought Studebaker when Studebaker was suffering from a perception of stodginess in its excellently engineered cars. The same solid-but-dull reputation has served Mercedes well. Support and protection by a giant like GE might have meant survival for what was, in fact, a company with a good idea.
But these two men have announced that they are interested doing hostile takeovers. Suppose I am a giant glass manufacturer, making my money off television tubes. I own as a subsidiary a little company that makes glass for stained glass work. My subsidiary loses money steadily, but wins me some friends as does some good for artists and for the idea of glass generally. Overall, I make an adequate return on my capital. You come in, buy my company, sell the subsidiary for its snob appeal, sell the highly profitable TV tube business for more that you spent for my whole company, sell anything else that has any value and close down the rest of the enterprise. That would be an extreme example of a hostile takeover. Between the extremes lies the real world. The two men in question have indicated that they are ready to make purchases that, shall we say, are not untainted by an element of hostility.
The cash they have available is said to be forty billion dollars. That would be enough to buy the Texaco oil company. Roll it over your tongue. Forty billion dollars.
Or if numbers do not appeal to you, consider this. within sight of this desk there are high rise beach condominiums, each condo unit as expensive as a good house and yard. They are air conditioned and have excellent plumbing and almost inexhaustible quantities of fresh water. (All of it piped in from the next country, of course. No drinkable water in the county. We pumped the wells until we got salt intrusion. The next county would like to send us their sewage now to protect their still productive well fields. We aren't taking it so far.) Tonight those windows will be dark. Nobody lives there off season. Also tonight every few minutes a Haitian child, no more miles away that Kentucky, will die of dehydration that could be prevented by access to good drinking water. Somebody somewhere has a lot of disposable money. That money is not always doing the most good for the most people.
The rapid accumulation of wealth we have experienced is not the cause of our preoccupation with it. It would be easy enough. to say that the progression of technology, the introduction of the computer, women's liberation, civil rights and the opening up of the country to world trade have together produced such a mass of wealth that people have realized how nice it is to have money and have begun to say as much. However, that notion does not hold. The increase in the total amount of wealth earned in the United States since, say, the nineteen fifties, can be attributed entirely to women taking jobs. The productivity of a single worker in real terms has not changed one iota in that time. Computers did not do it. Civil rights did not do it. Science did not do it. Trade did not do it. If we have more it is because more of us are working and because, on the national scale we are borrowing more. if we have more wealth, it is only because we want it.
It is going to be easy enough to challenge materialism as an ultimate value, but first let us consider some of the good things about materialism. Of course materialism, if pursued, should produce more money. Less obviously, materialism can promote art, health, science, education, tolerance, equality, respect for the law, world trade, and world peace, all in the name, more or less, of money.
My favorite story about the pursuit of money is the, tale of the ancient family, now very rich, who got their start in the Middle Ages. They purported to be transporters of gold. When the king or other person of substantial means was about to ship any gold from one place to another, these merchants would come to him, make him a fair offer for the cost of driving an armed and escorted wagon from origin to destination and then add an absolute guarantee that the money would arrive safe. All they asked was some extra time in getting there, for, they explained, the safety of the cargo depended on absolute secrecy of its whereabouts. The wagon would travel by a hidden circuitous route where bandits were known not to lurk, the routes being so little traveled. And the wagon would travel at unpredictable times, so even if the route were known, the schedule could not be reckoned. Both of these stratagems required a little extra time, but it would be worth it for the king to know that his money was completely safe.
On the appointed day, the wagon would come, collect to gold and then travel by the fastest possible route to the biggest city. There the people who were supposed to be shipping it would engage in wild speculation. The market would be destabilized by the sudden arrival of the gold, and having a large amount of gold, these schemers would make money handsomely. Then, at the last minute, they would convert assets back into gold, load it on the wagon and proceed by the straightest roads to the destination just in time to deliver on their promise.
Whether this stratagem is quite honest is a matter of opinion. I suppose it depends on whether they were willing and able to make good the difference if they lost some or all the gold. Still, it is an example of someone very eager to make money. Someone who was less eager but still did manage to make some money was the tomato farmer. The story goes that a certain farmer had a field in which he grew tomatos. After a few years, his crop yield fell and he was told that nematodes able to feed on the roots of the tomato plant had so multiplied in the soil. Yielding to necessity, he bought couple more fields, choosing them to be close enough to a city so the tomatos could be trucked into town easily, but far enough away so that the land was. cheap. Since the land was pretty useless, having been ruined for tomatos by the nematodes and not suitable for anything else with out preparation, he kept it. A couple more years - a few more fields. At the end of forty years, he owned a substantial amount of land in a perimeter around every major city in the state. Just about that time, the cities grew out to the point where his land was about prime to be developed into subdivisions.
While the farmer, if the story be true, made fabulous wealth without really trying to, by and large we would expect that people who worked at it hardest would be the most likely to earn it. And that has undeniable advantages. With money one can buy food, shelter and clothing. These are not small issues. Those poor children in Haiti, one tremendous problem for them is that the nation is desperately poor, it is quite simply the pdorest country in the world. People attempt to live on the equivalent of a dollar or two a day. There is no question in anybody's mind that the lack of water is a good thing. There is no lack of concern for open sewers, and I mean very large open sewers, many yards across. But there is no money to set the situation straight. Of course they have political problems too, which among other things make it difficult for helpful neighbors to assist them. Of course they have religious notions that would strike most of us as regrettable if not perverse. of course they have a language that separates them from their nearest neighbors. Of course their land is not as bountiful as some. But poverty remains their curse and the person who figures out how to make money in Haiti (produce wealth, not just move it around) will do Haiti and the world an undeniable favor.
While animal survival and its necessities are important, at the other end of a kind of spectrum lies pure art. The artist is generally~conceived of as a capable and energetic person who could make a splendid living turning his talents to making money, but who would rather spend what time he has perfecting his art. Remember how Mozart used to dance to keep warm. He could not afford the clothing of fuel to make himself comfortable. He could have wrapped run around in circles, if he really though that would keep him warm. But he preferred to dance; music was Mozart's life, and what we wanted to spend his time with.
The painter van Gogh wanted more than simply to paint. He wanted people to recognize when he could do with paint. That, during van Gogh's life people failed to do. He committed suicide in the end because he could not sell his work. It was not fear · of starvation, surely the man could have worked at any trade, but frustration with a world that did not accept him yet.
Recently paintings by van Gogh have been sold at auction for some of the highest prices in history. We are making up for lost time.
Neither Mozart nor van Gogh was recognized as the best in his own life, and there were surely other musicians in Austria and other painters in France who were making an adequate living at the time. But imagine them in this day. Concede that neither would command the following he now has; imagine how hard it would be for either to go hungry. We are now talking about a recognized but eccentric artist who is productive, who has a distinctive style but who is simply thought not to be the best. Imagine either actually managing to go hungry. A writer could do it, because it takes time and effort to enjoy a writer and because he works against a political background that may be hostile to him and an economic structure in which he must generally persuade someone to risk a fairly large amount of money on him before he even gets a chance at an audience. But for less than the best talent, there is more money available now than when artist, commanded greater prestige.
For those who do not make it big, there is enough money for animal survival. And for those whom the world loves, those artists upon whom the mob of humanity elects to lavish it adoration, the wealth can be extravagant. They do as well as football players. The music group the Beatles, if I recall correctly, were so wealthy they could support the EMI country in developing computed axial xray scanning, the famous "CAT" scan that ushered in a revolution in health care. Certainly the time was right, certainly it took judgement and courage so see where the effort could be made. But it also took a lot of disposable money.
Even before the advent of the CAT scan, medicine was recognized as expensive, even prohibitively expensive in principle. But the fact that a lot of money needs to be moved around in medicine means that there is the potential for somebody is make some of the styff. Writers tend to treat the cost of medicine a little different from other costs. If a lot of people but houses in any one year, then the housing market is "good." If a lot of people buy cars, then the automotive industry is "doing well." If a lot of people buy mustard plasters, there is talk of the "burgeoning cost of health care." No one wants to spend money on health care because no one wants to need to. But at bottom, it is still an industry and must respond to the flame pressures that govern other industries. If people want a service enough, they are going to make sure they get that service. If there is a large amount of money moving around, at it looks as if more money can be made by providing a better service or providing the same service cheaper, money will me made available to do it. If that results in better, cheaper care, no one laments it.
Like medicine, science needs a lot of money in order to make progress. Scientist distinguish carefully between pure science, such as studying how a radio wave interacts with a nucleus in a magnetic field, and applied science, such has how to make a feasible MRI scanner (sort of a super modern CAT scanner that doesn't use x-rays). The prestige lies with the pure science and the money is produced by the applied science. Like art, science seems to hold itself apart from material demands. Frequently pure science consists of building a complex machine and then describing how that machine behaves. Say you have a theory that a warm object will, other things being equal, cool faster in a humid atmosphere as and a cool object warm faster in a humid atmosphere than in a dry one. You build a machine that holds your test object, warms it, cools it, surrounds it with varying air mixtures and measures its heat loss. This machine will never be a great comercial success, but it will cost money. So will the super-conducting super collider, a sort of seventy mile across cyclotron atom basher. That will not be a commercial success either. The scientist is only interested in the money so long as it available to build his machine.
Thereby hangs a problem. The best talent, the most knowledgeable talent, tends to go to universities to do pure science while venture capital lurks outside the ivied walls lusting after fresh juicy brains. The result, particularly in the field of genetic engineering, has been the creation of sort of economic half-wayhouses. These are enterprises bound by contract to a university but independent enough to enter into negotiations with commercial developers, making pure science talent available to the market and making the market~s signals (read "moneyt) available to the university. The result has been substantial funding for science that society, through the ordinary channels of tuition, endowment and tax might have neglected.
Exactly what the primary purpose of a university is can be questioned. It has a lot to do with playing football, obviously, and a lot to do with libraries and laboratories. Someone has suggested that the primary purpose is to serve as the memory for a culture; to preserve over centuries what have been judged the most valuable ideas of that culture. This entails educating a lot of young people, and that involves feeding them, protecting them and ministering to their social needs. Arguable, universities have been neglecting at least some of their duties, but whatever they are supposed to be doing, they should do it better with more money, come it whence it may. But there is another favor that materialism has done university education.
In dim forgotten times, the life of the student was like the life of the artist, a commitment that excluded making making a good living. Unless there was substantial parental support, the student was poor and could expect to remain so until he was out of school, at which time he would begin to compete with contemporaries who had years. of head start on him. If he stayed in academics, he would be poor for life. But it was a high calling, and many undertook the life gladly.
Then, some time after World War II, somebody drew a little graph. Along the bottom of the graph he put how much education a person had and along the vertical axis he plotted the persons income. When he had contented himself that he had plotted everyone in the community, he came to a conclusion. The more education a person had, the more money he was making.
Now this was hardly remarkable. It took a lot of money to get an education. I was talking with the president of a very fine small private university once, and he mentioned that the university had never been blessed with the enormous alumni contributions that sister schools had enjoyed. I said I thought the alumni support for most classes ran at better than fifty percent. He agreed, but said he was talking about really big money. Why then, I asked. "It's because,"' he said, "of our admission requirements." I boggled.
"We have never given special breaks at admission time to rich kids."
What about the bright rich kids?
"Listen. If any kid is rich and bright enough to get into this school, he's too bright to come. We work very hard here. If he's that bright, he knows he's bright. If he's that bright and rich, he knows he will never have to work hard his whole life. Why should he come here and knock himself out for four years? He'll go to some school that specializes in rich kids, learn what he has to learn and have a good time at it."
The idea that a alumnus of the school might be poor but ambitious and blisteringly intelligent when he arrived and then go on to make himself rich on the basis of about the most exacting education in the world was not even worthy of discussion.
The person who drew the graph, however, came to the opposite conclusion. He said better educated people make more money, so they way to make money is to get an education. And so it was advertised. Education was expected to make us all rich. Simple honest work was despised. It didn't bring big bucks. For that, students were told to go to school and make something of themselves. The extent to which those hopes and expectation have been betrayed is common currency. Half of the promise was delivered on; students remained poor. The other half of the promise was not so simple. People with advanced degrees had trouble putting those degrees to work. Hut whatever universities are supposed to do, surely they should do it better with more talent. And talent they got. So much so, and so demanding that they have even tended to restructure their own ideas, thinking of themselves as a route to material gain rather than an alternative to a materialistic existence.
Among the groups most thoroughly pressured into seeking success through education has been the American Black population. Here the test of success was more subtle. The Black student was expected to make more money, indeed. But he was also expected to integrate smoothly into the majority race and culture. Now the sacrifice asked was of monumental proportions. Not just a few years of poverty were to be endured, but either the dismantling of an entire set up cultural expectations, or a life spent frustrating those expectations. And what was the purpose of this sacrifice? It was to benefit the mainstream culture itself, to justify that culture in the eyes of a mass of morally confident people who already believed in the culture to the exclusion of doubt anyway. The Blacks, needless to say, regarded the whole enterprise with some skepticism.
Not, of course, that a Black or anybody else should be denied the opportunity of as much high quality education as he can stomach. Nor that modern society can survive without training its members to the limits of their toleration in order to deal with the kind of highly technical work that will continue to increase. But the promise was that if all the Black leaders all went to majority dominated universities, the Black community as a whole would profit from it. Show me.
The maturation of a human is like the bringing of a great ship into harbor. The proper compass heading depends not only on the wind and current and disposition of the shoals; it depends on where you are, what you are, what direction you are already moving in and where you are going. Only with people those factors are much more momentous and far more variable. College education of the traditional sort is a constant compass heading.
But notice that this problem can not be laid at the door of materialism. To the extent that all we want is to make as much money as we can, then we do go all in the same direction. To the extent that time spent in higher education is an investment of time from which we expect a profit, then it makes excellent sense to wish it on everyone. Indeed, even outside the field of education, materialism breeds toleration.
Not many years ago in the south, bathrooms and drinking fountains were segregated black and white. I theory, they were of equal quality. Had they not been, I am sure we would have been treated to photographic essays that showed the front of a public place and then showed the interiors of the segregated bathrooms. There seems to be no question that if people had been willing to share they could have had nicer bathrooms and saved some money to boot. Since looking only at money filters out racial and cultural differences, its ultimate impact must be to minimize those differences.
Closely aligned with the concept of tolerating people at close range is the concept of considering other people to be equal. of course there are exceptions. M says he was once on a farm where there were three chickens. Chicken number one occasionally fought chicken number two and always beat him. Chicken number two fought chicken number three every chance he got and won every time. The result was that chicken number three always spent his time next chicken number one. Since number three was no threat, number one didnet care. Number two, who was a threat, had to keep his distance, and thus number three got a little peace. Between numbers one and three there was toleration but not equality. Between two and three there may have been approximate equality but no toleration.
I trust that no reader of this truly despises any mortal human in his heart, but if you do, it is a fair bet that, vast though the obvious moral differences between you, to the ignorant outsider, you are two of a kind.
Still, most of the time, you regard your friends as your equals and the people you don't much like are different from you. This is a perfectly healthy recognition of self and you share it with all mortals, including those who deny it, and birds, who are so visually oriented that they develop intense relationships with mirrors and mice, whose self image is strongly dependant on smell. You like whom you are like.
At first glance, one would say that wealth is a great segregater of people. It is just another of those characteristics that draw lines between people and determine friend and foe. But at heart, the love of money is an evangelical persuasion. The person who is primarily interested in money expects, even desires, that others have the same ambition. Imagine that you have caught someone making a very advantageous deal for himself. You confront him and point out that he drove an excessively hard bargain. He will not defend himself by saying, "But the other fellow was a Trappist monk. He will get his reward in heaven" or "She is a grandmother. She cares more about her grandchildren. I care more about the money." Hut he will say1 "He drove the hardest bargain he could, too" or "Now she's learned something. She will make it back the next time."
Certainly some have more than others, but the dream is of more and more for everybody. Differences are thought of as transient, small irregularities that will work out over time. The experience of my university president. friend would seem to deny that, but again, the problem is not one that arises from the notion of materialism itself. The problem with equality is that there really are differences between people and, worse, that some of those differences are due to choices and some of those choices have not been good. But if we all work hard and all obey the rules and the rules are fair, then we can expect all to make progress.
Making the rules fair, making the law fair, is of course a terribly difficult thing. One way to make laws unfair is to be constantly changing them. Merchants know that. You will seldom see the price of a car reduced. Rather, the dealer will offer a rebate on the purchase of the car. He does not want to see the person he sold the car to last week come by and ask how come the car is now two hundred dollars cheaper. Besides, the rebate is in the form of cash. The car is generally paid for with a loan, so the cash comes out of the loan. Also the rebate can be withdrawn and the dealer can then deny that the price has gone up again. People who push legislation through and courts who TMinterpretM the law to mean something else than what it used to mean are generally zealots who are not disposed to sit around and let their new program get moving slowly. Indeed, it is a problem how most fairly to correct an unfair situation.
Change laws often enough, and people will get quite cynical about making real sacrifices in order to comply. And of course in a rapidly changing society, laws will be changed rapidly. But if the only goal of the law is to regulate the way people make money, then people will simply go about attempting to make as much as they can in the face of the law. Look at the income tax code. Imagine that the complexity of the law you had to know to drive a car to be the same. People would not tolerate it. Breeches of the law would be so regular that it could not be enforced. But since the income tax code simply regulates money, people are willing to work with it.
People are also willing to work with each other, even across vast cultural seas. I mentioned that materialism is a behavior model that is evangelical. It wants to win converts to itself. The more who practice it, the better it works. Suppose I want to make and sell shoes by mail order. I am well off if there are already businesses in place who can build my shop, design my shoes, provide me with materials, print my catalogues, set up my bookkeeping, deliver my shoes and rent me a canoe when I decide to take a weekend off to play.
These economies become even more striking on a world scale. I was once in an industrial town in Connecticut, and a friend remarked about the smell from a nearby rubber plant. I was surprised not only by the fact that the plant should smell bad, but that it should grow so far north. obviously rubber production meant different things to the two of us. In local trade, specialization of enterprise benefits everyone. On a world scale, such specialization profits from the local capabilities of the land, the climate, the resources and the people. Local advantages make it profitable to cross the distances involved. I have even heard tell that local distribution in England is so efficient that Japanese products that cost the same at the factory door are sold cheaper in England than in Japan.
The result of trade has been cheaper goods for all and in particular the opportunity to make some money for poorer countries purely on the basis of the exigencies of making money without any eleemosynary consideration.
Perhaps peace is the natural state between trading partners. Certainly trade appeals to values all humans have in common. Just about anyone from any culture would agree that a ton of grain or a thousand board feet of lumber was an object of substantial value. And everyone can agree that everyone has legitimate need of such things. Nowadays this broad agreement on materialistic thinking has become institutionalized.
Not many years ago, it seems to me world peace was under threat from two great powers. Russia espoused the principle that the duty of government was to regulate to distribution of wealth and to control the people, protecting them from any recidivistic tendency to revert to religion. "From each according to his ability to each according to his need." America clung to the notion that people should be free to serve God and make themselves happy any way they saw fit. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." America has, according to some, revised it to "Life, liberty and the pursuit of property, and nothing else." Russia, according to their prime minister Mr. Gorbachev, has revised it, "From each according to his ability to each according to his work."
Makes a man proud to be a dog, eh?
The change is not great for Russia. Theirs was always a materialistic political theory. They always expected people to work. Otherwise there would have been no wealth to distribute. Now they are making it explicit and applying it to individuals. The change in the United States has been much more profound. The implied "and nothing else'1 is only half the change. The other half is the change from Mare created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights~' to "are equal and are endowed by themselves with certain rights." The resulting near congruity between the Russian and the American ideals holds out the hope of some sort of transient prolongation of the guarded peace between those two powers.
This is the legacy of the quest for wealth. Such are the pearls is casts before us. Before we trample them under foot and turn again and rend it, we must make a distinction. The word "materialism" has a formal meaning. In philosophy it is a school of thought based on the assumption that the universe consists of nothing but small hard atoms. That school of thought suffered a good deal when it turned out that atoms consisted of parts and that there were other things in the material world than atoms, like energy and information.
The philosophical materialists, had they stuck to their principles might well have insisted that energy and information also consisted of particles and thus involved themselves in one of the great debates of the century, that of the quantum nature of the world. However, science went one way and philosophy another. There is a modern branch of materialism called extreme physicalist materialism that says that only those things exist which the physicists say exist. Since physics has little to say about tomato nematodes, leaving such questions to biologists, the extreme physicalist materialist leaves a few things out. If you extent physicalist materialism to include all information that can be verified by independent observation and controlled experimentation, then you have a discipline called "natural philosophy." The trouble with the natural philosophy branch of philosophical materialism is that once you have explained it there is not much left to discuss. Some philosophers contend that natural philosophy does not account for consciousness, but the scientific attitude is simply that consciousness is a by-product of the brain going about its business. Thus natural philosophy is a fully consistent description of the universe. And a complete one so far as you limit the universe under consideration.
There are, of course, some disciplines that are not subject to verification. chiropractic and psychiatry were initially established and continue pretty much to be practiced without a sound scientific foundation. Liberal humanism with its assumption of the value of human existence in an atheistic universe is not subject to test even in principle. The major Zoroastrian religions, Parseeism, Christianity and Muslim are not subject to test. One might Well, as a natural philosopher, declare that they are all religions, not philosophies. Of all these religions, only Christianity specifically forbids that its principles be put to the test, thus by implication inviting that the rest of life be so inspected.
Thus we are invited, if not required, to inspect the doctrine of materialism as has become such a dominant feature of modern thinking, to check its foundations and see how long it is likely to stand.
When looking into foundations, one must contend with a theorem proved by a man named coedel. The theorem is that no system that is complex enough to make it possible to do arithmetic can by both complete and consistent. That there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. So to speak, there is a deeper truth under every truth.
On his way to his theorem, Goedel pointed out another useful notion. In any system (of mathematics, philosophy, what have you) that system is consistent if there is something that can be said in the system which is not true. The argument goes like this:
let us introduce an inconsistency into arithmetic. Let us say two plus two equals five. Keeping everything else the same, rules of addition and subtraction, we can now prove to be true anything that can be said in arithmetic. Seventeen times three is nine? Duck soup. Two plus two equals five. Subtract four from each side of the equation. Now one equals zero. Multiply both sides of the equation by fourteen. Now fourteen equals zero. Add three to both sides and seventeen equals three. Now multiply both sides times three. It is done.
Introduce any inconsistency, and the whole fabric collapses. So if the system does not collapse, it is at least consistent. True? well that~s another matter of course.
Try applying this notion of Goedel to Oriental philosophy. The spirit of Oriental thinking has, apparently been far more concerned with the question of what will make one a better person rather than what is truth, at least as compared with Western philosophy. Oriental teachers have tended to view a preoccupation with material matters as an irrelevance, preferring a preoccupation with meditation of a form not always obedient to strict rules of logic. Any statement has a strong tendency to mean the same thing as any other statement once one has peered into the substance of things. Against such a background, anything can be proven, but it does not matter. Oriental systems thus tend to lack statements of the form "two and two is five," statements that are false but grammatical within the system, which would prove the system to be consistent.
The Teacher, of course, would be delighted to hear that, and point of that it was perfectly all right.
Goedel's proof runs something like this. Consider this. Statement #1: This statement is false. If the statement is false, it is true and if it is true it is false. A nice little paradox you have probably run into. Statement #2: This statement cannot be proven to be at all times and unchallengeably true. Well, it's true enough; you can't prove it to be true. Since it is true as well as unprovable, it shows that in common speech there are things that are true but unprovable.
And by extension, the quest for wealth must be based on some non money based principle such as sensuality, cultural expectation or at least basic trust.
Not long ago someone remarked that the money he spent in order to eat a meal was spent so that he could have the sensation of having eaten a good meal. He was being a good materialist. He reckoned that his own sensory input was the only thing that mattered to him. You might have said, in contrast, that you ate a good meal for the sake of the knowledge that you had taken good and wholesome nutrition that you knew would sustain you during the tasks to follow. The sensation, in that case, was only of interest to you in that it assured you that the food was fresh and consisted of a suitable variety to match your body's needs.
The need for food is one of those elements that bind all people together. It also is a need we share with animals. As a general principle, those needs and drives, those tendencies that all humans share with each other, humans also share with beasts. We assume that an animal eats only for the sensation, but we do not know. And indeed, it is of little consequence. I have yet to learn of anyone who was persuaded that all humans were fundamentally the same, the same in all important respects, who did not think animals were due fair treatment. Indeed, the opposite case is the notorious one, the animal fancier who is the snob.
So the charge that the humanist isn't really a humanist at all, that the materialist puts himself and other humans into the same class as animals carries little weight. The response to that is, "of course.
But compare the motivations for eating a meal with the motivation for rearing a child. The one person rears a child feeling that the reward is the understanding that a good and able person has been given the opportunity of an interesting life. The other person, if he has a child at all, has one either because the sensations attendant along the way were agreeable, or because he wants to experience the sensation of having a child around. Of enjoying the child's presence.
Who is the more likely to make a sacrifice for his child? Who is more likely to give the child. a fair chance to go out and do something even as piddling as making a lot of money? Seems like the one that cares about the child has more to offer than the one who cares only about the sensation of child.
It is frequently observed that poor people have more children than rich people. You can probably think of a half dozen things that contribute to that, and if we both thought about it, we would probably not think of all the factors. It is treacherous to make plans and predictions on the basis of a phenomenon you do not quite understand, but take it as an assumption; rich people have few children.
That's their choice, by and large, so there is no problem, so long as there is a ready supply of young people coming along who are willing to do whatever it was of value that some of those rich people did. Materialism as a doctrine can survive for an extended time only if it as able to recruit since, it seems, those who succeed at it fail to reproduce.
Recruitment should not be much of a problem. After all, the reward is quite attractive. No harm in being rich even if you don't make it the prime interest of your life.
All the system needs is for those~who have flourished to return some of their wealth to assist those from among whom they came. In other words, if you are a West Virginia coal miner's son who happens to have made great strides in micro-computers, your charity should be directed back toward West Virginia. If you are a woman from Spanish Harlem who own the biggest textile mill in Georgia, you should take an interest in Spanish Harlem, its needs and opportunities. If you are fifth generation landed gentry whose ancestors were horse thieves on Tierra del Fuego, then your course is clear.
However, experience seems to run the other way. The person who has made a big advance in his life most typically has a low opinion of the people from whom he came. His primary interest is to divorce himself from his past. Trust no such person. Certainly do not trust him to take those steps that will help those most like him, to ensure that their jobs are as secure as he can make them, that they get a fair return on their productivity. If charity appeals to him, he will probably direct it toward total strangers, in all likelihood losing his last chance to help sustain the system from which he has benefited so much.
One of the most shocking inequities in distribution of wealth in the United States is the condition of the American Indian population. A lot of people feel that the word ~Indian" should be dropped,as it is obviously a hold over from a mistake in navigation made by Christopher Columbus when he reached what he though was the East Indies. No harm in that, really. By implication Columbus decided that he had arrived in a place and that there were people native to the place. I should prefer to drop the word "American," for that word is a clear affront to the Indians. "American" comes from the name Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci didn~t find anything worth a hill of garbanzo beans, but he did coin a phrase. His phrase was 'New World. By implication it was an empty place awaiting settlement and exploitation. Of course it wasn't new at all. It already belonged to somebody. That fact seems systematically to have been overlooked for the ensuing five hundred years.
The Indians are, legally, quite free to stop being Indians and become American citizens. In so doing, they would enter into a commercially oriented civilization and leave behind their tribal laws and values. Naturally they hesitate. Since typically they do not participate in the Paleface economy, it seems excusable that they do not participate in a proportionate share of Paleface wealth. It does not, however, seem excusable that they are found mostly in suboptimal land: Florida Swamp, western desert and high mountains. There are vast tracts of publicly owned land in the country. Some should no doubt be kept in reserve, against who know what future. But as for the Indians, I say if you cannot give them money, give them land. Good stuff. The kind you can make a living on. They took good care of it before. When the Paleface arrived, this continent was not a wilderness, it was a garden. It had been tended for years by peoples who treasured its beauty and bounty.
Another shocking situation with regard to the distribution of wealth is that of the American Black. The whole idea of the free enterprise system was that any initial inequities would be cleaned up in time. well the American Black has, by definition, been here before the War Between the States. That makes him a member of a substantial minority of Americans who have been here since before the present century. We are talking old families now. We are talking about early citizens. We are talking about foundation elements in our society. If anybody has been around long enough for the market to give him a chance, it is the Black.
But he never really did have that much of a chance. Widespread obstacles were matters of law until the middle of the century. Many deeds now in existence still say (unenforceably) that the land can never be sold to a Black. The fact that such laws were a result of the bitterness of Reconstruction did not in fact do anything for the Black person 5 opportunities. Other penalties, such as inflated rail freight rates, although directed against the South in general penalized the Blacks. fly the mid fifties, the rules at last assured some competition, and for a while there was progress. But currently, we see the rapid influx of foreign labor, much of which competes directly with Black labor, and we see the exporting of labor intensive jobs like manufacturing. It doesn't seem fair.
Do not tell me Black people are not willing to work hard. Come on down here and cut sugar cane and then tell me you know what hard work is. Do not tell me that there are not Americans willing to work at jobs like picking fruit. Make the price right and old Moneybags himself will be out there. Indeed, the average American can by more orange juice if the oranges are picked with cheap imported labor or are cheap imported oranges. Hut in case you hadn't noticed, the average American can afford all the orange juice he needs. And he can afford it at whatever price it takes to make it attractive for an urban Black teenage boy to jump on a bus and ride off to spend a couple weeks living cheap and working all day.
Surely anyone would want to see Black people working at jobs that are more interesting, comfortable, safe, productive. I would like to see them mining ice chunks from the rings of Saturn for trace hydrocarbons to be used on the first manned interstellar probe, if they want to. But there are things to be done now, too.
Another striking inequity is the one of sex. Men in this country are paid more than women, but most of the wealth is owned by women. Perhaps men work harder and die young from the effort. Perhaps women tend to marry men older and wealthier than themselves. In the last fifteen or twenty years, more than 28 million new jobs have been created in the United States, while Europe has not produced an substantial number. Host of this increase in the number of jobs has been due to women entering the work force. Yet the United States does not have, as every European nation has, paid maternity leave. There is something very odd in our ideas about sex or our ideas about money. Perhaps we don't distinguish much between the two; they are both just things to be exploited and displayed.
A purist might point out that the Scotch Irish are another group of Americans who have not become wealthy even though they have been here since before the Revolution. Indeed, it was largely they who lay down the ground rules that have permitted so much prosperity for so many. But they are an ancient race who have seen empires rise an fall many times and have little enthusiasm for churning up their placid lives. There are other areas where relative poverty is more keenly felt.
Thus, ironically, the United States which has so long vaunted itself on its economic freedom has indeed a poorer distribution of wealth than Europe and probably Japan. People go hungry here. People are alone here. People are homeless here. That will spread as more people increase the degree to which they consider wealth to be the only important thing in their lives. Even though the total amount of wealth may, for a timer continue to increase.
And the amount of wealth must continue to increase. First, the number of people in the world continues to increase. Many are not that far from starvation. There is ample food now to feed the world if, again, it could be distributed properly. Even after a bad season like this one, there will be enough rood. But there would not be, we would be in a state of permanent absolute world famine, had there not been spectacular breakthroughs in the ability to produce food. We simply must have a high technology society in order to feed ourselves. We must continue to make new discoveries in order to survive. Just pray that suitable discoveries will still be there to be made.
In the second place, people grow older. They get the hankering to knock of and take it easy. of course they still want to eat and live under shelter, so they want to invest some money. I suppose it would be possible to decide you were going to live a hundred years. Work for fifty years. spend only half your after tax income during those years and then spend the rest at the same rate for the rest of your life. Or work seventy five years. You are still left with money you have saved and that you expect to spend. You expect that when you spend it, it will have the same value as when you earned it.
In the real world, that is not likely to happen. Governments will continue to spend beyond their means as long as they can get away with it. They will, thereby, reduce the value of money people have. The effect is not instantaneous, but it is inevitable.
So the only way to save up some money against retirement is either to trust public support or to invest some money.
Well, if you have more people making more money and all expecting to reach retirement, they are all going to need to invest their money and there is going to be more of that money. In order for that new money to make more money, new factories and mines must be started, now technologies developed, hiring more people or the same number of people better trained for more money and so forth. Like a man on stilts or a shark the economy is doomed to eternal progress or to catastrophe.
Perhaps there is no ultimate limit to the amount of growth that can be achieved. There is cettainly a limit to the amount of growth that can be achieved in any period of time, but it appears that time is available.
Two obvious limits to absolute growth exist. One is the question of where we are to put our wastes and the other is the question of depletion of resources. Sooner or later, the two come down to the same question of cycles. Dan'l Boone, it is to be presumed, ate berries in the woods and squatted behind a tree when occasion presented. Voyagers on that interstellar probe will eat food out of a synthesizer and relieve themselves in some fashion that they will regard as more comfortable and as entailing a far lower risk of snakebite in a location inconvenient to inspect. Both pioneers recycle their waste with the aid of an energy source and a complex system.
But both systems have limits. Interstellar probes will never carry away so many adventurers as to relieve population pressures on the earth. The will not provide a return soon enough to make them a realistic element in anybody0s retirement plan. Unless there can be some sort of agreement effective throughout the planet that some population number is sufficient and that some standard of living is sufficient, resources must ultimately be overwhelmed.
Of course we may have already done it. The carbon dioxide in the air now reflects what was being produces sixty years ago. The sea absorbs enough so that there is that long a lag between the time a certain rate of production is reached and the ultimate results are felt. If, as seems likely, carbon dioxide increases the temperature of the planet, we will not feel the results of the present production until the mid twenty first century. If the temperature is too high to support our civilization then, and thus too high to support the majority of the population, most of humankind will die having been born into a world already doomed by our own poisons.
Similarly, there is fear that the ozone layer has already been significantly damaged by the use of chlorof luorocarbons. That means freon. That means air conditioners and refrigerators. The amount of freon released is expected very soon to decline; it is already accepted that there is a potential problem. But we have no means of purging the atmosphere of what is already up there. And it is not clear how long what has already released will do its damage. If the ozone layer is destroyed it could render the out-of-doors unfit for animal life, not to mention human life. Once again, we may have already done ourselves in.
Of course things that happen after I die have no significant sensory input to be reckoned with. The materialist does not reckon with the distant future. And this is one of its profound weaknesses. The future may not be able to fend for itself.
A more troublesome problem with materialism as a mode of behavior, as a philosophy or even as a form of humanism, is that it does not really speak to the deepest needs of humans. It is nice to be able to afford a cup of soup, a hotel room and a ticket home, but it is not hard to skip a meal, to sleep on the ground and to walk for many miles. What is hard is not to have a home to go to.
I was at an economics seminar once where the teacher had proposed that economics should be thought of as a "basket of goods" that each person could have. All each person had to do was decide what he wanted in his basket. The economy was a consequence of those decisions. He was a striking looking man, trim, very fit, who had been an All American hockey goalie. On this day he had, as was his wont, proposed something that left us speechless. I managed to point out what I thought was an obvious flaw, and he brushed off my remark so adroitly that it was clear he had been expecting it. But his brush off suggested leaving the country. I protested that one of the most important things I wanted in my basket of goods was to live and die in Dixie. He turned his scar seamed face my direction, draped one enormous hand, chalk and all, over the top of his head and nodded. In the code of the time and place that meant: 1. You have a valid point. 2. It is beyond the scope of the discussion. 3~ You will have to give that one some serious thought some time.
of all the peoples working on building a homeland, the state of Israel is a striking success. A half century Germany embarked on a pogrom against the Jews of unusual ferocity and scope not only connived in but mostly carried out by the government. The suffering and loss of life were as great as that in Cambodia under the Kymer Rouge, a tragedy of inconceivable proportion. The impact on the Jewish community was, of course, tremendous. Some fled to this country and made frantic efforts of assimilate by marrying outside their own faith. A bolder group established a powerful and ruthless state in Palestine that they call Israel, even though the name should, if anything, be Judea. It has that group that has done most of the hunting and killing of former Nazi S. Although is is a minority who have gone to that new country those who live in the United States have expressed a very strong loyalty to the notion of "Israel." rew Jews indeed returned to their homes in Germany.
To the dispassionate observer it looks as if the Jewish people were going through the usual stages of a healthy grieving process: paranoia, self pity and revenge. But it does not seem so to the compassionate observer, and we must be compassionate, for 0 my brother and daughter of my brother, there go you and I. What those people want is a home. Even those who know they will never go there want it. And no, this is not a reaction to the tragedy in Germany; it is deeper than that. Adolf Hitler (who was part Jew, not that it matters, but it does make you wonder about the wisdom of trying to prevent a recurrence of that kind of person by encouraging cross-marriages) in his autobiography this author of the most odious event in living memory in Western culture begins by raising the question, "Why do not all Germans live together in the same country?" The answer, 'Because they actually represent more than one nationality," does not seem to have occurred to his parents when he asked them. Nor the answer, "What would be the point in that?"
The man had identified something that humans share with the beasts. A sense of society. A sense of herd identity. A sense of the difference between belonging to a group and not belonging. Even insects have it. A bee, blundering accidentally and unknowlingly into the wrong hive will be accepted without notice by the members of that hive and will integrate smoothly into its workings. The same bee, approaching the same hive only knowing that it is the wrong hive will give gestures of uncertainty so unmistakable that the natives will kill her.
The Indians called it their "stamping ground," the place you didn't have to sneak around on tiptoe for fear a broken twig would cost you your life. Those of us who have traded in our tomahawks for lawyers to settle our quarrels are still aware of the difference between company in which the wrong remark can bring a lawsuit and company in which, with whatever justification or lack of justification, we do not expect it to. Perhaps the world would be a better place if we extended the same courtesy and exercised
the same caution around friends and family as around strangers. But the effort of doing so would be substantial.
So Hitler spoke to the heart when he suggested that governments should conform to the needs of their peoples. That boundaries should reflect people not geography. He lied, but people listened. They went along with him thinking perhaps that he would work out a homeland for everybody rather than the mass murders that were in fact perpetrated.
The Nazi regime imprisoned and killed an enormous community which, if properly motivated, would have helped him and might well have won his war for him. And that motivation, now seen in retrospect, would have been to offer them a homeland. But he did not trust the principles he spoke of, probably did not even believe in them. But when it was over, the Jewish people decided that, lied to or not, they would have their homeland. And that, for all who choose to go there, they have. And for those who do not choose, they know it is there.
It is a problem for those who live in Israel that they are relatively few in number. More Jews chose to live in the U.S. than in Israel. Their military success plus their inability to attract the rest of their potential numbers has produced a demographic time bomb. There are a lot of Palestinians living in captured territory. The Palestinians are reproducing rapidly.
The Israelis slowly and are recruiting few. In a couple decades, there will be an Arab majority. If Israel wishes to remain a constitutional republic, they will face the same problems as South Africa - the consequences of being a ruling minority.
Were there peace, quite likely more would migrate to Israel. Were more so to migrate, an Arab majority would not occur in the foreseeable future any more than an Arab military victory. The road to peace is blocked by historical factors, the most obvious being that peace is a rare event in that part of the world. M's mother once heard news commentators lamenting trouble in Iran and remarked, MEut there's always trouble in Iran.' She then did some research and found out that the last Iranian (Persian) head of state to die as an adult in office of natural causes was mentioned by the ancient creek historian Heroditus. Everyone since has died an infant, been deposed or been murdered. Second problem for peace in Israel is that the neighbors are devout Muslim, and the prophet Mohammed, for all that he recognized Jews not to be idolators and to be bound, if they kept their own law, for ultimate salvation, had a lot of trouble with them. A third and most poignant problem is that the place that was chosen as the homeland for the Jews already had somebody living there. And the Palestinians have, to put it mildly, yet to come to grips with living in a Jewish country.
Almost on a daily basis this year, some Palestinian child has been killed protesting that fact that Palestinians in occupied territory are deprived of their civil rights. That is, of course, nothing like the death rate by violence in any big American city, but it is an obvious sign of a troubled land. The problem is that no allowance has been made for that fact that the Palestinians need a homeland too.
It is not a matter of having followed a principle too far and found it impractical. It is a matter of having an principle and not trusting it. Israel declares she needs defensible borders in order to have peace. Palestine needs exactly the same thing. Israel is afraid that an Arab war will "push them into the sea."
Palestine has already been pushed into the sea and doesn't like it one little bit. Israel wants a home. Palestine wants a home.
The problem isn't finding a road to peace. The problem is figuring out what earthly room there is for conflict. If two little boys want to divide a cold soft drink on a hot day, and they have two glasses of different size and shape, one pours the drinks, and the other takes his choice. Let one side divide the land and the other choose. Holy sites get managed by some international committee. (With the soft drink, of course, it is the bottle top that is the irreducible conflict. Used to be if you pried the little cork disk out you could try to fasten the cap to your shirt by putting the cap against a layer of cloth and jamming the cork back in so you had a little badge.) of course for the project to work, there would have to be agreement that people would move to their respective lands once the division was made. Ensuring that would be most difficult.
The search for a home can be seen in nationalist movements in many places. The Tamils in Ceylon, the Sikhs of the Punjab, Basques of France and Spain, Afghans, French Canadians and as many more as you want to name. Russia has been called a "prison of nations.
So it is, but you might apply the same term to the United States, to India or to any of a number of African nations. Recently the Soviet Union has been under pressure by riots in a place called Azerbaijan by Armenian nationals who want their province of Nargorno-Karabakh transferred to become part of Armenia. The Soviets apparently will not do it because is they did they would be expected to do the same thing elsewhere, the rearrange their political structure better to represent their demographic structure. What, if anything, is the basic problem there, I would like to know. But generally imperial powers, prisons of nations if you will, make a principle of denying national needs.
Sometimes there is hope; generally there is not. Even the Scotch Irish of the American South once tried to establish a homeland.
They knew they would be sharing it with the Blacks, but they wanted it anyway. As often happens, the imperial power - the power that want to bind multiple disparate peoples together -crushed the national power.
How the South lost that war remains a mystery. The South had wealth and population adequate to match the North. The Southern people were, by and large, better fed and thus bigger and stronger, a significant point when the issue is decided on a bayonet charge. The war was more popular in the South. The war was fought in the South so supply lies were shorter. Travel is easier in the South anyway, since the land is generally more gentle. The soldiers were more used to the heat. They were better led. They were more accustomed to the use of complex fire arms. So what did the North have that out matched Robert Lee?
I think it was heroin. The name was invented because it made heroes out of Union soldiers, who otherwise were rather deep into their opium addiction a lot of the time. Of course heroin was given by injection, so it was only available from a doctor in those days.
Consider this. Two units are in conflict. Assume the size and skill of the units are comparable. The conflict ends with bayonets and muzzle loaders being swung like baseball bats. One side or the other retires in disarray. They run like rabbits.
The winning side takes the position.
Now, for the efficacy to the army as a whole, the most important factor is the efficiency with which the defeated men find their way back to their general staging area and get reassigned. If one is a heroin addict and it's time for a fix, a soldier might do that a lost faster than if his driving force is the intellectual conviction that war is a really good thing to get involved in. And if the choice is surrender or run and them come back, again heroin makes the hero.
Those who surrendered suffered horribly. There was a Southern prison camp at Andersonville, where the death rate of the Yankees was appalling. It has generally been put down to starvation, dehydration, no medical care, sunburn and discouragement. But what would happen is that the camp, not being a castle, really consisted of barrier anyone could walk across and some soldiers outside with guns under orders to shoot anyone crossing the line.
And they crossed it. Just walked off and got shot. Something, hunger, thirst, misery of some sort drove them to suicide. It wasn't just that Yankees are weak. These were the very men who were standing up to Lee's meat grinder. I think thy were in heroin withdrawal.
That is how the South was won.
The North has never quite recovered from the drug addiction problem she gave herself in those days. These days it is cocaine, which enters the country in large quantities, much used close to its point of entry, but much bound for the great northern conurbations. She prolongs the tragedy for the same reason she provoked it1 the problem is territorial greed.
Cocaine comes from South America, grown by hungry peasants, processed by ruthless merchants, worried over by incompetent and corrupt officials, smuggled over dangerous seas and arriving in say Florida, whence it is trucked a couple thousand miles to market. It sounds dramatic, but in fact, the only element that is remarkable is the truck trip. You can find hunger, ruthlessness, incompetence and so forth in many places. A system where a truck can go virtually unchallenged for thousands of miles, that is the miracle. If it were not cheap and convenient to cross the South, the drug problem in the North would diminish. Break up the Union. Break up that vast and easy market. Force smugglers to do their work right under the noses of those who are hurt by it, and things might be different.
Permitting the South the secede may sound far fetched, but it is at least possible. All it would take would be a constitutional amendment or a new constitutional convention. Short of that, it is not likely that the country as a whole permit any state or group of states out.
Another place where nationalism and imperialism collide, and this time more violently, is in Ireland. The people of the Republic of Ireland regard themselves as a nation, and quite properly so. The majority of Northern Ireland regard themselves as not being part of that nation. To small to survive alone, they remain attached to Great Britain. The southern Irish regard themselves as patriots and nationalists rather than imperialists, but the fact remains that the local population does not choose to throw its lot with the Republic, and what the republic wants is the land, not the majority of the people.
As in Palestine, the question seem to an outsider as to where the possible source of conflict could arise. Each wants a home. At least one side denies the other a right to a home. People get killed, but not as many as in many an American city of comparable size. Friends outside the conflict are embarrassed and uncomprehending. And no doubt there are reasons beyond the lust for land and the longing for home, local personal reasons, that keep such conflicts broiling.
Another drive that seems deeper than people~s wish for wealth is their religion. Some years ago I attended a conference given by a some very idealistic environmentalists who had decided that take a page of the of Seminole books. The Seminoles recently, having won a lawsuit, had decided to spend the money building modern housing for the tribe. The elected to build high rise condominiums. when people protested that it didn1t seem to be a very Indian sort of thing to do. The Indians explained that their primary love was of the swamp. Yes, they could all have built ranch houses and had big yards, but that would have destroyed more swamp than the condos. well the environmentalists took it to heart and decided that if palefaces could learn to live together happily, there would be more land left for nature. we could do it. paradise. Complete with plumbing and central air.
It was a wonderful conference, full of dreams of park, of open air restaurants, of schools on top of homes on top of office buildings on top of retail shops surrounded by walking malls. of art and music mixing comfortably with commerce and information transfer, while beyond the city gates the green and virgin land beckoned only the most restless souls. The first speaker on how to make the city more human, called up his first slide. A blue river slid past a steep tree shadowed hill while above a stately cathedral lifted Gothic spires. This was a down town scene. This was it, the kind of urban delight we would be talking about.
For the rest of the week not one mention was made of a church. There was lots of talk about commerce. There was talk about standing on street corners chatting. There was talk about ancient Greece and merchants hanging around the Stoa district, and about what it took to clinch a deal. But although the human was regarded as a social, a commercial, a cultivated and a historic creature, he was not a religious creature. I am sure that the political situation was such that bringing up such issues would have done more harm than good.
The real enemy of the city, particularly the intimate city of which they dreamed, is the difficulty in choosing your neighbors. Given a big yard and a good car, your neighbors are less important. But submitting yourself to the society of one building and public transportation on the company of whomever else requires either an indifference people do not feel or a highly homogeneous community.
The dream includes religion, and how to incorporate that is a problem they did not address.
Similarly, Mr. Gorbachev, in his book about the current restructuring of Soviet society starts out with a story about two workmen who were asked what they were doing. The one complained that they were carrying stones all day. The other stood and said with pride that they were building a temple.
Again, the dream of the proper life includes the needs of religion, even for a government that has been historically atheistic. In all fairness to Mr. Gorbachev, he does recognize in that book that people do have legitimate needs to be recognized as nations and that people do have authentic needs to conduct their lives in accordance with their religious principles. It will be most interesting how he is able to realize these high, these truly revolutionary ideals.
One country that would seem to have little trouble with such ideals is Iran. For one thing, they do have an undisputable homeland. The same people have lived in the same area for thousands of years. Ancient Persia. At the time of Christ, it was not the Romans who dominated the Near East, it was the Parthian empire. And by all appearances, the Parthians were far the more civilized. In addition to an ancient home, the Iranians have a size sufficient so that it is not likely that they will be invaded from outside. There may have been a time in history when a nation the size of Iran could be crushed by a giant like the United States or Russia, but that time is not now. World opinion would never stand for it even if someone wanted to try.
A second thing the Iranians have is a generous supply of useable oil. They are not the largest reserves in the world, but they are very large, enough to supply their own needs for many years and enough to export in great quantities. The oil potentially could mean a substantial contribution to the material well being of the whole country.
In addition to home and wealth, the Iranians share a religion which is very important to them. They are, mostly of the shute Muslim sect. The split between the Shute and Sunnite Muslim sects is generally traced to the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 A.D. Mohammed had established the Muslim faith, and with his death there was a struggle for control. The struggle was won, largely through assassination, by the Sunnite party, who then dominated Mid Eastern politics until the present. The Shah of Iran, staunch and repulsive ally of the United States was, of course Sunnite.
The split actually is probably even deeper. Some time around the sixth century B.C. a Persian (Iranian) we know as Zoroaster invented or recorded a system of belief holding five things to be true. 1) The universe was created by an almighty God. 2) That God takes in interest in the lives of humans. 3) At some time in the future, there will be a general upheaval in the universe with the end of the rules as we know them. 4) The dead will be called from their graves. 5) God will judge them for their deeds.
Zoroaster influenced Christian thinking. Jesus of Nazareth referred to a day of judgement. St. John the apostle talked about in in some detail in his Revelation.
Mohammed was influenced directly by Christians, accepting Christ as an authentic prophet, although denying that Christ was more a child of God than anybody else was. Except for that one point, Muslin would be a Christian denomination. Certainly the judgement day concept features as strongly in Mohammed's writing as in that of any Christian since John.
During the early life of Mohammed, the Arab world in which he lived was pagan. They were idolators, literally worshiping idols more than a thousand years after Iran had produced Zoroaster.
Needless to say, when the new vital Muslim faith reached Persia, it was like flame on straw. And not surprisingly, the Iranians to this day cling to a sect that is most devout. Mohammed himself bad not patience with idols. "Carnage is better than idolatry," he said, and led a series of military campaigns against those of the old faith.
It would not for centuries, the Shutes have been dominated both politically and economically by the Sunnites, the more devout and sincere pawns for the clever, the ruthless, the unscrupulous. No wonder the Iranians refer to the United States as the great Satan. we supported the Shah, whose second purpose, after clutching as much power and wealth as he could manage, was to bring-hiscountry-into-the-twentieth-century. In other words, to dilute and discredit the old Shute devotion and substitute Western materialism for it.
One should not take too much offence at being called Satan. By Mid Eastern standards, it's pretty mild. Remember that this is the land of the great soul satisfying curse, of curses that start out, "0 misbegotten dung of a syphilitic camel, swilling with reverence what the evil one spews from his unspeakable sphincters and cowering with soiled tail between trembling legs · ... " and then start to get nasty. The Prophet his self said God does not love a curse UNLESS A MAN AS BEEN TRULY WRONGED, in which case, no doubt, He enjoys seeing an art well practiced as much as any.
Furthermore, Satan is not the threat to the Muslim he is to the Christian. Mohammed's Satan 5 capacity to do evil is strictly limited to the ability to give bad advice, advice which leads one away from true reverence for God. The charge is, alas, not far off the mark from a Shute perspective. But compare the Christian Satan. Not only did he, like his Muslim counterpart, engineer the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The Christian Satan in so doing introduced original sin. Thenceforth Satan has a share in every human heart. The Christian is in sin until he is saved. Not so the Muslim, who is accountable for his own misdeeds alone. Even then, if he does evil unintentionally, it is not to be held against him. And of course, he can be forgiven just like a Christian.
Come judgement day, the Christian Satan is expected to reemerge as a potent and exceedingly dangerous force. The beast rises from the sea. The beast survives incredible injury. The beast calls all men to bow down before himself. The Christian Satan is able to posses a human body, makes disposition of punishment in Hell and is able to purchase a human's soul even if that person does no evil thing beyond agreeing to the transaction. Poor Job fell into Satans hands in complete innocence.
By comparison, the Muslim Satan is a weak pitiable little thing who can only mislead. Even that is not so bad. God does as much. Remember how God hardened the pharoah's heart.
By the way; perhaps you have heard someone say Muslim women are thought not to have souls. Perhaps I said it myself. Don't believe it. If a Muslim woman believes in God and does what is right, she goes to Paradise just like a man.
To a Christian, whether Christ was the Son of God is an issue of no small consequence. But begging that question, look at attitudes toward judgement day. Take the Christian Protestant Methodist approach. If you open your King James Version to the last book and push it in his face, and ask, "What's that mean?" he will probably change the subject. Rarely will he introduce it into the conversation willingly.
If you pursue him, he may whimper that the book, the Revelation of St. John, was written by a man in prison. That he couldn't say what he wanted to say. So it's all written in a kind of a code. You are then at leave to point out that at the very same time, this man's brother Christians were being thrown to lions for their faith, and that you could hardly expect to have respect for a man who was not willing to say what he meant under such circumstances, much less put him in the Bible as holy writ.
Perhaps your Methodist friend will then say that the whole point of Methodism is achieving a proper relationship with God. That God's kingdom is not an outward and physical political arrangement but an inner and spiritual transformation. That the chaotic, violent, even sadistic imagery in Revelation, is the description of the spiritual quest of the soul for God and of God for the human soul. That this spiritual process is just as momentous, just as real and just as disruptive of ordinary existence as the horrendous events in the book would be were then enacted on a physical and historical plane.
Bite your lip before you scream, "If it is so important, why don't you ever talk about it?" Notice that the reality described by the Methodist is not a material one. It is rather more oriental in tone, tending to lay more emphasis on what makes a person a good person and a little less on what is physical truth.
Contrast that with some of the more fundamental Protestant denominations. There you will find the expectation of the immanent return of Christ, the immediacy of the judgement day. The question of whether one will die before the events or be caught up to heaven first or whether one will have to live through it all becomes a very reasonable thing to discuss. Judgement flay is believed to be a real physical even in the most literal sense.
with all this, the Muslim would feel right at home. He is speaking history. Fact. Or at least anticipated fact, as real before the event as the next world's Fair or football season.
What constitutes a fact in the future is, of course, one of those little imponderables. For some centuries, our Science, our Natural Philosophy, has been based on the assumption that the world will go on just the way it has~ Do you threaten me with Judgement day? I point out that it has never happened before. The Zoroastrian religions are based on the assumption, call it revelation if you will, that there will be profound changes in the world, including the rules themselves. Do you deny my revelation? Mohammed said that when the unbelievers say, "We are waiting," say "I too am waiting." Strictly speaking, there is no way to test the two assumptions, since it is the validity of testing that is in question. It is possible to discuss the two, and there is a massive inconsistency in the assumption of science; that is to say, for the universe to have started fifteen billion years ago and for it to continue as it is now for another fifteen billion, it must at some moment lift itself out of a "black bole." The only alternative description of the universe as we see it involves a moment in the near (less then fifteen billion years) future when the fabric of time and space disintegrates just about as Zoroaster described. "The sky rolls up like a scroll.TM It is in Revelation. It is in the Koran. Although I have pointed this out before, I notice that science has not yet been thoroughly discredited.
This disruptive event is expected by Muslim and Christian.
Don't expect a Baptist-Muslim unity movement any time soon~ The historical barriers are vast. But in principle, again it is hard to find a point to quarrel over. Since the Muslim believes in Jesus, even after his own manner, the Christian has no quarrel. Since the Christian believes in God, the Muslim has none.
Oddly, while the Christian fundamentalist movement has as its prime concern the passing of the test of Judgement Day, that movement also seems to serve the daily spiritual and cultural needs of its people. Their involvement social, the intensity of the religious experience of these believers is great. The Methodists, despite their emphasis on the humanistic aspect of their faith, indeed fail to meet the human needs 0£ the faithful. Theirs is a political denomination, interested in political problems in foreign countries, interested in disarmament, interested in ecumenical movements and forging ever more powerful relationships with other religions. The sheep are not fed.
Happy the Iranian with his home, his ancient religion his ancient unified culture, his vast potential wealth. But alas, Iran and Iraq have had for the past eight years a long, terrible war. Over what? The watershed, the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, over which they have fought is interesting enough. The swamp Arabs who live there still build houses with pre-Babylonian techniques. But the actual importance of the area cannot justify the million deaths that the war has cost.
I have yet to hear anyone suggest going down to the area and asking the people there which country they would rather belong to. Seems odd, Ma 'am. But they haven't
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Early after the Shute overthrow of the Sunnite overlords, Iran deeply offended the U.S by permitting radicals to kidnap and bold hostage people at the American embassy. The Prophet specifically states that captives must be ransomed or returned. Holding them indefinitely or harming them is forbidden. This, then was another case of failure to hold firmly enough to principle, for by ignoring these teachings, Iran convinced the world that they had made an enemy. Iraq seized the occasion to attack.
During this terrible war, the United States has hovered about trying to be a helpful bystander. This was difficult enough in a part of the world of intense passion and complex history. Also, our motives were easily open to question. we didn't want Russia to get at all that oil. More immediately, we didn't want the flow of oil to our friends cut off. Nor did we want the kind of fundamentalism that characterizes Iran to somehow infect the Arabs, unlikely as that may seem, Arabs not being Persians.
And alas, infecting the Arabs is just what they would like to do. After thirteen centuries of Sunnite domination, the Shutes are not content to practice their religion in peace. Not that they would be permitted to. It was Sunnite Iraq that started this war by invading Shute Iran, thinking them to be weakened.
Just this month, it looks as if there may be some softening of Iran S resolve. They have had some setbacks on the battlefield. I suspect American satellite intelligence may be part of that.
Some other things have made the U. S. look anti-Persian. Last April Israel, with our blessing, murdered an Palestinian in I think it was Tunesia. Sent some commandoes ashore, knocked on the door of his study, and cut him down with automatic weapons when he answered. within two days Iran threw everything they had at the United States Navy. The Navy was doing its job that day and in a few hours, Iran lost a third of its force on the Persian Gulf. Two days after that, I watched a talk show on which professional news commentators sat around and asked each other in a contented sort of way why the Iranians had gone into a suicidal frenzy. No one had any suggestion. Particularly no one said maybe they were incensed at us because of the murder our ally had committed.
It is not possible that the connection had not occurred to them. These were pro's. They were paid to say what somebody wanted to hear. Nobody wanted to hear that we were actually guilty and had escaped punishment because we were too strong to be punished.
More recently, an American Navy cruiser shot down, accidentally we are told, an Iranian civilian transport jet. The captain of the ship said he thought he was under attack. That ship carries a radar system called Aegis after the shield carried by Zeus. It is the best ocean going radar. I have been told that American airborne radar, the kind you might put in a fighter jet, is able to count the turbine blades on an approaching jet at seventy miles. If that is true, the Aegis at six miles ought to be able to count the fillings in the airplane pilot's teeth. And they say they couldn't tell if it was a transport of a fighter closing in on them. Somebody has not been telling the truth. Since we are the only ones talking, it kind of narrows the field.
In the aftermath of the airplane tragedy, the United States has, reacting with proper horror at what we did, offered to pay compensation to the families of the victims. Mohammed said such pay must be offered and must be accepted. It is a way of keeping an accident from turning into a blood feud. cod does not hold you responsible for an accident.
Even before the payment has been agreed upon, Iran has softened her tone. Perhaps a decent gesture has done exactly what the Prophet hoped it would.
Iran remains an example of the limits of materialism. Money is not the most important issue for many people many times.
The final flaw in materialism, our materialism in its present form, is that it cannot go on even if people really want it to. We have based our sense of nationhood on our sense of our money. The United States has about as much wealth as Europe, even if it is less well distributed. And Europe appears to be well on the way to establishing a massive common market. In economic terms, it will represent the equivalent of a nation larger and wealthier than our own. This will be more than a psychological blow. We will have to start competing on equal terms in a world that will contain at least one force that is more than our equal.
There is no harm in that in principle. It would just make us all a little less rich. But since wealth is not well distributed here, there are many who can ill afford to be a little less rich. Our social order is predicated on extensive and expensive mobility and dispersal of population. Take away our cars and there go our detached dwellings. Take away our detached dwellings and there goes our insulation against social inequities and tensions we have grown into. In other words, if all one cares about is money, losing money is not a trivial issue.
Another structural problem we have is a massive national debt. This is not only a debt in terms of borrowed money that is earning interest, we also have a large number of people who are going to want to retire and to be paid while they are in retirement. That money is going to be hard to find. Fortunately, the United States still has a pretty good credit rating. The Japanese still lend us money and seem happy with the resulting return and security.
That security is, however, not absolute. I understand that a new constitutional convention can be called if a sufficient number of states submit petitions demanding one. The number needed is two thirds of the states, or thirty four in all. Last I heart there were thirty three, yes, thirty three state petitions already on the table so to speak. Just one more state has to decide that the constitution needs serious restructuring. That many now require anything more than another Supreme Court interpretation of the constitution that does local damage somewhere that hasntt felt it before.
At a new convention, it is hard to say what would happen. For one thing, a lot of things that had been judged implicit in the old one would be made explicit or explicitly be excluded. For another thing, it would only be by the greatest effort that a three quarters majority be found that would ratify the new constitution. If thirteen states decided that they would ratify nothing that did not give them the option of leaving, then either they would get that option or there would be no new constitution.
With no constitution, there is no United States. With no United States, there is no one to shoulder that massive national debt. If that debt had proved crushing in the first place, a deadlock at the convention might be no accident. It might be easier for the individual states to walk away and leave it.
For many, conspicuously for the Japanese, this would be a financial disaster. They would endure it.
The Japanese regard the united States with more than awe and affection. The Japanese regard the United States with respect. That is respect as in, MThe Japanese boy spoke to his father with respect.
Remember the War Between the States. Remember the years during which the South was looted, disenfranchised, impoverished. The forests cut. Land confiscated. The whole process of despoilment and rapine still called with scathing irony "reconstruction." Yet look at the relative patriotism of the Southerner. How he really does love his country for itself, not for what he can make off it. A conquered people tend to regard the conqueror as a parent.
Now consider how we treated Japan after World War II. We built her up. Accepted her trade. Protected her. we protect her still. And so they regard us as a parent. And so they will go to great lengths so keep us whole. Will trust us beyond the limits of good trade balance.
But if we are destroyed, they will, with unfathQmable grief, accept it as the hand of fate and go their way. Keeping even a loved and respected parent alive by extreme artificial means has never seemed to appeal to the Japanese sense of honor.
Wealth is the representation of perceived value. Once animal survival has been accomplished, value is based on culture and is thus fundamentally different from on community to another. The accumulation of wealth for its own sake ultimately destroys all.
Booty
Editor's Note;
Wild Surmise is an occasional newsletter on speculative matter. It is sent out free. We are happy to add anyone who asks to the mailing list. Of course anyone who asks can get off the mailing list too.
Last month we mentioned a comic strip. This particular letter should not have neglected to mention the inimitable "Far Side," nor should we have failed to mention M Shoe, M which is about a newspaper that is edited by a raven. That editor is not, however, bald.
Next issue, late this year, Booty will try to invent the ultimate bow and arrow, a better bicycle pump, a good surfboard and a satisfactory pitcher.
M came in from a lecture the other day and announced that he was officially more intellectual than Booty. The lecturer, referring to magnetic resonance imaging, had announced that the greatest intellectual phenomenon of the decade was MRI. "He didn't mention Booty at all. Just the two of us."
Ed
copyright August, 1988 WILD SURMISE
BALBOA AWARD
Cortez, who did not discover the Pacific, did apparently discover the blood sucking bat and name it the vampire bat, thus inventing the bat-like vampire to the great benefit of personkind.
A Balboa award to Richard C. Hoagland, The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever. North Atlantic Books, 2320 Blake Street, Berkeley Calif. 94704. He attempts to make a statistical analysis of the chance his putative artefacts occurred by chance, although in the absence of pixel values his information is inadequate.
If you are looking for a good book on cosmology, something standard and readable, look into A Brief History of Time from the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking. Bantam Books, 666 5th Ave, NYNY 10103.
Last issue Booty proposed that his reverse time theory suggests but does not insist that the radius of the earth is increasing at a speed comparable to that of the expansion of the universe. He suggested that when the earth was smaller atmospheric pressure was greater and this could be tested by measuring the pressure in bubbles trapped in amber. According to John C. Cramer in Dinosaur Breath, Analog Science Fiction Science Fact July 1988, the pressure has been measured as high as ten atmospheres, which is far too great for Booty's theory to account for. The amber apparently has been compressed by geological forces.
Last issue Booty proposed 1988 would have a cold wet summer. At least it would be unusually cold in the southern hemisphere. According to Taking the World's Temperature, p. 80 of the July 1988 Economist magazine, 1988 so far is the hottest summer ever in both hemispheres.
The other day the heart stoppingly beautiful official Wild Surmise laboratory assistant came in with the May 13, 1988 Journal of the American Medical Association and pointed out kindly that my picture was on the front cover. The major article was a series of three articles on the current health of Vietnam Veterans done by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Despite the increased mortality already documented, the health and social status of the veterans proved to be comparable to that of their contemporaries.
There was, however a 100% increase in depression (4.5% vs 2.3%), a 53% increase in anxiety (4.9%. vs 3.2%), a 49% increase in alcohol abuse or dependence (13.7% vs 9.2%). A full 15% (and this was percent of all veterans of Vietnam, not only those who had been in intense combat situations) experienced combat-related post traumatic stress disorder at some time during or after military service and 2.2% had the disorder during the months before the study was done, even after all these years.
For further information lay hold of the July JAMA or write:
Veterans Health Study
Centers for Disease Control (F-l6)
1699 Clifton Road NE
Atlanta Georgia 30333
Another Balboa award, then to the CDC and their highly authoritative research.
Information of AIDS continues to be turbulent. On June 14, 1988, they said in a convention in Stockholm that t· the CDC's estimate that 1 million Americans are now infected with human immunodefficiency virus, which causes AIDS." On June 17, 1988 the American Medical News states AIDS "has already infected some 64,000 Americans." The wonder why we don't always feel real comfortable with their statistics.
The larger number is about exactly what it was a year ago, Indicating that the rate of spread has dropped from 100% per year to 0% per year, which speaks pretty well for how people have suddenly started being more careful. However, the CDC reported last year that they were looking at a 23% rise in syphilis cases, the largest jump in 20 years.
It is now generally conceded that just about everyone infected with the HIV virus dies in five to ten years. That being the case, the sexual revolution has already lethally infected more Americans than were killed in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf combined.
We suggest you be careful.
Ed
MILD SURPRISE
I have always sympathized with Tybalt. He was walking along minding his own business, which consisted of looking for a fight, when he ran into Romeo, who was being more erratic than usual even for him. Romeo and Tybalt's families spent a lot of time snarling, drawing swords and generally acting like jerks. Romeo, in the course of two maximum mood swings, precipitated two duels for Tybalt, who survived one. Up until then, the worst thing that had happened was somebody bit his thumb at somebody else.
Biting a thumb is the kind of gesture where one wouldn't know he was being insulted unless it was done right. But if you really went at it, chewing excitedly, sucking on it noisily, slobbering all over it, it would make a quite adequate insult. Nothing to be killed over, though.
Like Tybalt,. I find the world set about with unpredictable people and rules that keep you from simply laying your hands on somebody and pushing him around. Even in sports, you can't. Chess would be so much simpler if you could, as I used to when playing older brother, simply seize an opponent's piece that offended you, or golf if you could grab your opponent's elbow during a put you very much wanted him to miss. Two exceptions are wrestling and rugby.
I first learned how to play rugby one mellow autumn day in Connecticut. It is a little like football in that an oblong ball must be advanced to the end of a playing field, pitch they call it, by a team. In football arriving is sufficient. In rugby, the ball must actually be touched to the ground to score. That kind of consideration belongs to the "backs," the taller, better looking, smarter, better coordinated players, who are good runners and prefer showing off by making dazzling plays kicking, dribbling lateraling and tackling, to getting sweaty, dirty and crushed in the anonymous welter of the "scrum."
Play in rugby begins in a number of ways, depending on variables understood only by backs. The most characteristic way consists of forming up the scrum. A little guy called the "hooker" stands between two hulking players and everyone throws his arms around the guys beside him. They face another line from the other team, and both lines bend over and lock heads. A second line then forms behind, each player in the second line putting his head between the rumps of two players in front and his arms over the shoulders of the players beside him. Similarly each player in the third rank finds a suitable pair of buttocks and puts his head between them. In the finished formation, there are no heads visible.
The ball is then tossed in by an official, and each team attempts to hold its ground while hooking the ball with the feet and passing it on back to the scrum half, who throws it to the backs, who then begin their advance.
If your team has the heft, and you really want to, you can push the scrum bodily forward, making it a little easier to get the ball, and actually gaining ground over the playing field. That fall day, our team earned the nick name, "the beef trust."
Long after, I made by way across London to meet Tur where he was having a beer at the Fountains Abbey Pub. Tur had been in London for months, and as I had 5ust arrived I had few friends there. The atmosphere was mellow although rather formal. The walls were clean bare wood. The people were tidy and seemed, contrary to observation, to have better things to do than hang out at a pub. Darts thunked stolidly at the other end of the room. The smell was as much lemon as beer, and the place was not over heated. In all, it was not the kind of place where you thought you were about to get into trouble.
Tur let slip that the Mary's rugby team had a game coming up, but there weren't enough men to field a team. I let slip that I didn't mind playing a bit of rugby on a weekend. He thought he might be able to get me a slot on the team. I thought that would be awfully nice, but I really didn~t think I'd be able to handle anything but the scum. He said he didn't doubt it for a
So one day in late winter, I donned borrowed rugby garments and met the others on the cold pitch. Somehow Mary's had put together a team. I eyed our backs and then looked at the opponents. The Centaurs, they were. They weren't all that big, but they looked very tough, the tall lanky kind of toughness you associate with young horses. They already looked offended that we had so much as set foot on their pitch.
We set up the scrum. They put me in the back row on the outside right with Tur, who is pretty big, next me, figuring he could keep me out of trouble. When the ball was tossed in, the our right flank moved forward, the left flank was thrown back, the formation pulled a ripe melon on the runway act and in the confusion the Centaurs' scrum half grabbed the ball and they scored.
Mary's backs put their heads together. Next time we set up the scrum, they put me inside left and Tur outside right. The ball was thrown in. This time the formation held together, and we began to advance in slow lazy loops toward the right. The ball bobbled up to my feet. I lifted a foot to step over it, misgauged the height, kicked it back to the hooker, who, unaccustomed to the seismic forces he was being subjected to, did about the same thing and kicked it to the Centaurs, who kicked it to their scrurn half, who grabbed the ball and they scored.
Once more the backs huddled. This time they put me inside right and Tur outside left. That was better. Tur was built like a bison. I used him as a fulcrum, and we heaved the whole scrum back. The ball lay untouched as we simply walked off it down the field. Our scrum half moved and we put our heads up.
It was a thrilling moment, the ball at last in our position, the Mary's backs lined up in a clean diagonal row, each looking very pleased with the scrum' S efforts, each looking very jaunty, each
oblivious to the roiling mass of Centaurs closing it. They ran a clean, classical attack and made it half way down the field before the pressure of Centaur tackles broke the line up. By this time unfortunately, everyone was keyed up. The Centaurs got possession of the ball and had begun moving up the field when a tackle by a Mary's player, it may have been Tur, left a centaur on the field.
He didn't get up.
We gathered to stare as he lay still and silent.
"Why doesn't he get up?"
"Maybe he's hurt."
"Are you hurt?"
Silence.
"It's his ankle."
"Somebody look at his ankle."
"1'11 look at it. I'm going to be a doctor."
"M all right. You look at it."
"floes this hur...
"Leave it bloody alone!"
His bellow made us suspect that he was alive. That his ankle did, indeed hurt. And that we would all get along better if nobody grabbed it.
When we looked again, his leg was indeed broken above the ankle and sitting at a thirty degree angle.
We waited for the ambulance. Afterwards we decided that maybe we were just playing for fun, and it would be nice if nobody tackled that way for the rest of the game.
They did not have showers. Instead, there was an enormous hall with ranks of tubs. Each tub must have been three feet deep and four wide and long enough to hold eight sweaty, naked, players singing bawdy songs, some submerged with only their faces showing and others sitting astride the side, wetting only one leg from the knee down. I found a solitary corner of an empty tub so soak the cold and cramps out in the hot water. This was quite acceptable, too. It was all very English.
Trouble with rugby, other than the rare broken leg, is that it's a team sport and you have to be able to be there when the team needs you. Besides, not many girls play rugby. I took up running.
I knew I would never break an records running, but I heard of one race I thought I might be able to handle. It was a two mile run down the beach, a quarter mile swim in the surf, another two miles running and a final quarter mile in the surf. As a boy, the one sport I knew I excelled in was running in deep sand or snow. I thought Swimming was mostly a matter of form. Surf would break that up enough so it would be a fair contest.
Fair it no doubt was. An electrical storm delayed us for about a half hour. We started down the beach, the expert runners tripping it lightly on the wet sand and the surf's margin. By the end of the first running leg, I was numbered with the stragglers. The surf was not a great problem, as you could swim out past it. The problem was that there was a current. Current delays a slow swimmer more than a fast one, so be the time I got out of the watet I had a solid grasp on last place. After I had limped the last running leg, the officials told me not to get in the water because it was getting dark. Since quitting had not been my idea, I felt sufficiently justified to go to the after race awards ceremony and watermelon feast.
Sometimes it is chilly after dark, at and such times I look around and my fellow runners quaking and turning blue and bumpy, and at such times I reflect contentedly that my physique is better optimized for resisting the cold than any of them. This was not such a time. It was as hot and muggy as Verona. I was standing chatting with another runner as I held a large slice of watermelon in the palm of my left hand and a cold drink in my right hand. At that moment, a stout man with a beard took a bite out of my melon.
I had never met the man before, and my options seemed limited. I could challenge him, "Hey, you're eating my water melon." It seemed weak under the circumstances. I could pour my drink over his head, but I didn't want to loose the drink. Or I could take the melon and scrub it in his face. That seemed extreme.
So I decided to forget about the melon, he had gnawed out an enormous hunk of it anyway, and went back to the conversation. Next he took another bite, incredibly finishing off the rest of the slice in a single gurgling slurping crunch. So much for the option of scrubbing it in his face. Relieved that the interlude seemed over I started to retuin to the thread of what we had been talking about.
Then he bit my thumb. He wasn't subtle about it, either. He chomped down hard and really worked the thumb over. It was about time to get the drink into action.
But I recalled what had happened to Tybalt and got away from the place as quickly as I could.
M