WILD SURMISE

AUGUST 1989 #19

THE MIND AT HOME IN THE UNIVERSE

Such perceptions are shared by all so that we have a broad comfortable agreement that we know what time is on a personal and experienced basis, and we are understandably impatient if someone tries to say that time is any different from our gut feel of it.

Consider an extended period of time, a time longer than any human can live. It is still possible to have ideas about such a long time if we live in a community. We pool our experience over a number of generations and, as a community, arrive at a consensus. However, it turns out that different communities have different ideas about what time is. This extended, communal time has no direct bearing on our personal physiologic time. Communal time exists only by virtue of pooled experience and pooled thinking. For example, the Zoroastrian expects that the world will end in the future. The natural philosopher expects that the world will go right along as it has always gone in the experience of the community of natural philosophers. These two positions are in complete contradiction, and neither can, from any individual's experience, claim to have the better grasp of the truth. Both are community beliefs rather than personal beliefs.

Now I will propose that perceptions of time themselves, communal perceptions of time, do themselves change with time. This proposal raises an espistemological problem, a problem of how or whether you can know something. One can speak only from experience. Communal consciousness transcends personal experience and serves as framework from which to understand personal experience. Any consciousness that transcends communal consciousness should be a god or cod Himself. How can one, without claiming privileged communication, claim to understand how a community changes its basic concepts?

For one thing, people do write things down. And those writings are capable, with the aid of diligent and well supported scholars, of surviving the fall of empires, the destruction of languages, the extinction of races and the scorching of the land. Certain writings are in fact believed by some to be reports of privileged divine communication. The Koran was written before the extermination of Babylon, that mother or at least wet nurse of civilizations. The Bible dates to before the disintegration of the ancient Romans and creeks. such teats of survival are not to be taken lightly.

The Quakers, realizing that the language was changing, once decided that the best way to modernize the text without entailing the terrible risk of translation was to preserve the old language. They attempted to talk using only words found in the King James Version. It was a noble experiment, and I think it served them well, for in those days they had the reputation for stubborn honesty, blunt reliability, and use of peaceful means even at personal risk; they had a distrust of personal vanity and trust in honest hard physical work. Of late, I fear, they have come to use modern speech with its temptation to use flowery and ill defined words with their attendant flowery and ill defined concepts, and one finds them engaged in such liberal projects as smuggling aliens into the United States, something that bodes, initially at least, far more ill for the poor among the native born than for the sturdy middle class of the Quakers themselves.

More fortunate are the Muslim, many of whom still speak the language of the Koran, and the Orthodox creek, who have never had to translate the New Testament.

None the less, as a rule, we depend on translation of ancient texts, with the inescapable risk of misunderstanding.

In the second place, there is a thing called the imagination. It is one of the distinctively human traits. Used judiciously it can save a lot of risk for motor minded extroverts and a lot of time for the more reflective among us.

And finally, I do not much mind if I am wrong. It is not that it does not matter whether one is right or wrong. By the end of the article, I will be making suggestions, and I should be devastated to learn I was misleading you. But here initially, I only want you clearly to understand what I am saying about concepts of time changing with time. Later, you are at liberty to dismiss the idea if you choose on esthetic grounds alone. I claim no vantage point from which to be able accurately to assess what I say.

One point of tackling things in this way is that if we start deep in the past and then come running up to the present at great speed, perhaps we can sort of keep the momentum up and find out where we are likely to be headed next.

Consider what time means to an animal, to a child before he can speak or to an adult a long time ago before the first sentence was spoken. For such a person, there is little or no intellectual community. His notion of time is physiologic, and it is very probable that his whole mental life and the horizon of his ability to wonder about things is closely linked to the same physiology.

With the advent of communication, whether for the individual or for the community, it is as if the lights come up. It is possible to talk about consciousness, thought, personality, opinion, belief system. In all probability, thought is the result of the interaction of neurons, cells inside human brains. Since creatures with very few neurons, particularly when kept in isolation, seldom seem to have many novel ideas, it seems that there is a certain minimum number of neurons that must be interacting with each other before conscious rational thought can occur. That number is probably not many less than a typical human brain contains, else there would be many animals with which we could converse as eguals. In all likelihood, the minimum number of neurons required for thought is much greater than the number any human brain can contain. Thought, real thought, occurs when many brains are interacting. A community develops, and it is the community that does the thinking.

Consider a tire in the hearth. One oak log, even if it is well lit, will not burn. It many smoulder and glow as a.coal, but it will not flame. Neither will two logs blaze. But three logs, with the help of a little kindling, three logs make a fire. Similarly, three brains may make a mind, or three million brains, given they have a chance to communicate.

One of the first tasks of this mind, of course, is to identify its component parts. An infant playing with his toes establishes where his own body ends and the world around him begins. A person with a pain may refer the pain to some place other than the actual site of injury. whack your funny bone at the elbow, and you will sense it as a painful tingling in your hand. A slipped disc in the back may be felt as a pain going down the leg. But seldom will a person describe a pain that is actually outside of his body, say six inches in front of him. The exception is phantom pain of an amputated limb. In the unhappy event they take your arm off, it may still itch even though it is not there. You learned to expect to have an arm there when you were tiny.

When a community, a mind if you will, first identifies itself, it has some choices to make. First, of course, it will have to include a lot of neurons, that is to say the brains of a number of people. Then of course, it will have to include whatever those neurons need for support, nutrition, protection, and interconnection with other neurons. That is to say, not just the brains but the people themselves, with their heads in tact, their stomaches in action and their ears and voices at the ready. The mind then for organizational purposes, and of course organization is the very essence of mind, assigns personalities to individuals.

This condition is known as animism. It is the assumption that everything in nature has personality, has spirit, has a soul. This is not a matter about which one can be right or wrong any more than one can say of a game that the. rules are wrong. You may argue over whether a stone is able to respond in any way to what you say to it. You may argue over whether it can ever be conscious of you. You can also argue over whether a computer can ever understand you or be aware of you. You may have an opinion on whether a devil can live in a stone or whether there were spirits that dwelt in the earth before there were people and whether one of them may be capable of lingering near same object like a stone. And your opinion may be right or wrong. But if some communal mind has decided that a stone has a personality, then it has a personality.

This state of animism is, of course, rather cosy and appealing. There is nothing to be afraid of in nature, since all things have personality and all things are part of the mind. Everything is treated with respect, even affection, as one would treat a member of his own family. Of course, it is necessary to eat, and that means killing something, even if it is only part of a plant. But that is no terrible thing. Pluck an apple and the tree grows another. Club a squirrel and the tree grows another. Nothing is lost for very long.

In such a state, time has no preferred direction. The future is expected to be a lot like the past. Indeed, the two are hardly distinguishable. There is no perceived limit to what nature can supply, and everything that dies is renewed.

After a long time, however, experience began to pile up that belied the cheerful assumption of animism. People kept dying and they did not perceptibly come back. Indeed, infants were born, but it became clear that these infants were not exactly the same as the people who had died. Time clearly had a preferred direction. Life was a one way street

Now that was discouraging, since it became evident that a person could fall ill and die and that seemed to be an end to it. Since unpleasant things really do seem to occur on a regular basis the whole outlook became quite bleak. You are born. You get kicked around a lot. Then you die.

This condition of animism with an awareness of death, of stressed animism you may call it, found itself cluttered with a large number of objects that once had had personality but now were gone.

In short, there were ghosts. And these ghosts were very frightening. Obviously ghosts were alarming because they might be physically dangerous; not being physically real, they were hard to deal with. Your infirm aunt, who was no problem as long as you could feed her, get her to smile and more or less assure yourself that all was well with her, the same aunt, long since dead, was harder to deal with when all you knew about her was that she was real, that she existed as surely in your mind as the trees around you, that she was important to you and that you had some important obligations to her but had not done anything for a long time. If she were upset with you, you would not know it and would not know what to do about it anyway.

But there is a thing yet more frightening than this about ghosts. The presence of a ghost in your mind, or in your experience, challenges the very structure of reality. The mind, under conditions of pure animism, is the function of a mechanism that includes the whole immediate environment. It has structure, like a closed room. A ghost is like a place where a window has been torn from its casement. It is a hole in thought itself, in reality itself. And beyond that hole lies not just pain and death but utter chaos, gibbering irrationality, something far beyond the confines of simple mental illness, total disintegration of the soul. That is the source of the primitive, the atavistic fear that ghosts inspire. The ghost is not limited to being the ghost of a dead person. It may be the ghost of any object that has been included by the common mind as an integral part of itself. When the object itself has gone the memory, the need for that object remains/and is reflected as a flaw in the structure of the mind itself.

Under condition of stressed animism, then, there is the first inkling of time. Things die and stay dead. Time still has no apparent beginning, but time has a possible end. It is possible that the whole moral structure of the universe may fall apart.

One reaction to the stresses of animism with its teeming spirits and its risk of collapse of the universe was the notion of reincarnation. Although it was not obvious that people were coming back the assumption was that people were coming back anyway; you just could not tell easily that they were. Since they were coming back, they would not hang around as ghosts. Since they were coming back, they could continue to function as parts of the mind. As it were, although the window was gone, the hole in the wall was patched. And, to make things better, what happened to a person in his life determined how he would come back. If a person got injured in his life, he might come back with a birth mark. If a person led an exemplary life, he might come back under very favorable circumstances. Under ideal circumstances, he might not come back at all. He might escape from the whole process by rising above it. As a part of the universal mind, he would have completed his task.

This assumption of reincarnation does a number of interesting things. First, and most obviously, it is a way to account for the basic unfairness that may be perceived in the world. A person dies in the course of some very noble act, or lives long and comfortably despite having done wicked things, and there is, in his reincarnation, a chance for the universe to balance the books.

Second, reincarnation is a reasonable way for a person to be able to evaluate his own life. The question is, "Am I living in such a way as that, in the event I am reincarnated, I will return as the kind of person I really want to be?" In our materialistic world, we hear the ironic statement, "He who dies owning the most toys wins." It is just a way of keeping score.

Third, reincarnation is an incentive for a person to try to do the best he can within the community and family into which he was born. Consider: if you believe in reincarnation, then the one thing about which you can be absolutely sure is that the condition of your birth was hand picked by the universe not only to be a fair reward for you last life but, and it is the same thing, to provide you with the best possible opportunity to continue your moral and spiritual growth, taking into account whatever your moral state is at present.

For this reason, the Hindu does not accept converts. The Hindu believes in reincarnation. If you were not born Hindu, that may be good or may be bad, but it is quite clear that you were not meant to be and you must seek your own moral growth in the cominunity, the family and the religion into which you were born. This lack of any effort at recruitment has, of course, lost the Hindu any number of friends. The Buddhists, who believe essentially the same things about reincarnation, about moral growth through successive lives, about meditation and about refraining from eating meat, the Buddhists have a large number of friends and admirers. Myself I have no difficulty with accepting the Hindu refusal of recruits. It is, in fact, the ultimate in toleration to say, "Do not try to be like me. You are better the way you are.~'

In a universe strictly limited to reincarnation, there is no room for ghosts, devils or idols. Any spiritual entity exists as some living form, either an animal if the spirit is poorly developed or a human if the spirit is adequately developed. Indeed there may be forms that are further developed than humans, who will not have any detectable physical element, but these spirits are far more advanced than any but the best of humans in such things as altruism and good sense. They can be relied upon utterly not to be dangerous, indeed never to interfere with those of us who are still at the physical plane of the struggle.

Another thing that animism developed into was polytheism. As generation followed generation, starting from a basis of animism, two things became apparent. One was that if you kept track of trees, eventually every tree died, but there were still trees. There was an abstraction behind trees, what we would now call "species." It was possible to assign personality to some spirit of all trees, or the sun, or grain or the sea. So instead of having the ghosts of a million trees, one had one tree spirit.

Dealing with dead people was a little less elegant. It seems that in the polytheistic world, it was necessary to introduce a Hades, a place whither dead souls went.

At the same time life was getting simpler by cutting down on the number of non human members of the community and cutting down on the number of deceased members of the community, life was getting more complicated by the introduction of things that had obviously not been around forever. There were cities built, fields cleared and planted, stories learned, laws agreed upon. These things were expected to last forever, and some, particularly the stories, have lasted quite well.

Characteristics of polytheism include the worship of many gods, include the assumption of a hierarchy in existence whereby somebody is in charge and gives orders to somebody else, include the silent assumption that since there are gods associated with sacred things there is at least some of the world that, not being sacred, is available for ruthless exploitation and include an abstract, rational way of looking at the world. Abstractions themselves become as gods. People gather around the abstraction of freedom of speech as they once did around the old council rock.

Obviously, polytheism lends itself to the worship of idols. These would be things, physical objects as well as abstractions, that are not people but which are included as valued members of the community. Under polytheism, there are also destructive gods, since every thing of consequence has an attendant god and there is plenty of destruction visible.

There are ghosts in a polytheistic universe, but they do not elicit the primal terror that ghosts evoke under conditions of animism. There is a place where the spirits of the dead belong, and if they are out of place, it does not mean that the whole of reality is about to become unglued.

One of the best recorded polytheistic traditions is that of the Hebrews as described in the Old Testament. I hasten to agree that that tradition is pretty much monotheistic. But it is not strictly so. The words, "There is no god but God" appear nowhere in that document, nor does such an idea appear in any writing prior to the carrying away of the Jews into Babylon; indeed, other gods are mentioned as in Job and when the witch of Endor described them for Saul. In many respects, the Old Testament is much like other polytheistic religions. There is an air of hierarchy. There is a Hades. Some things, like the arc of the covenant are sacred; others, like the enemy's cattle, are not. And abstract matters are important; the important rules of life can be written down and numbered in a rational fashion. If you like, think of the Old Testament religion as rudimentary, a special case in which the number of gods has been reduced to One.

Under the conditions of polytheism, time has a beginning but no end. There are many tales of the beginning of things. There may be tales of the future, but tales of the future do not include the end of time. Rather one deals with a series of promises that are expected to last "forever." Mentioning a forever denies that time may some day end.

Then some time about three thousand years ago, a Persian, that is to say an Iranian, announced to the person next to him that time had a beginning and an end. The Persian's name was Zoroaster, and how he decided that, I have no idea, far less how he managed to persuade his acquaintance that this was no joke.

This Zoroaster lived and taught around the sixth century before Christ. His career marks approximately the rise of the Persian Imperial power. If you remember the struggles of the early Greek city states, one of their problems was with the new and enormous power of Persia. By the time of Christ, the Persians, now the Parthian Empire, were still the dominate world power. Rome had some trifling ascendancy in the West, but the Parthians had alliance with the Han dynasty in China and, until the Romans betrayed them, an alliance with Rome such that a Persian could in principle walk in peace from the Atlantic to the Pacific. At that time Persia had already been a great power since Italy and China were squabbling little petty tyrannies, and Persia would remain a great power after the other two had collapsed.

It seems inescapable that a large part of the power and stability of the Persian Empire was due to the teachings of this man, Zoroaster.

For one thing, Zoroaster taught a strict, jealous monotheism. Under conditions of animism, polytheism or reincarnation, a person might be willing to accept the gods of another person as being right for that person. The Zoroastrian perceived only one great Truth and all else was Lie, to be shunned and despised. For another thing, Zoroaster taught of a day of judgement, when the whole world would be taken apart, the dead called back to life and the world judged, each according to what life that person had led, and accordingly rewarded or punished. And, of course, tied in with that, time had both beginning and an end.

These teachings are remarkable not only for their enormously influential position in history, carried on the crest of the wave of rising Persian power, but for the fact that the teachings seemed unnecessary. The polytheistic culture in which Zoroastrianism arose was not inherently unstable. Nor was Zoroastrianism necessary for the survival of an empire; many and great were the polytheistic empires that had risen before and would arise after: Babylonian, Egyptian, Roman, Tnca, Aztec for a few. In fact, the difficulty with Zoroaster is not so much deciding what forces made his teaching so highly successful as trying to find any source at all. One possible source was Isaiah.

Isaiah is a major prophet of the Old Testament. He wrote maybe the first thirty nine chapters in the book of the same name. He is a most difficult man, living at a difficult time writing a difficult book.

A major difficulty throughout the Old Testament is the question of voice, the question of just who is talking. In most writing, we expect to have the voice be that of an omniscient narrator whose viewpoint is constant and whose mind is in perfect accord with the writer. Everything else is supposed to be in quotes. In more subtle writing, the writer may be far from sympathetic with the narrator. The narrator of the poem '~Ny Last michess" by Robert Browning is a cruel, vain, vicious, greedy man, who reveals all his undesirable characteristics to the reader without noticing them himself. The narrator of "Ozymandius" by Percy Shelly ends with the words, 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." It is a quote of a quote of a quote, each speaker having a different understanding of the sentence.

In Isaiah, voice leaps about with wild abandon. Sometimes the man Isaiah is referred to as '.1,,' sometimes as "he." And then with chapter forty, somebody else altogether starts talking. At least that is what the scholars say. The scholars, or course, look very carefully at the language and try to decide who wrote each word. what they wind up with is a series of very short statements which theoretically were written by different people and then compiled by others and amended by others. The question of voice becomes quite baffling.

What we are dealing with is holy writ. People have taken these words very seriously for thousands of years. Consider this passage from Isaiah, ruthlessly edited here by me. "Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment. The eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall harken. The vile person shall no more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful. For the vile person will speak villainy, and his heart will work iniquity, to practice hypocrisy and utter error, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail.

That is a thumbnail sketch of the 'vile person," to one who now, prior to the coming of that king, is called "liberal."

Now compare that with this caricature of a political liberal of the second half of the twentieth century. A liberal is a person who, in the United States, supports the following agenda, both before and after the fact.

1) The outlawing of. zoning laws that specify what racial and religious groups can live in what area, thus creating the danger, real and fancied, that neighborhoods can be broken up by the entry of people who are not wanted; also making it a legal impossibility to correct matters when some racial group is confined to some unfair, clearly undesirable and inadequate area by blind market forces.

2) The integration of schools against the will of the majority of the people being integrated with the resulting disruption of a great public education system and the relegation of the nation as far as education goes to the status of a third rate power.

3) Forced bussing of children so that even if they feel at home in their own neighborhoods, they will not feel at home at school.

4) Liberalization of laws and attitudes related to divorce until the majority of marriages end in divorce and the majority of children have broken homes.

5) Permissiveness toward things like homosexuality until the homosexual community is set up for a plague that will exterminate it more cruelly and efficiently than any conceivable massacre.

7) The admission of aliens into the community at a rate that materially depresses the earning power of the unskilled and even of the skilled as well as depriving less fortunate lands of some of their best talent, a rate that destroys the host country's one great strength, its effective ethnic unity.

8) The unliberalization of gun laws so that a government, itself founded by the armed resistance of citizens against a tyrannical rule, will never again fear resistance, no matter how tyrannical, so that killer packs of wilding teenagers can be confident they will not meet an honest man with a weapon.

9) The legalization, nay approval, of abortions at any time for any reason at government expense.

10) The imposition of these policies if need be at bayonet point and by the use of big government and its laws.

11) The passage of those laws by a series of confrontations, deliberate breaking of the law until a whole generation grows up thinking that confrontation and force are the natural means to achieve a political goal, that virtue means "We will overcome" not "We can get along."

12) The routine use of public demonstrations at times of public sorrow, for instance protesting the death penalty so routinely that it becomes a carnival to which even death penalty supporters feel at liberty to contribute.

13) The confounding of the judicial process until there are literally two thousand people on death row in the country, more than in any other country in the world.

That, we will pretend, is the liberal agenda. I feel comfortable in saying that there is at least one point included that a man of good will might oppose; the outcome if not the intention.

Such a Than, if he knows and respects the passage from Isaiah, may not permit himself to be called "liberal." He will think "This may be a vile thing; if I support it and am called liberal, I am the very vile man to whom the prophet~ refers."

Since a political movement consists not only of an agenda but also of people, the systematic exclusion of certain people changes the nature of the movement. If the movement has a name, their exclusion changes the meaning of the word. Obviously few items on the hypothetical liberal agenda were issues at the time of the writing of Isaiah, but his writing is so influential it is able to affect the meaning of words to this day.

So there are many things that render the scholarship about Isaiah difficult, but I will assume they are right on one matter: The first thirty nine chapters were written before the Jews were carried off to Babylon. And I take whatever else they say seriously but with reservations.

Isaiah must have been a difficult man from the beginning. "At the same time spake the Lord by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, Go and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put thy shoe from thy foot. And he did so, walking naked and barefoot. And the Lord said, Like as my servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and a wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia; so shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians prisoners and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered.~' Three years. This was not a prophet to be trifled with.

In order to be fair to Isaiah, one should discount the bulk of his prophecy along with his difficult personality. Take the passage, "Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. And it shall be as with the people, so with the prince; as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him. The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word. The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish." Powerful stuff, yes, but this doom and gloom is not exactly unique. Lots of prophets could do that; Isaiah can rise above it.

"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be ful~ of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.re Of course the commentators insist that this was not written by Isaiah himself. I insist that whoever wrote it had a vision of rare hope

Having seen the vision of God, Isaiah is then commissioned to speak to the people in this fashion: "Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed." Now ignore moral question for a moment, the question of whether it is evil of God to let people wander into sin. Ignore the theological question, whether there is salvation in understanding. Consider only the literary guestion, what is he talking about? He is talking about this very book. Isaiah, or cod-through-Isaiah is saying, · 'I am trying to confuse you. I am deliberately being hard to understand."

Nobody gets away with that. Not Shakespeare, not Dante, not Milton, not Homer. It is literary death to call attention to your own narrative style, although Mohammed does it. It is literary extinction to apologize for that style, as any number of good souls have started a speech with an excuse, '~I'Th sorry this is going to be a dull talk, but I'm not very good..." It is literary condemnation to the everlasting bonfire to be deliberately dull and point it out, as Shakespeare does with a speech by polonius in "Hamlet," and gets away with it. But to start out saying, "You will not understand this, nor do I intend that you should," nobody of any stature does it. But Isaiah does it. A difficult man. A difficult book.

The earliest Isaiah, dating from the time of Uzziah, lived before Zoroaster. Later additions, if we are to trust the commentators, date from after Zoroasters time. It is hard to tell what passages might have influenced Zoroaster, and what passages Zoroaster might have influenced.

Consider, though, the episode at the well. This is dated to the time of Ahaz, before Zoroaster. The political situation is thus: The patriarch Abraham received a promise from cod that his people would flourish. One of his descendants, Jacob (also called Israel) had twelve sons. During a famine, the entire household of Israel moved to Egypt. Many years later, what were now twelve tribes of Israelites left Egypt and invaded Palestine, living there for some generations until they united as a single kingdom of Israel under the able leadership of Saul. Saul was subverted by David, who usurped the throne and ruled all Israel, as did his son Solomon after him. After Solomon, a leader named Jeroboam led a revolt against the house of David. The tribe of Judah, however, remained loyal to the king and seceded to form a new kingdom Judea. These people were the Jews, as distinct from Israelites. As you read Chronicles and Kings, you will see that you are following the fortunes of two different nations. They spend a lot of time fighting each other.

The message sounds clear enough. All Ahaz needs to do is trust God, and God will protect Judah and the line of David. He says Israel will be broken, but it is not clear to me whether that is a promise or a threat- I consider it a threat. It is clearly a threat that if Ahaz does not have faith, the house of David will be destroyed.

"Moreover the Lord spake again unto Ahaz (You see how difficult this book is. I thought God was talking to Isaiah all this time.) saying, Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy cod; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above."

Now that is fair. Isaiah is offering to prove his credentials with God. And he offers a sign, a big one, anything. One would expect that the king, who is under. siege and is inspecting the water supply would ask for water, lots and lots of water.

"But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord."

That sounds fine, but Isaiah realized, and Zoroaster would have realized, what it implies. The king is not worried about running out of water. He has all the water he needs. He has a plan that will get him out of this. He will form an alliance with Assyria and settle his Israel problem once and for all; the final solution, as Hitler called it. Quite perceptively, and quite properly, Isaiah hits the ceiling.

"And he said, Hear ye now, 0 house of David, is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also? (This is important. Because of the king's stubbornness, both Israel and the house of David will be destroyed, for without Israel as at least a potential ally, Judea is a sitting duck, God's promises not withstanding.) Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; (and this is an even bigger sign than was promised, for the initial sign was limited by Ahaz's own imagination. This sign has no such constraint) Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son."

Now the word virgin in modern translations is generally rendered "young woman," and so many virgins are. But I am given to understand that it is the same word as used in the passage in the Song of Songs referring to the women Solomon has at his disposal, "There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number. My dove, my undefiled is but one.'⁹ The commentators may say with a snigger that these "virgins" are not really virgins, they are harem girls. I say harem girls they may be, but virgins none the less. For the passage makes a clear, numerical distinction between queens and concubines and virgins. Solomon, a ruthless dictator of a third world state, unrestrained by any vestige of accountability, has himself a little garden. He collects little girls and keeps them fed, clothed, clean, safe and passive until he decides they are to be concubines. Until then they are virgins. Many probably never become concubines, and Solomon doesn't even bother to keep count.

"And shall call his name Immanuel." (God With Us.)

If you want a good laugh, watch some commentator try to explain how that one means anything but what it says. All I can say is that modern criticism came along too late for Zoroaster. rt you look at Zoroaster, he carries this symbolic name practice above and beyond the call of reason. He may have got the idea right here.

"Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good." Now I will at this point accept the more modern rendition, "Cream and honey shall he eat when he knows how to refuse evil and choose gbod." Now at what age does a person first take milk and honey? I suppose mothers still put honey on their nipples when they are nursing. The standard bible commentators may not know that. The King James Version translators may not have known. But Isaiah would have known it. Zoroaster would have known.

"For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, (that is before he is born) the land that thou abhorrest (Ahaz in his lack of faith is destroying both Israel and Judah.} shall be forsaken of both her kings." You've had it Ahaz. Neither you nor your line will live to see that day. That is your sign. Kings and Chronicles document what then happened.

Thus spoke Zoroaster, and people believed throughout the Persian empire

Another possible source of Zoroaster's ideas was that he had the ideas because he was a member of a different group of people. Just who those people might have been is not clear. Zoroaster in his writing refers to people who side with the right as "Aryans." Nowadays that refers to a language group that includes almost all the people of Europe, western Asia and India, but with notable exceptions like the Basques and the Pictish ancestors of the Scotch Irish. When Zoroaster mentions the Aryan people, he seems to be referring to a single tribe; at any rate, it is hard to believe that he was aware of comparative language studies over so large an area. I do not know what people, if not Persian, that Zoroaster might have come from. However, since what he taught is so far from anything recorded prior to him, save perhaps hints in Isaiah, I suspect Zoroaster came from some place far from Persia and Mesopotamia, somewhere that was not at the time making records that have survived.

It is said that the tragedy of Zoroaster was that his followers were not of his own high capability. Noses was a great prophet, but Moses was also followed by a large number of dedicated and able prophets who amplified and interpreted his work and built on his teachings. The same is said of Isaiah. Zoroastrianism was the religion of the Persian empire, its size, power and longevity utterly dwarfing the little kingdoms of the Hebrews. Surely there were able people among the Persians, but no other Persian name was ever placed beside that of Zoroaster. There was no Amos, no Jeremiah, no Ezekiel or Daniel. priests of Zoroaster, however firm in their preservation of ritual, somehow let the names of cod come to be treated as gods themselves, so that now for many the name Zoroaster is more synonymous with superstition and magic, with witchcraft and astrology than with an authentic call to worship God. No one is more shocked than Zoroaster himself would have been.

There is yet another possible force that may have helped give rise to the teachings of Zoroaster, and that is the force of logic. It may indeed be that the physical universe is inherently unstable and must fail catastrophically in the historical future. If so, the prediction of that catastrophe i's only evident from a study and a general understanding of the theory of relativity both special and general, of the quantum theory of physics and of astronomy. Perhaps these things can be learned by standing under the night sky and thinking long and hard. If Zoroaster did indeed, with his own mind or learning from any number of brilliant teachers, trace out the major intellectual achievements of the twentieth century, it seems a hard thing that he did not record them as well as his conclusions based on them.

Although there were no internal inconsistencies in polytheism that gave rise to the teachings of Zoroaster, those teachings themselves gave rise to substantial tensions. The first problem was that, granted there is good and evil, how can you be sure which is which? Isaiah had promised the child that would know good from evil; until that child should appear, how does one know if one is in error?

The second problem is that, assuming you are in error, how can you correct that error?

The third problem - and the one relevant to this discussion - is when? Given that cod will establish his just kingdom, do we live at the beginning of the long night of error or near the end?

So urgent were the questions that even centuries after Zoroaster himself, there were still at least a few of the faithful who were ready to cross the desert from Babylon to Judea to stand beside the cradle of an infant and place their gifts and their questions before the virgin and her son. And we are told she never forgot.

So you see, if Zoroaster was deprived of good helpers in the first few centuries of his teaching, in the end he got the best help of all.

All this is not, of course, to suggest that there have not been good dedicated Zoroastrians even down to the present, but their numbers are few. I have unfortunately never met one myself. If anyone can speak for Zoroastrians, I should be happy to listen.

Jesus began his ministry. He answered the question of "when?" saying, · ¹The kingdom of God is at hand." Right now. Any minute. We live at the end of the era, at the end of creation, not at the beginning or middle. He also taught what is good and what to do if you have sinned. These things need not concern us presently except to say his answers were a radical departure from what had gone before.

Now ask yourself, "Is it necessary to believe that Christ was crucified in order to be a good Christian?" I think not, for if you must believe in the crucifixion, then all those who knew him and believed during his living ministry were not, in fact, Christian. Again, we are against a hard thing.

It is an important point, for excluding the question of the crucifixion, the Muslim believes in Jesus the same as any Christian and - more to the point - believes in the day of judgement. So far as concepts of time go, Islam is simply another Christian sect, no farther from the Greek Orthodox than the Orthodox from the Southern Baptist.

This had different implications for Christianity and Islam. For Islam, there was no great problem. The prophet Mohammed had made it clear that salvation depended in great measure on proper moral action. God needed but restore the memory of a person and that person would know at once if he were worthy of heaven or hell. On the other hand, the Christian depended on the divine intervention of Christ. No matter how good he had been, salvation in the end came only if Christ made a personal effort on his behalf. For the Western Church, the Roman Catholic, this salvation depended on a sort of old boy network. Christ appointed Peter to be his pope. Peter passed the responsibility to a succession of popes₁ each of which was recognized by the pope before. The popes appointed bishops and the bishops priests and the priest was personally in touch with the flock. Come the end of time, there was a clearly established chain of understanding; the common parishioner knew a priest who knew a bishop who knew a pope who traced his appointment all the way back to Christ.

The passage of years and the accidents of history contrived to make this cozy system a little shaky. What if there had been a bad pope? Just one. That might leave people cut off from the chain and thus cut off from God. In response, a movement, the Reformation, developed that took among other thinqs the stand that a person was responsible, through prayer and study, for achieving his own salvation.

At around the same time in the secular world, no one quite said as much, but an attitude developed that since the world had lasted over a thousand years already, perhaps it would last several years more. That being the case, perhaps it would be worth looking carefully at the world to see just how it might be working. Suppose the world keeps on just like it has been, what then?

The name of the discipline, initially a sort of a mental hobby, was "natural philosophy." More recently, the same school of thought is called 'modern science." In putting together their natural philosophy, thinkers reached back to pagan times and resurrected the polytheistic concept of time: it had a beginning but no end. If Judaism is a rudimentary form of polytheism in which there is only one God of interest, then modern science is degenerate polytheism, a special case, a world of many gods in which the number of gods just happens to be zero. (Please be careful of what your company is if you care to remark that science is degenerate polytheism.) Since anything in a polytheistic world that is not sacred to some god is subject to ruthless exploitation, and since no gods are recognized, nothing is sacred.

Again, true to its origins, science has very little interest in what happens in the distant future. I have seen a highly regarded economics magazine state in two different articles in the same issue that on the one hand the heartbreaking, insoluble problems of a certain nation were due to their having a few years back imported nationals from a different culture as cheap labor while on the other hand, in a different article the magazine strongly endorsed the idea that certain nations should import nationals from a different culture as cheap labor. They perceived no conflict in this: the social disaster that would be caused would not happen for several years, and thus did not exist. Natural science only assumes that the universe will continue for a brief while.

The African elephant and the rhinoceros are gravely endangered. when was the alarm sounded? when population declines promised extinction within two years. Up until then, it was the far future; the risk did not exist.

For another example, some scientists recently announced that they could get the power of hydrogen fusion, the power of the hydrogen bomb, out of an ordinary drinking tumbler filled with cheap "heavy water'⁹ and some cheap electrolytes with electrodes of palladium and platinum. This was hailed as the answer to all the worlds energy problems. Heavy water can be produced in effectively limitless supply, and palladium is stockpiled because nobody can come up with a use for all of it.

Did this bother our scientific brethren? No. Everyone talked happily of limitless energy. No one actually faced the world that was down the road; that world did not exist.

'A cheap shot,~' you say. "Kick him when he's down. The failure of cold fusion was a keen disappointment. Many problems would have needed to be overcome, but the potential benefit clearly justified a serious investigation.'

Very well. I will now point out a matter that is right now being ignored before the fact and when there is still time to do something about it. This is more important than pollution, than liberty, than nuclear war, than population explosion, than climatic change, or AIDS or all of them together. None of these calamities is capable of exterrainating the entire human race without warning. But a few weeks ago an astroid passed the earth, missing us by some half million miles. A dead hit would have killed us; all of us. We are talking tidal waves a half mile high, the sun blotted out for a couple years, nothing growing, travel impossible, utterly unpredictable temperature swings, and no warning. Well, if an object is going to come within a half million miles of us, and if the effective target is about five thousand miles wide, the chance of a hit is one in ten thousand.

That is a risk well worth protecting ourselves against. And, indeed, we have the means to. A suitable space based observatory could be built. We could orbit enormous nuclear tipped missiles, far greater than anything that might have any military use on earth. And we could nudge an inbound astroid aside. But we take absolutely no action at all. As for as science is concerned, we have never been hit by an astroid in the past, that is in the documented past, and the future will be like the past. So we watch comets and astroids zing by with an air of unreality. Give us a fair sized hit, one that killed a couple million people, and we would take action. But the idea that our first warning may be our last simply does not exist.

This by no means refers to all scientists, merely to the general impact, the general understanding of the field.

Now while the relentless march of history inexorably forced a wedge between the moment Jesus said, "The kingdom is at hand" and the present, something was happening to our understanding of the past. Our recorded understanding of the past for a long time went back only as far as records themselves, say to about four thousand BC. However, science, through the study of geology, has postulated a past going back perhaps five billion years and astronomy has suggested a universe going back perhaps fifteen billion. Compared to a past like that, two thousand years can still be described as "at hand," any minute, so soon that it is virtually already here.

And perhaps it is. There is a Christian tradition, not universally accepted, that between the time Christ died on the cross and the time he returned, he went down to hell and released all the good souls down there who had been damned for the quite understandable oversight of not having been Christian. (No heaven in polytheistic time, remember?) This "harrowing of hell," this bursting of gates, breaking of chains, thumping of devils and shaking burning sulfur off innocent souls is one of the great stories that Hollywood has never filmed. How long did it last? Two days. Crucified Friday. Arose Sunday. Two days. And how long is that? well, Jesus said a day is as a thousand years. And here we are coming up hard on year two thousand. It will be a time of heightened expectation.

Expectations will be highest around the anniversaries of the birth and death, 1994 and 2030. If those expectations are fulfilled, many souls will go to heaven, and some may even go to the other place, perhaps for saying "I told you so." At all events, speculation will take on a new form.

But what if nothing particular happens? What if, except for some pious ceremonies, 2031 rolls around to find a world unchanged? Then there will be pressure for a new concept of time and in consequence a new reality, a new morality.

Here is my guess on what it will be like.

First, it will be perceived that all religions have been true. That is not to say that all religions are the same or have the same meaning. Since they say different things, to say they all mean the same thing is to say they mean nothing. They are deeply, profoundly different, but may yet all be true.

Second, it will be perceived that the animists have been right. That the universe is an intimately interrelated set of phenomena. That nothing happens in isolation. That the fabric of the mind and the fabric of reality and the fabric of the universe are all interconnected. Nothing is without consequence.

Third, it will be perceived that the polytheists have been right. That the past has seen the rise of things of enormous power and importance. Ideas, traditions, languages, cultures, races, the phyla of the animal and plant kingdoms, concepts like art and government, are sacred things that are to be held worthy in their own right, respected regardless they at some times seem to serve no obvious practical purpose.

Fifth, it will be decided that the physical universe is unstable over a time span of billions of years. That Einstein was no fool when he invented his "cosmological constant," for without that convenient fiction, the universe described by his mathematics has the fate of a soap bubble; it enlarges in an orderly and predictable way and then vanishes of an instant.

Sixth, that that age of the universe extends billions of years into the past, but its extent into the future, although potentially enormous, is a small fraction of the past.

Seventh, that the Zoroastrians, the Christians, the Muslims are right, that when the universe pops, it will lose the mechanism that kept time moving in an orderly way. Time will move erratically. The dead will rise and experience their lives from a new perspective.

Eighth, that those who do not believe that this end of time comes with the promise of a redeemer will pray that they are wrong, for they then can expect to be hurled backward and forward in time, suffering the fate of a fish in a blender only again and again forward and back.

Ninth, that the reincarnationists have been right, that one escape from this chaos of mind after time is so to order your mind that under all circumstances the mind's impulse is to suppress itself as an ordering force. To escape all desire, especially desire for personal integrity, so that ultimately the elements of the personality are so dispersed in the chaos that, while there may be no joy, there is at least no suffering. On the other hand, the personal discipline so remarkable among the reincarnationists, might in fact be a superb preparation for the chaos beyond the future -

Tenth, that while this universe lasts, this walled city, this island in the midst of chaos, we enjoy it for what it can really offer. It can, if people want it, offer safety, discipline, predictability, love and joy. The universe also offers a remarkable opportunity for growth and maturity. Good and evil things can occur, and at least to a certain extent we are able to choose what will happen. Sometimes we make those choices for ourselves, but sometimes we are at each~others mercy; we can learn that a bad choice can hurt someone else and learn to try not to let that happen.

Eleventh, and that the source of this discipline and capacity for joy and opportunity for growth is the immediate community. That to tear a person from the culture of his birth is to do him cosmic harm. That to destroy a culture is to destroy the haven for the dead as well as the living. And that true cooperation among people is truly to keep their differences.

Be that as it may, there are different possible ideas of time.

The notion of ideas of time changing with time does, however, have serious problems. For one thing, all the concepts I have described still exist: animism, polytheism, reincarnation, monotheism, Catholicism, Islam, the protestants, modern science. If any of them somehow evolved from any other of them, it was not at the expense of the survival of the original. There are, for instance, perhaps a billion Hindu who still worship at idols. That means there are more polytheists than ever before in history. The same can probably be said for every group.

Rev. Busch was kind enough to refer me to some passages that I overlooked in my own reading, including Yasna 43:4,5 and 6, on page 30; Yast 19:10-24 on pages 238,239; Fargard 19: 5(16) on page 419 and 27(89)-3o(98) on pages 423,424; Yast 24: 54 page 274. On page 238, for instance, VAST 19:11 runs, · '... restore the world, which will never grow old and never die, never decaying and never rotting, ever living and ever increasing, and master of its wish, when the dead will rise, when life and immortality will come, and the world will be restored to its wish."

Consider the worship of idols. I know of no substantial idol worship in Scotland or Ireland. Occasionally people there have accused each other of it, but no one has ever come up with an actual idol. That is not to say there was nothing going on in that part of the world when idols were more popular. The oldest recorded astronomical observation is in Ireland. There is a tunnel built of boulders about 30 miles from Dublin some 5100 years old. In the morning around the winter solstice, light coning through a small window above the doorway flashes half way down the tunnel. When it was built, the light flashed just at dawn far into the tunnel to a point that was recorded by a carved shamrock. The legend that this happened has lasted to modern times, although the earth has wobbled on its axis over the thousands of years.

The article I read about this referred to the people who had done it as "farmers." That means they were more sophisticated than a hunter and gatherer society would have been. But I think a better choice of words, considering the evidence, would have been to call them 'astronomers.

So Scotland and Ireland have had science but no idols for a long time. Meanwhile in India, idols are actively worshipped and have been as long as there has been any record. Either of two things must be true. Either there are indeed gods that dwell in certain places and are truly worshipped there and Scotland and Ireland simply lost out, or else a people, whether genetically or culturally, is capable of maintaining its basic integrity over astronomically significant periods of time.

Or consider weapons. Researchers have found evidence for prehuman African apes crushing skulls with antelope femurs. Look through the evidence of pre-Celtic Britain; there were no weapons before the Celt came, no war, no chains. Look at the present century. Within living memory, and possibly still, the ordinary British policeman, the bobby, has not carried a gun, not even a pistol.. The norm for Europe is police armed with machine guns. And in Africa, no they are not still bonking each over the head with thigh bones; things have gotten worse.

There is the concept of cognitive dissonance. It is the state of accepting two different things as true that cannot both be true. People turn out to be fairly good at it. Here is an example:

A=B (fair enough?)

Subtract B from both sides of the equation. Now:

A-B=O (right so far?) Now divide both sides of the equation by A-B:

(A-B)/(A/B) = 0 so:

1 = 0.

Until you remember that it is against the rules to divide by zero, you are left with a kind of a conflict. Yet you would find it no problem to shrug your shoulders and go think about something else. The more complex and abstract the problem, the less difficulty one has leaving the problem unresolved.

Things are quite complex and abstract in these times. How are you to understand a round billion Chinese? Their culture has been strongly influenced by Buddha, strongly by their own family tradition, strongly by Confucius, strongly by Communism and now strongly by a rebellion against communism. I have referred to the Hindu as if they were a classical polytheistic faith. It is not nearly so simple. First there is a strong reincarnation element to their beliefs. Second I am sure if you hunted through the vast wealth of Hindu thinking and writing you would find support for the notion of time as endless and the notion of time as ending.

Finally and very important, consider the strong tendency for things to fall apart. New orderly structures arise only very rarely. As mentioned, the great phyla of the animal kingdom emerged early in the fossil record. The new phyla that have emerged have been few. Those that have vanished are many. The concept of democracy, now of such urgent interest in China is traced at least as far back as ancient Greece. Julius Caesar described the equivalent of a town meeting among the Celts in France. The Celts were not great record keepers, and it is not far fetched to imagine that deciding public matters by vote goes far back into antiquity. France now is the second oldest country in the world that is a republic and a major world power. Great new systems simply do not arise in a steady, dependable way. So it is not out of the question that all these ideas of time have been around for as long as there have been people capable of taking an interest in them.

It is convenient to think that each sequential idea arose out of necessity as experience rendered the previous idea inadequate; however, it very well may not have happened that way.

The important thing is that these different kinds of time are really different. Time can stand still, may have one end, may have two ends, may go in a circle or may go on forever in either direction. In any case, they are as different as a triangle is from a square, having a different number of vertices, as different as a line is from a globe, having a different number of dimensions, as different as a pebble is from a wombat, having a different order of complexity. Different people live under different concepts of time, and their universes are thus completely different. It is only by dint of great effort and understanding, not to mention terrible necessity, that people with such differences can get along at all.

But time is a very simple concept. We can measure it very accurately. We have highly sophisticated theories for dealing with it. We have an intimate physiologic sense of its passage. We have no trouble in distinguishing time from temperature or from banana cream pudding. We know what time is, or can at least reduce it to one of a very few choices.

Consider something difficult, like family. Consider something problematic, like duty, honor, courage, dignity, generosity, horse sense, beauty, toleration, love, fairness, humor ,independence, or honesty. These all, like time beyond what can be sensed subjectively and physiologically, these all are community values.

The communist party in Poland holds the first tree election in forty years and loses every contested seat. Again, in the West we are surprised. Our intellectuals have treated communism as their darling for generations. Free countries actually have communists elected to their parliament. surely a communist state like Poland should have as many communists as a free one like Italy. But no, they hate being communist, those who actually have to live with it. periodic revolutions, bloodily suppressed, did not impress us. The tact that we knew communist sympathizers did.

Or consider the anti communist demonstrations in China. Students and their sympathizers protested for weeks, occupyinq a large square in the capital city of Pekinq. The demonstrators numbered up to a million. Yet during those weeks, there was not one person killed. Now find me an American city of a million in which there was not one death by violence during that period of time. For us it was business as usual, but that involves murdering about a person a day in a city like Washington D.C. Their good sense and restraint were inconceivable to Os. We were most impressed.

And there was a time, a period of many days, during which the students could have consolidated their gain. They could have let it be known that they had made their point, and then have gone about their business. This would have established that it was all right in China for people to protest the government, even in a very vigorous fashion, that it is not the end of the world if there is debate. Then they could have come back and tried another time. nut instead, they stuck out, paralyzed the city, embarrassed the government, and eventually were put down by troops. That, alas, established that it really is the end of the world to have debate, that protesting the government is a terrible thing at least for somebody. But they did not quit. They had not gained what they wanted.

In the real world, with untold numbers of choices and limitless possibilities, the number of people who are going to like most of what the government is doing will be vanishingly small or nonexistent. So those people have a choice of living with their disappointment or going about the job of subverting the government. Any republic can be subverted by a majority; otherwise it is not a republic.

We have in this country seen due process of law subverted by an "active judiciary." The supreme court initiated a program of social reform. It may be true (and may not) that their intentions were good. But they clearly thought their ideas were more important than having those ideas voted on by the people. No republic can survive that spirit long.

This is a point not all Americans understand, and a smaller fraction of supreme court justices. It was too much to expect Chinese students to understand it, to take it to heart, to have their say and then step down to live in peace. The primary reponsibility, of course, must lie with those who ordered in the troops. It was a tragedy that will be long remembered.

In Russia, the new head of state Mr Gorbachev has been doing many things that are rightly applauded around the world. At the same time, he has been faced with strikes and riots. It is easy to sympathize with the strikers and rioters, but one can only hope they have some restraint. It is possible that the government there will revert to a type more consistent with our historical expectations and put down opposition ruthlessly.

So the cultural chasms that divide us are deep, indeed bottomless. We live in different universes, the most fundamental elements of which are different from one group to the next. And that is a wonderful thing, a thing to be kept and cherished. And it is a thing to be understood.

The attempt to build a computer with a personality, reasoning along the lines that the human personality was only his switching mechanism, was an unmitigated failure.

There are now attempts being made to build a machine that does not go on a strict input-program-output model. Such machines are called "massively parallel" computers. Here is a minimal design for one. First define a "node" to be a small processor, perhaps the power of a desktop computer; it will be the equivalent of a neuron. Define a "wire" as any means of conveying a signal. The node has a large number of input wires, among which it can distinguish, a large number of output wires and a program by which it can vary the pattern of signals it sends out according to the pattern of signals it gets in. It also has a means of changing its program and a means of receiving a signal that says either, "Good - keep the program as it is", "pretty good - change it a little maybe" or "not so hot - change a lot." Define a "rank" as a line of nodes all spaced out horizontally across a page. Define an "array" as a set of two or more ranks. Now collect a large number of sensor devices and a large number of devices to display the final signal pattern.

You are now in a position to build your massively parallel computer. Take an array of three ranks of nodes. wire a sensory device to each node in the first rank. Wire each node in the first rank to each node in the second rank. Wire each node in the second rank to each node in the third rank. Wire each node in the third rank to a signal display. Start out with all the programs in all the nodes set at random. You are now ready to "teach" the array. Present it with a pattern, and if it gives the proper response, reward it, if not, instruct it to change itself.

Those who work with such machines generally do so by using a standard but very powerful conventional computer to simulate the array. None the less, they are able to point of some interesting things. For one thing, the thing really does seem to learn. Second, the designer does not program the array, he teaches it. And he may not know or even have any way of finding out just what the connections are that permit the array to recognize a pattern and to respond appropriately. He may not know what the program in any given node is. Third, and a take this with some skepticism, the array seems to have difficulties with attention span, getting bored or hallucinating if the work load is insufficient or excessive.

But two things will interest us: first, the number of patterns an array can distinguish among is no greater than the number of its input nodes. Second, it takes at least three ranks to perform even the most basic logical functions.

The notion that the-array can not deal with any more patterns than input nodes is not, apparently, an observed fact; real arrays fall far short of that. It is a theorem of the mathematics that describe such arrays. Therefore, if the massively parallel computer bears any relationship to the human brain, the same constraint must apply. At some level in your brain, there is a rank of nodes that is finite in number and that number limits the absolute greatest number of patterns you can recognize.

A great number of those patterns will be words. In fact, for any pattern you do recognize, you probably have a word for it. If not, you might do well to make one up. You recognize trees, of course, and there are probably trees you can recognize as belonging to a species but do not know the name of the species. But try stars. Row many constellations do you know the name of but cannot even approximately sketch? Then how many can you sketch but do not have a name for? And consider the awkwardness of talking to someone whose name you have forgotten. It is said that you talk "at" a person whose name you do not know but "to" a person you can name. Still, you probably learn many a face without knowing the name. Experts in most fields will make it a point to know the proper name for each pattern they deal with. Chess players, on the other hand, will store massive amounts of pattern information dompared to the number of terms they use to describe patterns.

So how many patterns, how many words, can one learn? Obviously many thousands, but not an infinite number. A million? I would find it hard to believe one could learn so many. If one could, it would be at the sacrifice of picking up names, faces, recognizable personality traits, social graces, subtleties of food and clothing, nuances of emotional states, music, sounds of a summer evening and shadings in the clouds. The more of such things that are learned, the better, and as for words, the more the merrier; but do not forget this is an exhaustable resource. no not forget what we did to the planet while assuming its resources were infinite. Do not abuse your brain.

Now you perceive the problem with learning a second language, particularly at an early age. The child.who learns two languages will not learn either so well as if he learned that one only. He should learn the language of his household, the language of the people he belongs to, and learn it well. Some day later in life, when his ideals are secure, his identity strong, then perhaps he can learn a foreign language without harm. At least he will be able to decide whether the effort he is putting into it is going to be worthwhile in light of what he expects to get out of it. But two or three languages should be a maximum, even for an adult,

But two things will interest us: first, the number of patterns an array can distinguish among is no greater than the number of its input nodes. Second, it takes at least three ranks to perform even the most basic logical functions.

The notion that the array can not deal with any more patterns than input nodes is not, apparently, an observed fact; real arrays fall far short of that. It is a theorem of the mathematics that describe such arrays. Therefore, if the massively parallel computer bears any relationship to the human brain, the same constraint must apply. At some level in your brain, there is a rank of nodes that is finite in number and that number limits the absolute greatest number of patterns you can recognize.

A great number of those patterns will be words. In fact, for any pattern you do recognize, you probably have a word for it. If not, you might do well to make one up. You recognize trees, of course, and there are probably trees you can recognize as belonging to a species but do not know the name of the species. But try stars. How many constellations do you know the name of but cannot even approximately sketch? Then how many can you sketch but do not have a name for? And consider the awkwardness of talking to someone whose name you have forgotten. It is said that you talk "at" a person whose name you do not know but "to" a person you can name. still, you probably learn many a face without knowing the name. Experts in most fields will make it a point to know the proper name for each pattern they deal with. Chess players, on the other hand, will store massive amounts of pattern information cdmpared to the number of terms they use to describe patterns.

So how many patterns, how many words, can one learn? Obviously many thousands, but not an infinite number. A million? I would find it hard to believe one could learn so many. If one could, it would be at the sacrifice of picking up names, faces, recognizable personality traits, social graces, subtleties of food and clothing, nuances of emotional states, music, sounds of a summer evening and shadings in the clouds. The more of such things that are learned, the better, and as for words, the more the merrier; but do not forget this is an exhaustable resource. Do not forget what we did to the planet while assuming its resources were infinite. no not abuse your brain.

Now you perceive the problem with learning a second language, particularly at an early age. The child who learns two languages will not learn either so well as if he learned that one only. He should learn the language of his household, the language of the people he belongs to, and learn it well. Some day later in life, when his ideals are secure, his identity strong, then perhaps he can learn a foreign language without harm. At least he will be able to decide whether the effort he is putting into it is going to be worthwhile in light of what he expects to get out of it. But two or three languages should be a maximum, even for an adult,

One for home use and a couple for dealing with the hostile world. And for a child, just one, but he should learn it exhaustively.

Now consider when they change the name of a city, a nation, a bird, a disease, a natural phenomenon or a name of historical interest. A million words make a mind. That is an oversimplification, but it may be an underestimation. How many people know the name cheops? suppose it is only a million. Now some expert decides to change the name the flyufu. The name must be relearned a million times. That is the equivalent of destroying a human mind. One life, shot to dogs meat, just like that. (snap) And for what? For nothing. Persia is a good English word. It is not a good Iranian word, and there is no reason an Iranian should learn it. But tell a few hundred million speakers of English that the word is not Persia but Iran, and you have, again, done the equivalent of burning up a brain hundreds of times over. of course American children know little geography; they have better sense than to waste their time on things that are being changed all the time.

Also important in the architecture of the machine is the fact that a usable array must have at least three ranks. One rank is the sensory rank and another the display rank, and what they are doing can be known. But there is a least one hidden rank, and in a human brain no doubt many hidden ranks as well as the opportunity for a pattern to cycle through many times before anything happens outside. The behavior of the hidden rank (or ranks) cannot be perceived from outside, although the brain cannot function without

it. The actual signal handling in two different arrays may be quite different even though the same input produces the same output in both. Obviously, the actual pattern handling in the hidden rank as well as the number of trials before the array is able to function satisfactorily will be strongly dependent on the initial random programs in the various nodes.

In the human, where do these initial settings come from? As a first guess, it is probably a combination of heredity and random chance. look at another highly complex information pattern of your body. Look at the prints on your finger tips. Some of the prints will be loops and some whorls. If you compare index finger to index finger, middle to middle and so forth, you will notice that the patterns tend to be symmetrical. The index finger of the right hand will be closer to being a mirror image of the index finger of the left than it will be to being a copy of the middle finger of the right hand. Yet the symmetry is not perfect. There will be differences from one hand to the other. Since both hands have the same genes, the hands tend to be alike. But since the symmetry is not perfect, there is obviously a random element that is superimposed on the basic genetic pattern.

If you take two people and train them to respond the same way to the Sante patterns, you may content yourself that they have been trained to be the same. In all likelihood, the way their two brains are processing the information is quite different from one to the other. If you take three people, two who have the same genetic and cultural background and one who is different and train them all three to respond the same way, you probably will be able to get all three to be equally consistent in the desired response. There is nothing wrong with this, it just means that each one's brain is doing its job right. But while all three have learned to respond in the same way, their hidden ranks will be different, and it seems inescapable that the two who started out the same are now more nearly processing information the same way compared with the third. So if you take two genetically or culturally distinct groups and train them to do the same things to the point where no test you have available reveals any difference, they will still be different. The way their brains actually process the same information will be different. Their internal landscape, what they think to themselves, will be different. And under novel circumstances their behavior may be totally different.

If you have been following the line of reasoning, you should be flow have discarded any shred of suspicion that any one group can be called better than any other; or more kind, more noble, possessed of a better sense of humor, braver, wiser, more just, more honorable, more practical or superior in any such way. Because all of these concepts are words. They are very important words, but they are still patterns that are to be recognized by a brain. People in a closely knit community may indeed be able to recognize the same word in approximately the same way. Hut once you start crossing cultural or hereditary lines, there is no reason to think that the words mean the same thing, that the patterns are recognized in the same way at all. Since the concepts do not transcend cultural expectation, it is meaningless to use them to compare cultures.

And we should no longer be surprised by the fact that we are surprised at what other cultures do. We simply have no mechanism for predicting how they might react under any given circumstances, even if we knew, as we do not, intimately what those circumstances might be.

As for building a computer that will mimic the human mind, the architecture I have described would have to have a million nodes per rank, at least seven ranks, as that is how many patterns the brain seems happy to contemplate at once, and a trillion wires between each pair of ranks. That would be expensive. Fortunately, there are ways to cut that number down.

Given the differences, does this produce problems? You bet. Of course it does. It produces problems at every level.

On the biggest scale, cultural differences lead to wars. About twelve or thirteen centuries ago, there was an enormous Moslem expansion coming out of Arabia that swept all the way into Spain. From about nine centuries to five centuries ago, the Christians fought back and at last pushed the Muslims back out of Spain. There was, indeed, a religious difference, but it was not great. There was a tremendous cultural difference. Eight centuries of warfare was an enormous price, but the alternative was Arab culture all the way to the arctic.

Starting with the first European settlements in North America about three hundred years ago, and ending with a peace treaty between president Truman and the Seminoles about the middle of this century, there was constant war between the European settlers and the Indian natives. The alternative was that the Europeans discard their technology, put on loin cloths and start living on a hunting and gathering basis like everyone else.

There are other causes of wars. world War Two was started because of two men: Hitler and Stalin. They signed a treaty to divide Poland between them, Hitler invaded and the war began. It is hard to imagine what the outcome would have been if the two had not subsequently started fighting each other. I often wonder whether some clever allied intelligence agent managed to get those two to betray each other, some diplomatic wizard who could pass himself as native German and as native Russian. At all events, even a war that was started by two monsters became far more hideous by feeding on cultural differences.

At a smaller scale than wars, cultural differences cause more woe. The words "race" and · 'riot" are linked so frequently as to become nearly a single word. And even when there is not violence, there is trouble. Competition between two cultures can never be "fair" in the sense that both sides adopt the same unspoken words, for fairness is a culturally founded concept.

pursue. My friend laughed broadly, called the Than a hypocrite and generally suggested that he should have given the job to the other Than just to avoid the chance of being partial to the cousin~

If you want to find a place where the interaction of cultures produces heartbreaking problems, just look at places where there is such interaction. I pass over the disintegration of the United states, such things as most marriages ending in divorce, rising teenage suicide, epidemic drug use, declining intelligence, decreased attention span, violence in the big cities, greed, indifference to poverty and wretched schools as being too obvious an example of mutually destructive intercultural reaction.

Britain, far less damaged, also has problems. Take something as simple as standing in line. It is not a universal instinct. A jet arrived once in Paris and passengers filed along many passages until they came to a gate where their passports were to be processed, where they stood about in a crowd, being called to the gate one by one. One travel weary passenger remarked that there was a large number of closed gates, and it would be nice if some other gates were opened. Another said that at least they could set up a line. This last was heard by a French customs officer, who shouted, "We are not barbarians. We do not stand in lines." I still have not made up my mind whether he was just tired of hearing complaints, whether the immigration people picked up some clue by the way individuals moved and made eye contact in the crowd, whether this was a burst of humor, whether in fact I heard him wrong, whether he meant we should have set a line up ourselves if we wanted one, or whether he meant just what he implied; only barbarians stand in lines. The passengers had, after all, arrived on the same plane. There was no real reason one should be served before another.

The British call a line a queue. Historically, they have had a reputation for elevating to a form of high art the act of queuing. Recently, their protocol failed tragically. A group of young people had been standing outside of a stadium in England where a soccer game was to be played. By custom, as the game started, gates were opened and people were admitted free to an area where it was possible to stand and watch the game. There was some pushing, and a number of people were killed in the crush. One might have expected it anywhere but England.

In fact, it takes only a solid wall or fence and a very few people to turn any crowd into a tragedy. I have seen a crowd of some hundreds of adults and children filing out of a football stadium through a great door scarcely narrower than the hall leading to it and seen that crowd thrown nearly enough into a panic so that parents were at pains to keep children from being trampled, breathing became difficult and so that there was no choice of where to walk but to follow the current. The entire motive force behind this proved to be four high school girls who had decided to hurry the crowd up, joined hands and started pushing. Had it been a couple dozen muscular soccer fans, and had there been no outlet, it would have been a disaster.

There has been no suggestion that anyone at that soccer game was not English, but the fact remains that even so seemingly trivial a matter as queuing up is a cultural reflex that cannot be abandoned even by a few without costing the lives of many.

Another recent British event poignantly dramatizing the difficulties of cultural conflict is the book The Satanic Verses by Salman nushdie. Mr. Rushdie lived in Britain when we wrote the book, but had grown up in India as a Muslim. The book was found objectionable, and it sparked fatal riots among the community of Muslims living in Britain. The riots spread and finally the author was condemned to death for blasphemy by Khomeini, then head of state in Iran. Rushdie has outlived Khomeini, but still lives in hiding.

In the course of the story, one of the heroes has the delusion that he is an angel, becomes more Westernized and ultimately destroys himself. The other hero, initially enthusiastically Westernized, has the delusion that he is a satanic figure but reverts in loyalty to his Indian heritage and in the end survives as a human being.

The man who is becoming more Westernized, as part of the disintegration of his personality, experiences a number of very troubling blasphemous dreams. In the course of the story, the world of the non-Christian non-Anglo immigrant into Britain is portrayed in a very persuasive way. It is not a nice place to be.

The point, if any exists, is this: we have been trained to think: loyal-to-culture-good:not-loyal-to-culture-bad. But abandoning ones culture and people is an unpleasant way to lose one's mind and one's life as well as one's soul; this is true as well for the host country as it is for the migrant.

No wonder the British Muslims rioted. Rushdie had held up the naked, festering truth to them. Showed them for what they were. Called what they were doing by its own name. Revealed their shame. Exposed their inconsistencies. This was not a small matter. People were killed in those riots.

Yet it was not this that cost Rushdie his freedom to move about in public (for the sentence was given that anyone might kill the author and receive a rich reward from Miomeini); he was sentenced for blasphemy. Those blasphemous dreams, taken out of context, are a vicious attack on Islam. In context, of course, they are nothing of the sort. Sadly, I tear that those who condemned Rushdie had not read the whole book, but only excerpts and had gathered exactly the wrong message.

Then will you be willing to show mercy? Will you be tolerant of those forces that once opposed you?

Apply those crucial questions to nushdie's central theme of becoming westernized. The first answer must be: of course I wi~l crawl and abase myself. Abandoning my people is nothing but abject groveling before expediency anyway. The second answer is:

certainly I must be ruthless. By the time I and five billion of my fellows have mingled with the half billion that comprise the west, there will no longer be a West to be identified. I cannot be merciful to the meal I digested yesterday.

Rushdie is, of course, wise enough not to spell it out, but only leaves the excruciating questions dangling.

The death sentence which made the headlines was an error. The riots were in response to a real challenge.

On a personal, a one-on-one level, cultural differences again cause problems. Think what happens when two people are competing at a sport. If one comes from a culture where that sport is widely enjoyed and finds himself competing with someone from a culture where it is unheard of, the outcome may still be in doubt, but it is hardly a fair fight, other things being equal.

suppose the two are two men competing for the love of a woman, or two women for a man. Now there are no longer formal rules. There is no vestige of a claim of fair fight; yet there is competition, the outcome of which is of great importance. Throw cultural, racial or ethnic differences into the situation, and two things may happen. Either the person making the decision can make some explicit estimate of the value of the cultural difference (may say something like: "suitor A is closer to me ethnically, but is insane, sick of an incurable and infectious illness, is in jail and hates everything I love, so I choose B, even though he ((she)) lives on the other side of the county line," or "Suitor B has cute bedroom eyes, but we do. not speak the same language, wear the same clothes, worship the same God, or clean ourselves with the same hand, so I choose A, who is kind of cute, too.") or no such estimate may be made, in which the outcome will be far more a matter of chance than a matter of what is best for all concerned.

On the other hand, if a bad choice is made, a large number of people are hurt: the parents and family of both may be deeply grieved, close relatives and friends devastated, the man she should have married and the woman he should have married (or shacked up with, perhaps, in this late and decaying age) and the children.

I think it hurts the children most, if the differences between the parents are great, born with an initial mental set that is neither that of the mother or the father, doomed to grow up in a society where there is virtually no hope of finding the kind of love that can exist between two who can share things deeply, looking strange

Then will you be willing to show mercy? Will you be tolerant of those forces that once opposed you?

Apply those crucial questions to Rushdie's central theme of becoming Westernized. The first answer must be: of course I will crawl and abase myself. Abandoning my people is nothing but abject groveling before expediency anyway. The second answer is:

Certainly I must be ruthless. fly the time I and five billion of my fellows have mingled with the half billion that comprise the west, there will no longer be a West to be identified. I cannot be merciful to the meal I digested yesterday.

Rushdie is, of course, wise enough not to spell it out, but only leaves the excruciating questions dangling.

The death sentence which made the headlines was an error. The riots were in response to a real challenge.

On a personal, a one-on-one level, cultural differences again cause problems. Think what happens when two people are competing at a sport. If one comes from a culture where that sport is widely enjoyed and finds himself competing with someone from a culture where it is unheard of, the outcome may still be in doubt, but it is hardly a fair fight, other things being equal.

Suppose the two are two men competing for the love of a woman, or two women for a man. Now there are no longer formal rules. There is no vestige of a claim of fair fight; yet there is competition, the outcome of which is of great importance. Throw cultural, racial or ethnic differences into the situation, and two things may happen. Either the person making the decision can make some explicit estimate of the value of the cultural difference (may say something like: "suitor A is closer to me ethnically, but is insane, sick of an incurable and infectious illness, is in jail and hates everything I love, so I choose n, even though he ((she)) lives on the other side of the county line," or risuitor B has cute bedroom eyes, but we do not speak the same language, wear the same clothes, worship the same God, or clean ourselves with the same hand, so I choose A, who is kind of cute, too.") or no such estimate may be made, in which the outcome will be far more a matter of chance than a matter of what is best for all concerned.

On the other hand, if a bad choice is made, a large number of people are hurt: the parents and family of both may be deeply grieved, close relatives and friends devastated, the man she should have married and the woman he should have married (or shacked up with, perhaps, in this late and decaying age) and the children.

I belabor the obvious. Given that cultural differences are, under certain circumstances, a problem, can anything be done about it? Can we get rid of these differences? One remembers the story of the child, it may have been a black child, in the class in Texas whose ethnic toleration had been pushed to the limit by a class recitation in which the Latinos were doing very poorly on recognizing great American quotes. The child said audibly, "Too many Mexicans around here." The teacher asked sternly, "Who said that?" The child answered, "Davy Crockett, Alamo, 1836." Too many differences.

One logical approach, for live stock not for people, would be simply to eliminate all but one chosen group. This, of course, is not even an acceptable way to treat animals. Let a species of animal be threatened with extinction, and forces will be mobilized immediately to try to save it. This even goes for undesirable animals. The small pox virus, about as lethal an organism as has ever existed is kept alive in laboratory strains. From time to time, people think that the disease smallpox has been totally eradicated. Then another case will turn up somewhere in the world. It is almost extinct, may be truly extinct in the wild, and if not may become so soon. (In this day of jet travel when few are vaccinated against the disease, of course, the chance of an epidemic spreading with blistering speed through a vulnerable population is not to be ignored.) There have been suggestions that the number of laboratories carrying live strains of smallpox be reduced, since each laboratory is a potential source of infection. No one I know of has suggested exterminating the virus altogether. Not yet.

Well if a nasty lethal virus is protected, obviously killing off human cultures by killing off people is not to be considered. But there is another thing that, alas, does get considered despite being almost the same thing.

We could eliminate cultural differences by all getting together and having the same culture. If all these cultures would get together and intermarry, then there wouldn't be any differences, would there? We would all be one happy~family, nobody would need to get killed and no culture would be eliminated any more than any other. Children would just choose what best to keep of the worlds presented to them and the end would be one world with the best of all that had gone before.

Suppose you are zookeeper for the whole planet. You can decide just who will marry and have children with whom. You set about~to create your unified world. Suppose you have two races with different languages, different cultures, different religions and so forth. You decree that everyone from one race must marry someone from the other. All children born will be half breeds, and they must marry only half breeds. You move people about enough so they do not identify with location either. How long will it take to have a unified world? About a life time. You must wait about a hundred years until the last of those who was one race or the other has died out. In the mean time, of course, you are visiting terrible psychic injury to everyone at your mercy. Old people are dying miserably, young are growing up with a sense that they are lost. The first generation will speak a "pidgin~' dialect that is stunted in its grammatical forms and only serves to convey the most primitive notions. By the second or third generation, that dialect has matured into a "creole" that is a fairly complete language. After a century of intense suffering, the people are beginning to act like people again.

Meanwhile, other social issues will have to wait. You cannot expect these people to limit their family size, or long to postpone having a family. Nor can you expect them to be highly innovative, highly educated, highly flexible in other ways. A few might, but for most, you are already asking too much. So family size will increase, perhaps doubling each generation, so by the end of the century, you will have a final population that is about ten times what you started with.

In India, there are hundreds of languages; in India alone. In that country there are more than seventy major languages - major like they have different alphabets. Some write left to right; some write right to left. Suppose, to make matters simple, there are only sixty four languaqes in India. You apply your mass people breeding scheme to India alone. Nothing goes wrong, and after six centuries you have them a homogeneous community. Two more centuries and you have the world all together. Eight hundred years with everybody cooperating. Each century, the population has increased ten fold. The earth's present five billion people have expanded to half a quintillion, or about one per square inch of the planet's surface. Too many Mexicans, Davy. You'll never do it.

Given that you cannot destroy human diversity without destroying humans, given we must live with it from here on in, is it a good thing?

Of course it is a good thing.

If we all live in identical huts with identical cows, identical bean rows and identical beehives, there is not going to be a whole lot of trade in butter and honey. It is far cheaper to make use of our own. If all nations are equally prepared to raise food and build cars, no one is very likely to ship cars from one place to another. It will happen, of course, but it will not be a qreat driving force, not the kind of thing livelihoods depend upon.

So if trade is to continue, it will be because there are advantages in specialization. It will be because it is better from a purely monetary standpoint for people to be different and do different things. The thing that distinguishes a sophisticated society from a simple hunter and gatherer society is specialization. To be sure, there is not that much to be gained by trade between a sophisticated society and a hunter and gatherer one. The hunters and gatherers simply will not have the money the other society wants, nor the means to make use of something like a fax machine or a cellular telephone if it were affordable. So trade is of less interest if differences are very great, but to a certain extent it thrives on differences.

A second very practical advantage to diversity is protection against sudden shocks to the system. It is very well to say that this late in history we are able~to create nuclear tipped missiles that can protect us against collision with comets and small planet fragments, that can detect a new epidemic while the number of victims can still be counted on the fingers, that can monitor weather and agricultural changes with satellite photos and anticipate famines, do something about them before they happen. But there is always the unknown. There is the economic or technical or infectious or climatic disaster that simply cannot be foreseen. In~such an event a world wholly consisting of hunters and gatherers may face a serious threat of extinction, as the Patagonians faced when smallpox turned up among them. something as simple as vaccination might have saved a race now utterly gone.

Similarly, a world wholly consisting of commuters linked to fax machines and cellular telephones and a distribution system dependant on them might face extinction because of nothing more than a storm of sunspot activity rendering all electronic instruments useless for a period of months.

If we all live in identical huts with identical cows, identical bean rows and identical beehives, there is not going to be a whole lot of trade in butter and honey. It is far cheaper to make use of our own. If all nations are equally prepared to raise food and build cars, no one is very likely to ship cars from one place to another. It will happen, of course, but it will not be a qreat driving force, not the kind of thing livelihoods depend upon.

So if trade is to continue, it will be because there are advantages in specialization. It will be because it is better from a purely monetary standpoint for people to be different and do different things. The thing that distinguishes a sophisticated society from a simple hunter and gatherer society is specialization. To be sure, there is not that much to be gained by trade between a sophisticated society and a hunter and gatherer one. The hunters and gatherers simply will not have the money the other society wants, nor the means to make use of something like a fax machine or a cellular telephone if it were affordable. So trade is of less interest if differences are very great, but to a certain extent it thrives on differences.

A second very practical advantage to diversity is protection against sudden shocks to the system. It is very well to say that this late in history we are able to create nuclear tipped missiles that can protect us against collision with comets and small planet fragments, that can detect a new epidemic while the number of victims can still be counted on the fingers, that can monitor weather and agricultural changes with satellite photos and anticipate famines, do something about them before they happen. But there is always the unknown. There is the economic or technical or infectious or climatic disaster that simply cannot be foreseen. Tn~such an event a world wholly consisting of hunters and gatherers may face a serious threat of extinction, as the Patagonians faced when smallpox turned up among them. something as simple as vaccination might have saved a race now utterly gone.

Similarly, a world wholly consisting of commuters linked to fax machines and cellular telephones and a distribution system dependant on them might face extinction because of nothing more than a storm of sunspot activity rendering all electronic instruments useless for a period of months.

In the past, there is no question that the "Christian" and "Muslim" worlds served as checks on each other's consciences. It is considered impious for a Muslim to indicate his plans with a qualification, which sounds like "inshallah" and neans, "God willing." We have a parallel colloquial expression, "Lord willin'; and the crick don't rise." It is a confession of the futility of plans in the absence of divine cooperation. In more formal circumstances, in court a person is expected to swear to tell the truth "so help me God," thus invoking God's assistance. "So help me," is generally an indication of the firmest intention.

But perhaps saying, "So help me, tomorrow I shall remember to smile at people" may be a redundancy. "Shall" alone implies the divine insistence. It sounds so much like "inshallah." Of course,..the word "shall" actually came from some Teutonic root implying a debt. But the word "will" was available, meaninq "wish". "Will" and "shall" used the same way only 'will" applies to the speaker and "shall" to the speaking. When great determination is implied, the uses reverse- This odd state of affairs may be a coincidence, but it seems likely that the Arabic sentiment has worked itself into English, even if not the very word.

For years before the communist world began to collapse, their presence served as a sort of conscience for the free world. The question could always be asked, "Are you acting like the very class structured capitalist society the communists describe you as?" Marx said, "Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction." The question could be asked, "Is this a good idea, or is it the seed Marx referred to?" Although communism had no moral superiority to the rest of the world, indeed was witness to mass famine and mass slaughter such as the rest of the world has never seen in peacetime, it still served as a moral restraining influence in the West, particularly when the West got on one of its binges of pollution or environmental destruction, served as a challenge to explore space, served as a challenge to spread ideals of freedom to the rest of the world.

In a larger sense, the differences between people are more inportant, are more a good thing than any consideration of practical value or even pleasure. It is the differences between us which make us human. What we share with every other person, we share with non human animals. Indeed, animals are dear to us, and riqhtly so. But there is something more that we cherish in each other.

If you are lucky, the bulk of the people you spend your time with will share the same universe with you. This is of course a relative matter; let us say other things being equal the luckier you are, the more you share with those around you. But in brutal fact, no matter who you are, most of the people in the world who are actually alive when you are do not exist in the same universe as you do, yet they are your universe. True, there are animals, ideas and inanimate objects that can entertain you. None the less, your real universe is that of alien human beings.

And you can regard this with a negative or positive attitude. I recently saw this fictitious conversation recorded:

That is an outrage.

Your attitude is one of basic positive regard, if you like what you see when you look at the world, you will tend to be loyal and tend to distrust major changes that threaten to destroy the world you know and love.

If your attitude is one of primal distrust, if you do not like the world you see, you will tend to favor changes in that world. You will invent abstract schemes, behind which lies the implicit statement, "I would like the world if it were better," in this way or that. Such wish is in vain- The trust or distrust comes from within.

Likewise vain is the wish of one who would say, "I love the world I see. Would that it would never change." change it will and must in ways we cannot know, and the only world we can love is the one that we know; the only world we can know is the one that is.

In this forced march of endless farewells, there is only one thing we can carry into the future. That is each other and each others differences. Sustained by mutual trust, we face the future knowing others face it as well. Destroy those differences, and we face it alone.

Not even if the future were a secure and tranquil place, there would still be the need to hold to our differences. Our differences are what lift us a little higher than wild beasts. And our differences are what make us ourselves. If each person looks into his own soul and sees that which makes him worth being himself, he will find a little that he shares with no one at all, and a substantial amount that he shares with very few. He must, if he is to rise to the challenge of being a human being, make his peace with that which is his own (her own).

And one must learn not to think it rude to talk about such things. It is qenerally said when a person takes off to do something in defiance of good sense and even in defiance of good heart, "It is his life.. He can do with it what he likes."

Say rather, "It is my mouth. I can say with it what I like." It is my mind; I shall think as I like. If it is the humanness of myself and others I care about, I must respect our differences.

Most of the differences between people can be attributed to the community. To be sure there are great, monumental differences between people in the same culture, family, race or religion. But across such differences there will still be a degree of understanding. If one is to rise to the challenge of being human, a person must make his peace with the small community with which he shares the most, to understand that it is that particular sharing that is the largest part of his own humanity. He must learn to accept and love his own jealously, so that he can accept himself. Quickly.

Editor's Note:

Wild Surmise is an occasional newsletter on speculative matter. It is sent out free. I would like to welcome the members of the Cincinnatus Society to the number of our readers. We are happy to add anyone who asks to the mailing list, and of course remove anyone who asks as well.

Last month the staff got together and bought a four wheel drive vehicle. Since its purpose was largely recreational, M thought we ought to call it the Four - Play. speaking of cars, we hear that the "Batmobile" in the movie "Batman" is really a Buick.

Booty claims he was mentioned in the August 3 Calvin and Hobbes comic. That's the sort of thing usually happens to M.

Booty's research came up with the "fact" (Booty almost never cites sources, so you never know what he just made up or remembered wrong) that more than one out of every three competitive athletes would be willing to give up their lives at the end of six years (say to a complication of a drug) if for those six years they could be the very best in the world at their sport. I thought it would be nice to show we had the same commitment by havinq the writers sign a statement to the effect that each would be willing to sacrifice his life after five years if during that time he would have the ability to write the absolute truth.

They thought it over a bit, and then M said he'd sacrifice Booty's life after four years if Booty could only write that long without talking politics. Booty said he would sacrifice M if N could go six weeks without talking about himself. Fortunately the breath takingly beautiful official Wild Surmise laboratory assistant was there to restore the peace.

Copyright, August 1989 WILD SURMISE

MILD SURPRISE

Younger brother was a superb shot. No one was as good a shot as Father, or course. But the difference in the amount of experience the two had was enormous. The difference between the two was great in other way~. Father of the deep craggy brows, father of the heavy powerful hands. In younger days, in the heat of a fight, he had lifted another man over his head and dashed him to the earth. Younger brother of the clear happy face, the copper colored curls like the locks of Apollo. A face that, as a little child looked on the world with excitement, affection and wonder. And he was a good shot.

By the way, don't worry. This is not a sad story.

One day I remarked that if you throw a ball, it travels level until it runs out of speed, then it drops. Father said no, that it drops at the same speed whether it is moving forward or not. So he got a couple tennis balls and put them on the table he thumped the two simultaneously, knocking one barely off the table and sending the other across the room to land within inches of the far wall. The two hit the floor at just about the same time. I was not impressed. Stunned, yes. How was it possible for anybody to do that, and on the first try? Too stunned to look impressed. Another failure. In fact, when he had been the little boy of the age I was then, he had regularly made his lunch money by pitching pennies against the other boys. The pennies were pitched from behind a lag line and the boy whose penny was left closest to the wall took both

The lock was torn off, the box was unsealed, but still Older Brother did not lift the lid. He just waited. I looked at the little metal chest. In my mind it contained a skull Cvery small of course, possibly a rat's skull), a burnt candle end, an indecipherable brown parchment, an ancient glass bottle containing an opalescent fluid closed with a cork and wax , a small cloth bag tied with string, a fistful of dried and shriveled berries and a short stick with a mysterious discoloration. Brother waited. I opened the box.

On the rusty bottom of the box lay a torn paper envelope with the words Paris Green.

After that, Father decided that keeping rat poison around a house with little boys in it simply was not a good idea. He got rid of the poison and resorted to a franker way of dealing with the rats.

You have seen rats. You have seen rats saunter. You have seen them stroll. If you have seen them taken unawares, you may have seen one trot. I doubt you have seen one run. But a rat can run. It can run as fast as a racehorse over a short distance.

Father kept his twenty-two pump gun in a closet far from the ammunition. I never saw him clean and oil it but once, but I am sure he did, for after he died the gun rusted within months. Well on the dreaded Night of the R?t, which came about once every so often, Father would get down the old rifle, rummage out the scatter shot from its hiding place and he and Older Brother would lay plans. Sometimes they would consent to take me along.

We would slip from the house and move stealthily down the garden walk to the darkened garage. Father would open the door silently according the the approved method: You pull hard on the handle. Then you turn the handle as far as it will go. Then you lift. Then you ease it forward. Then you slowly take the pressure off. The rats heard nothing as loud as their own footsteps.

Father checked the location of his sons, eased the safety off and nudged Older Brother to hit the lights.

Now it is a fact that Father confessed to that the Navy once put some of its promising officers to a test. The men were placed in a darkened room. As the lights came up, there would be revealed on the front wall the silhouette of a warship. As soon as an officer recognized it, he was to signal, I believe by pressing an appropriate button. As the test proceeded, and father responded first time after time, he began to marvel that his ability to adapt to light was so much different. There he would be sitting looking at the familiar menacing shadow of a light cruiser and everyone else in the room was sitting in the dark.

He could do it when the lights came up slow, and he could do it when the lights came up fast. In the garage, the lights came up fast.

The rats, oblivious to the cat-like opening of the door soon learned what the lights meant. They ran. They ran like buffalo on stampede while Father pumped scatter shot into them.

From my standpoint, it seemed like this. We would go out to the garage. Everything would be dark and quiet. I would get really sleepy. Then there would be the blaze of lights, a blur of rippling grey bodies, the rapid click and sneeze of the gun and, by the time I was oriented, there would be all these dead rats.

Again I was too stunned to be impressed. Another failure.

I never was afraid of the dark after that. Darkness was my friend. What T was afraid of was the light coming up all of a sudden. Or worse, I would cross a darkened room and reach out at the end to turn on the lights, but my hand, in my imagination, would touch not the switch plate but the back of a huge and hairy hand that was already in the act of throwing the switch.

It was the Navy that had tested him and found his eyes were so good, but it was in the Army that he had learned how to shoot, how to move without seeming to move, how to command men, how to see in poor light. For he had been an officer both in the Army and in the Navy. He said that when there would be a fight between the services it would go like this; The Army would start it. The Marines would win it. The Navy would play a trick on the others while the fight was going on. He did not think that highly of Army morale. But they could certainly use their guns.

Properly deployed infantry should be able to lay down a field of fire across which an advance is not feasible. If it is unable so to secure itself, it should be withdrawn. A rifle is able to lay down such a field, unless it has to deal with motorized armor, poison gas, excessive artillery or aerial bombardment or nuclear missile. A carbine is just for killing folks.

I Once had seen a war movie and complained to Father that it was not realistic. "They were just shooting. They weren't taking aim or anything."

"Oh that's realistic. Suppose you were..." then sadly, ~No₁ I suppose you WOULD aim the thing. But you've grown up around guns. Suppose instead you were on the flying bridge of a cruiser in battle, explosions going off all around you, planes diving on you, and somebody had placed in your hands a sextant. what do you suppose the chances are you would use it for what it was designed for?"

Truly we had grown up around guns. I have seen Younger Brother, he of the clear and smiling face, pick oft a running squirrel with a shotgun at a distance farther than I could have thrown a rock.

But I will always remember the first time we took Younger Brother out shooting. There was lots of empty country in those days, and you could find a place to do such things safely. We climbed out of the car and looked for something to shoot at. Some thoughtful soul had left his beer can behind, and we found it.

Older brother wanted to hang the can up and shoot at it. We had no string, but when we dug in the glove compartment, we found a five foot length of leader line from an old fishing expedition. That was great. Leader never breaks, so we would not be forever running to tie the beer can up again.

Then Older Brother announced he wanted to try to hit the can while it was swinging. Father explained that it would be to hard to hit that way, but we insisted, so he let us try. Older brother fired twice without hitting anything. Father explained that the thing to do was try to hit it at the end of a swing. I, as usual, would take no suggestion and insisted on trying to hit it in center swing. I too hit nothing.

Then Younger Brother wanted to try. He was so young we was hardly verbal, but he made it quite clear he wanted to take that long shiny thing smelling of oil and acrid smoke, to point it at the swinging can, to frown along the barrel and have it make that wonderful noise, and then to receive the serious sympathy of the others when nothing else happened.

In vain we expostulated. Futilely we begged. To no avail we reasoned with him. He could not possibly hit the can. But he was not to be denied.

The beer can dropped.

I never in my life gratified my father by looking properly impressed, but Younger Brother made up for it all in that moment. He lifted his little head and stared in disbelief. He knew he had done it. He had made the gun bite the can way over there and the can had fallen.

Actually, when we inspected the can we verified what Father had known from the first. The shot had gone high and had hit not the can but the leader itself. The clear, hard line was split as well as broken.

Since then I have seen many a hole made by many a gun, seen father pick up a gun at an arcade and let go twenty rounds without a miss. But I have never again known a moment of such drama as when Younger Brother shot the beer can down.

M