WILD SURMISE

December 1990 #22

AN ALMOST ANONYMOUS INFORMAL NOTE

The Riddle of the Century.

It is said that the advent of agriculture produced enough free time so that people could spend time in the gentle pursuits of civilization. Of course nothing of the sort happened; if you compare a hunting and gathering society with a farming community, you will find the hunters spending most of their time goofing off, while the farmers are putting in brutally long hours doing dangerous and strenuous work. The time spent on anything but animal existence has been set aside at great sacrifice.

We have more options in this century. That is not strictly because we have become more efficient. In the United States in the past thirty or so years, the amount of wealth produced by one hour of work has not budged seriously. In fact, if you compare the wealth produced by a high school graduate of today, he is worse off than a high school graduate of his father's generation. If you take the economic growth of the country and subtract from it the national debt including that involved in the Savings and Loan crisis, I doubt we have even maintained our gross national product over the past generation.

This is true despite civil rights legislation, despite women's liberation, despite women by and large now working outside the home about as much as men do, despite massive increases in international trade, despite massive immigration in the name of economic growth, despite the computer, despite deregulation left and right, despite an economy flogged mercilessly to produce growth, more growth and nothing but growth.

We have shrunk.

If there are people with more wealth in this nation, if there are people with more leisure, it is because there is a poorer distribution of the wealth and the work. Today as always, abstract questions can be addressed only using time that has been set aside by somebody's sacrifice. Questions such as: what is it to be human?

The things that make us human are the same things that make us different from each other.

It is really as simple as that. The things we have in common we have in common with animals. Any thing you might eat that is wholesome, there is some animal that would be quite happy to have

it. The air you breatheand water you drink refresh animals as well. You sleep sometimes and have desires to socialize and have sexual urges that many animals would understand and share although it is rude to act out some of those urges with animals.

Ah, but when you use language, you go where no animal sets beak or tongue. Certainly psittacine birds can use words and use them quite cleverly. A few great apes have been taught to use sign language in a recognizable form. But no creature other than a human uses language with the fluency, the expression, the imposing skill a human takes as his birthright. Say one good original sentence and you have separated yourself from all non humans.

You have also separated yourself from the majority of your fellow humans. Most people will not understand your sentence. If your sentence is in English, a fair proportion of the human race may understand you, for more people speak English than any other language. (well, all right, maybe a lot of English speaking people won't understand you, but I did say a good sentence.) If your sentence is Spanish, again a great number will understand. Mandarin and Cantonese, two great Chinese languages, also have large numbers that speak them.

If you are one of those linguistic athletes who speak seven languages, and you chose those languages carefully, you might indeed be able to address the majority of humans by translating your sentence. I am not sure if that has ever been done.

Hut speaking all languages? No, I am quite sure no one has ever done it. Languages vary radically in construction, vocabulary and voice. There is a whistled dialect of Spanish. There are hundreds and hundreds of languages, each as rich and as subtle as your own. Even the attempt to learn two of them involves a sacrifice. A child who grows up speaking two languages will, in general, speak neither as well as he would if he had been exposed to just one. In fact, I know no one who speaks more than four languages whose English doesn't sound quite strange.

Animals don't use tools. Pick up a torque wrench (or a patch bolt, which can serve much the same purpose) or an astrolabe and you can be quite sure you are holding something no animal ever learned to use properly. Again, of course, most humans wouldn't quite know what to do with it. In proving yourself human, you have proved yourself different from most humans.

Don clothing, take up a musical instrument, dance, plan a political insurrection and you again will differentiate yourself from most fellow humans at the same time you do what no animal does. And of course as it gets closer to where you really live, where you really deposit your humanity, when you try to understand your life, your relationship to those you know, your moral standards, your social norms, there your differences become greater and enormously more difficult to describe.

We have, at unthinkable expense, just finished doing a world wide experiment on people's differences and just what those differences mean. How we ever got into doing that experiment is beyond me. It called for great intellectual arrogance and savage disregard of human life and human happiness. The price has been staggering. But since we are paying the price, it is high time we looked at the results.

Germany. World War I started although nobody wanted it. The problem was that leaders expected a war. They prepared for a war. They prepared to mobilize their troops and get them to the front quickly. Then somebody shot some prince (it really doesn't matter whom), and everybody started rushing troops to the front.

Once they were there, it turned out that nobody had a plan for getting them back home again. The armies were so vast that the battle lines stretched from sea to sea. There was no chance of a flanking maneuver. So long as the armies stayed put, both were virtually invincible. But if one side started sending people home, there would be a hole in the line and the other side would have a decisive advantage.

So the twentieth century began with a long and horrible war fought for no real purpose on either side save not to lose. But in the end, Germany lost.

I suspect that the victorious allies remembered the wonderful success of reconstruction in the South of the United States. Having won the War Between the States, the northern states sought to punish the South and partly as a result of this looting fell heir to unprecedented wealth. So Germany was stuck with a punitive peace for a war she never really wanted.

This punitive peace stayed in effect until the rise of Hitler, who then seized by force the rights Germany had been denied at the conference table. Then in an effort to unify all Germans, he entered Poland and conquered the whole country.

Mistake. Foul. Foot fault. It was a mistake on any scale and by any interpretation. There was a part of Poland that was pretty much German. Germany, having discovered that appeals to reason and tolerance were to no avail, had some loin cloth of an excuse to grab that part. But most of Poland was Polish. There was not one scrap of reason to enter it.

Germany had made her mistake and Britain was not about to let Germany forget. It was the seizure of Poland, not anything to do with Nazi treatment of Jews (the enormity of which was not suspected at the time) that precipitated the war.

Germany lost again. Another punitive peace was imposed. And only in this year has Germany been permitted self government, has the occupation really ended.

Let me summarize the century: Everybody shot at Germans. Then everybody punished Germans. Then everybody shot at Germans some more. Then everybody punished Germans again.

Now I concede that some other things have been going on, but just consider these four epoches to be parts of the same process. On the one hand, consider Germany with her allies Italy and Japan. On the other hand consider Britain with her allies France and the United states.

Germany has struggled for a country that would reflect a cultural reality. They wanted a country of Germans, all Germans and pretty much nothing else.

The Italians boasted under the dictator Mussolini that they would rebuild the Roman Empire. That was a joke. At the time (just before World War II), the book on empire had been written by Britain. She had the biggest empire of all time. Preposterous to think that Italy could ever compete with British industrial and military might.

Japan was and is a very culturally homogeneous nation. The Japanese are aware of this. Not too long ago some Japanese minister of agriculture or something was talking to a Japanese village, exhorting them t~ more strenuous efforts as is their wont. He said something like this:

Do not be proud of yourselves that you have out-produced, out-sold and out-grown the United States. Do not take pride that you make better cars and introduce superior electronics, that you have made the States look like pathetic pudgy giants. This is not the same country that defeated your grandparents. This country has accepted enormous numbers of immigrants, straining the very fabric of the culture. This country has a school system brought to its knees by integration and bussing. Were you up against the old America, the America that lost hideously at Pearl Harbor and the battle of the Coral Sea and only stiffened her resolve, the America that faced impossible odds at Guam and Corregidor, who faced those odds again and won at Midway, the America that could read your own coded messages faster than you could read them yourselves, that built the A bomb and used it in hopes of sparing lives, that built a fighting machine in the pacific that could have defeated any military power the world has seen, an America that trusted mind over might, that fought in sorrow not in anger, that in victory felt pity rather than joy. Were you up against that America, the real America, then you might not feel so superior, although you would probably be happiest.

Well we almost went to war over it all over again. We insisted, we - the United States and he wasn't even addressing us - demanded that he retract what he had said. It was only a pep talk. But it ran so deeply against our policy that we could not ignore it.

You see our attitude is that you take any bunch of people, the less in common the better, and jam them together with the right laws, and they will build a superior sort of nation. History means nothing. Land means nothing. Family means nothing. Culture means nothing. All that is needed is a set of laws that permits no impediment to the pursuit of property.

The implication of the man's speech (and please do not hold either him or me to my paraphrase) was that if you start with different people, you get a different nation. Sounds harmless, but it was not interpreted as harmless by our press or our politicians.

As with the United States, so with Britain and France. All three countries encourage cultural mixing as a matter of policy.

So we have spent a century doing a controlled experiment. Three countries have gone for the concept of a nation of people and three have opted for a nation of laws. Three have tried to stay culturally pure, well recognizable anyway, and three have gone for mixing as a virtue.

And now the results. Germany, which was overrun by France under Napoleon, has become so strong there is no comparison. The United States, once utterly dwarfing Japan as an economic power must concede equality if not a Japanese edge. Italy is a mightier industrial force than Britain.

The nations who won the wars have lost the peace. Cultural diversity works just fine if you are going to make a fighting machine, for the killing power of a fighting machine is largely a function of its size. Indifference to background makes a bigger potential army. If you consider winning a war as not losing, then war is not a human endeavor, as dying is not uniquely human. Weapons that kill humans kill animals.

But the arts of peace call for a different strategy. Here numbers alone are not sufficient. one thing that is needed is a willingness to invest in the future. Particularly, there is a need to invest in education.

If there is no integrity to a society, if most of the adults have little in common with most of the children, then those adults will not treasure those children. Sorry. People are people.

People being people, there is another thing that will happen. When a person who is recognizably different is present, a certain percentage of people will become hostile. That percentage is high, pretty close to 100. Most people will suppress that hostility, most cultures have rules that demand this, but the hostility will be expressed.

Often the expression is brutal. The number of blond women being beaten by swarthy husbands and boyfriends on any one hot Florida night would be enough to break your heart. If the hostility is not expressed by brutality, it may come out in subtle ways. And this is true even if the stranger is one's own child.

The specific truth for this is lacking, for we are talking about something both subtle and forbidden. But the general observation is beyond question. The United States accept more immigration than the rest of the world combined, make through such efforts as bussing and affirmative action more effort to homogenize the society than the rest of the world and have more broken homes and worse schools than any comparable place.

Properly one marries for love. If love is taken, falsely and cheaply I think, to be a biological urge shared with animals, then that urge can be satisfied by a human of different background or even a non human. If love is taken more carefully to be the perception in another of what one understands to be the best in oneself, then obviously one seeks another who shares as much background as possible.

My own sad belief is that miss matched couples are not even together for reason of biological urge, but more commonly for reasons of dominance, money, access to drugs and rebellion against parents who have committed the subtle and forbidden sin.

How can one do it? How can one bring into the world a child whose mixed background will be his own worst enemy for life? Think on this: Better for a man to have a millstone hung about his neck and be drowned in the uttermost parts of the sea than he should place a stumbling block in front of one of these little ones.

And so the experiment was run. And these are the results. Three nations have maintained their culture and thrived. Three have denied theirs and suffered terribly. The Russian empire must be ranked with the allies, made greater efforts to deny cultural values, suffered more horribly. Third world powers have suffered greatly too; they have been totally dominated politically and economically by outsiders.

One might well object that there have been other things going on in this century than this great, expensive and now completed experiment. The objection is less substantial than might be expected. Consider four of the major thinkers of the century: Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Adolph Hitler and Karl Marx. All are still generally believed. All have taken what you may call the American side of the debate. All were at least partly Jewish. They are the heroes of our lack of culture. Let me take them in alphabetical order.

The most agreeable person among these demi-gods was Einstein. He was a quiet theoretical physicist who used his formidable mathematical power to resolve some of the most difficult questions that ever faced science. But Einstein did not become a cultural hero for his mind bursting equations.

Einstein is a hero for having proposed and defended the proposition that everything is relative. His two most famous theories are the special Theory of Relativity and the General Theory of Relativity.

The first theory proposes that if you were whizzing along through space at three quarters of the speed of light, you would not be able to make any measurement that would tell you that. You would happily assume you were at rest.

This statement scratched and still scratches many people's itch to say, "See. Nothing really matters on the big scale. There are no absolute standards.~' That is why Einstein is a hero.

To a certain extent, what Einstein says is true. Sitting in a closed box, it is hard to say what direction the box is moving in. But as for traveling a three quarters the speed of light and not being able to tell it, that is flat not true. Such a traveler, assuming he is permitted to look at the universe, would then see himself traveling past galaxies always in one direction and would notice a grossly asymmetrical cosmic background radiation.

When put to the test on the large scale, the special Theory of Relativity simply sits down and says, "That wasn't what I was talking about."

The General Theory of Relativity does even worse. This theory examines what happens in an accelerating field. It describes the world as seen from a fuel dragster. To no one's surprise, such a world looks different from the world as seen from the grandstands. In other words, the General Theory of Relativity isn't relative.

The title says it is a theory of relativity, it even hints, "This theory is even more relative than the last." nut it is not more relative. It isn't relative at all. But that does not matter to the person having his itch scratched. It is the name that counts. Einstein is still the hero.

Few challenge Einstein. We have done it in these pages before. For one thing, the Special Theory of Relativity is based on measurements that indicate that velocities &o not add linearly. consider a train moving at four miles an hour and a child running down the aisle at four miles an hour relative to the train. Tf the child is running toward the back of the train, well and good, he is at rest with respect to the ground.

If the child is running toward the front of the train, common sense would suggest that he is going at eight miles an hour with respect to the ground. Einstein took as an assumption that the speeds would add: Speed of child over the ground equals this quantity (speed of child plus speed of train) divided by this quantity (one plus this quantity (speed of child times speed of train divided. by this quantity ( the speed of light times the speed of light))).

Well we tried it. Our measurements were sensitive enough to detect a difference between the two answers. Our measurements were alarmingly crude. But our measurements were not much worse than anything that could have been done at the time the theory was announced.

So we have hurled ourselves in the way of Einstein as a bug might hurl itself in the way of a locomotive and with similar results. But we will try it again: better measurements, more help. More time.

The second problem I have with Einstein regards the General Theory of Relativity, with which I have little problem except the name. If that theory is true, the universe cannot be expanding, because that would mean it had to expand out of a black hole. Therefore the universe must be collapsing. The universe looks like it is expanding. Therefore time must be running backwards.

This line of reasoning leads to strange and disturbing ideas which we have discussed before.

Whether my objections are valid, the fact remains that Einstein remains a hero for reasons that are either misunderstandings or are simply not true.

Sigmund Freud decided that he knew how the human mind worked. The human boy started out with an instinctive sexual desire for the mother. Fearing the wrath of the father but burdened with ungovernable lust for the mother, the boy resolved matters by deciding that he was, in fact, the father. He then supported this utterly mad notion by adopting that father's speech, manner and value system. Any time the boy departed from the father's perceived behavioral norms, he suffered unbearable guilt because he was thus faced with the truth that he was not, indeed, the father and thus had to exist without sexual gratification from the mother women lived with a kind of mirror image.

That was it. That was what it was to be human. The only problem with Freud's formulation was this: there is not a shred of truth to it.

The theory is totally worthless. It is founded upon not one single controlled scientific experiment. It is just what Mr. Freud said. His evidence was what people said as heard and selected by Freud and as interpreted by Freud's intuition. In other words, no evidence at all.

But Freud was enormously successful. He massaged the same lump Einstein did. He said that all human values are arbitrary. That is easy enough. But he also accounted for the persistence of such values. After all, it is easy to say that there is no important value, but hard to maintain it when everybody on the horizons believes in such values.

If everyone agrees it is wrong to murder the elderly and helpless, then perhaps it is really wrong. If one culture believes that women should be treated as equals as men and share the same risks while another culture feels women should be protected, then perhaps each attitude is right for its respective culture and wrong in the other culture. That is why different values persist in different cultures.

But if all such values are simply learned by children because they want to identify with their parents because of unreasonable sexual urges, then there is no right and wrong within cultures or between. There is only what works. only what is convenient. Only what makes money.

Freud is a hero of the American school of thought not because of the value of his treatments of emotional disease. They have no value. He is a hero because of his dismissal of standards of value as things to be taken seriously, a hero because he states that the things which make us human are things we all share. In this he still has an enormous number of believers.

The third and least savory of modern heroes is Hitler. Hitler started out by asking a question, "Why can't all Germans live in the same country." But he ended by making a propositional statement, "If cultures (races, tribes, what have you) are different, some must be better than others."

And that last statement few indeed are willing to challenge. But it is not true. It cannot be true. It is a contradiction in terms. The word "better" is a culturally determined concept. If two cultures are different, then there is no such thing as "better."

And Hitler would have gone on to say, "And ours is the best." By "ours," he would have meant the German part of his heritage, not the Jewish part.

Hitler's father was the illegitimate son of a German man named Hitler and a Jewess named Shickelgruber. He, Adolph's father, petitioned to have his named changed to Hitler, but he was raised by his mother. Depending on how you reckon it, this man was either all Jewish by maternal descent and upbringing, not at all Jewish by choice, or about fifty fifty. That leaves Adolf somewhere between half Jewish and not Jewish at all.

But he lashed out at Jews with unprecedented viciousness, earned the revulsion of all the known world in the process. Give the man his due, he or his staff introduced the limited access high speed nationwide highway system, the fast fuel efficient cheap car, the long endurance submarine, the accurate dermatome distribution, the intercontinental missile, the space ship, the jet fighter, the nuclear bomb, pinpoint accurate bombing, the highly mobile attack force and the personal computer (which was a mechanical device used for coded messages.) But he is hated for his murders.

And quite rightly so. Of course it wasn't just Jews Hitler had murdered. Indeed, less than a quarter of the deaths he was responsible for were deaths of Jews. By that reckoning, it is more accurate to say that the man was a Jew who killed non-Jews than a non-Jew who killed Jews.

But it is killing of Jews that was the most horrible to us, for it is evident that he was trying to destroy something in himself and by extension something in all of us. And what would that have been? Our capacity for tolerance. Our capacity for compassion. Our capacity to reach out even beyond agreed cultural chasms of infinite depth with help and caring and a wish to understand even though understanding is forever denied us.

Hitler is a very bad example for people who think mixing cultures is a good thing. And yet he is most honored by those who think they honor him least. For if his proposition was, "If cultures (races, tribes, what have you) are different, some must be better than others."

But instead of taking the affirmative stand, "On the contrary. All are good. All must be protected, kept and loved," many take the stand, "There are no absolute values, so no culture can be better than another, so THEY CANNOT BE DIFFERENT.¹¹ This becomes (in the face of overwhelming evidence that differences exist), "Cannot be allowed to be different."

Those who promote mixing of cultures seek a homogeneity little different from what Hitler sought to gain by killing people. It is monumentally ironic that the nation Germany which has flourished by virtue of its cultural integrity produced a man who so conspicuously denied the value of cultural differences. The Gypsies were slaughtered virtually to the last soul.

Hitler stroked the same swelling Einstein and Freud did. Much as people hate him, they hold to themselves his basic concept. Nothing is absolute. Nothing matters but what works. There is no basic goodness in somebody else's virtues, no value in his treasures, no holiness in his gods. He is to be destroyed or assimilated.

The fourth hero of American thought is Karl Marx. He took as an assumption that all value is economic value. All issues reduce to current cash value. The proper business of the nation, the government, the entire social order is to create and distribute wealth. And the way you do it is by sharing; sharing the work and sharing the income.

And his ideas were put to the test. And they failed hideously. A nation of hundreds of millions of bright educated found in the long run that they could not feed themselves. Now that is hardly odd. Materialism itself is a dead end street. That is why there aren't any very old purely materialistic cultures. In order for things to work, people need to care beyond what just works.

But is that the conclusion we have drawn from the failure of Karl Marx? No, not a bit of it. We say, 'surely the proper business of the social order is to create and distribute wealth, and the way you do it is by untrammeled greed and cutthroat competition.~'

Marx was only wrong in the details. We thank him for having clarified our vision. In effect, Marx not only invented communism, he invented modern capitalism too.

He told us there is no higher virtue than money we can all exchange. He caressed the same nub as Einstein, Freud and Hitler.

So these great thinkers, these writers, have taken the American allied side in the great controlled experiment of the century. And now we have tried it we know. It certainly cost us enough to find out.

The things that make us human are the things that make us different. They are priceless things, worthy to be treasured, vital to be kept.

Let me come at the point again, this time citing evidence. I will refer to the Burgess shale studies, the twin studies, the child rearing studies and language-genetic studies.

The Burgess shale is rock from a quarry in Canada. The rock deposit is some eight or 50 feet thick and not as big as a nice city block. It contains fossils from the Cambrian era.

The Cambrian era was a long time ago. Fairly soon after the earth cooled back then, the evidence is that there were a lot of living things, but they were most primitive. The equivalent of what are called blue green algae. Blue green algae lack complex cellular structure that most living things have nowadays. But these algae are able to live without any other kind of organism. Given air, sunlight and water, blue green algae thrive.

Most of the rest of us need hamburgers dike lots of people do) or soil with nitrogen (like trees do) or the inside of some unhappy sheep (like some tapeworms do) to survive. The supremely primitive blue green algae makes do with air, water and sunlight.

And for a long long time blue green algae and such like were about all the life that could be found. Then suddenly the fossil record demonstrates complex animal life. In geological terms, this life appeared overnight. The level in the fossil record that contains these first complex animals is called the Cambrian level.

The Burgess contains Cambrian fossil in unusually good state of preservation.

Now you might have expected, if you believe in evolution, that these earliest fossils would have been primitive. But in fact, they are quite highly evolved, guite specialized. To me they all look like the kind of thing you get cooked up in batter at a seafood place. But to the experts they are interesting and different the one from the other.

Now if you believe in evolution, you might have expected the differences between these creatures to be modest. After all, if evolution is causing differences, then differences must get greater as time goes on. The greatest differences between groups of animals are identified as "phyla." You are in the same phylum as a goat or a fish, but not as a jellyfish.

Well the Burgess shale holds members of every single modern phylum as well as a host of others that have gone extinct.

In other words, the basic designs of animals were all set in a comparatively short period of time. Changes since then have been minor.

Of course, we have living things now that look very different from each other. But the experts say that these differences are very superficial compared to the differences that then existed.

What is more, it seems that there is a pattern. You start with many forms. Most go extinct. What is left then specializes. Then there is another great dying, when most living forms vanish but what is left goes on and specializes some more. But with each wave or specialization the amount of basic change that can be accomplished is less than the change that followed the previous great dying.

The experts, and I refer to Harry Whittington and his colleagues, say that this pattern is true on all scales. With time, the greatest differences are destroyedr new forms that appear have more limited differences.

In the early Cambrian era, a number of organisms appeared that were profoundly different, the one from the other. They were different answers to the question, 'What is it to be a complex animal?" The big answer was, of course, "It is the things that make us different from each other that make us different from blue green algae."

And the big answer is to be understood as a lot of big answers, one for every animal phylum. And since that time, no new answers have ever appeared. But lots of answers have been lost.

After the first great appearance of different forms, the fossil record is punctuated by great dyings. These great dyings get our attention because we think it may happen to us.

I do not see why this is necessary. If life is good, than is it not enough to see different forms and say the different forms are all good? Is it not enough to mourn the passage of whole phyla as the loss of something strange and wonderful without asking, "What is in it for me?'⁹?

I do not know what has caused the great dyings, the biggest one that ended the Permian era, the recent one that ended with the Ice Age or the famous one that took out the dinosaurs. But there is one obvious thing that made them worse. creatures depend on each other.

Consider a very simple system consisting of trees, ticks, deer and mountain lions. The deer hide in the trees, which keeps them safe from the lions but exposes them to ticks. The deer eat of the trees, the ticks and lions eat deer. We can see that the lions and ticks are competitors for deer blood. One day the ticks invent a weapon with which they kill all the lions · The deer then multiply without limit. They eat all the trees. With the trees gone, the deer all die. Then the ticks all die.

This is a fanciful situation. But start eliminating half of living forms, and this sort of thing will occur, a sort of domino effect.

It is a commonplace observation that we are witnessing a great dying of a magnitude as great as that of the end of the Permian era. It is so fast that species are being eliminated by the effects of human growth in numbers and economic activity.

It is less commonly observed that we are witnessing a great dying of humans as well, not fall in the numbers of humans but a fall in our basic diversity. Tiine was a person with a good ear could listen to a Than talk and tell what county in South Carolina the man came from. Nowadays, in contrast, I no longer listen to the radio; the Yankee accent of the average announcer is too insistent a whine. Languages and cultures are subsumed by an ever more aggressive English speaking cultural and economic invasion. Only the strong resist.

Human races, like the phyla of the animal kingdom, go back as far as the horizon of our information. Somewhere back there they all started. we assume₁ for lack of an alternative idea, that they all came from some single source, both the animal phyla and the human races and language groups. The alternative theory, that humans evolved from ape like ancestors in different places independently but at the same time, the alternative theory strains the ability to imagine, much less believe.

So we have no theory. We only have our cultural and racial groups. Timeless. Enigmatic. Never to be created again.

o pe⁶ple will remain different all right. Specialization among humans is as much the rule as specialization among animals. Dismiss from your mind the notion of a universal brotherhood. What is happening is merely the impoverishment of human diversity. What could happen is the extermination of the human race.

That is the lesson of the fossil record, if lesson it holds. The things that make us different are the things that make us human, and if they are lost they cannot be restored. If we lose our differences, we may lose all.

Another line of recent research that bears on the question of what it is to be human is the research done on identical twins. A team headed by a worker named Tellegen got together a group of twins. Some were identical, some were fraternal. Some had grown up together, some had grown up apart

These people were all subjected to a battery of psychological tests, a sort of a personality inventory. Since identical twins have identical genes while fraternal twins share about half their genes, it was possible to do a strict comparison and discover for once just how much of personality is inherited and how much is the result of a combination of chance, choice and environment.

Remember the great experiment of the century has been competition between countries that are nations of people and countries that are nations of law. For the nations that define themselves only by laws, the United States, Britain and France, it is of course axiomatic that genes make any significant contribution to the personality. Laws can only influence environment, give freedom of choice. If genes determine personality, then the laws are controlled by genes too. Then a set of laws proper for one group of people might not be proper for another.

This we cannot bear. Our laws must be right. Absolutely right. Otherwise we cannot claim that absolutely anyone or any combination of people can be expected to live by our laws. Yet we do sd claim.

We assumed, for the sake of the century long experiment, that genes had no influence on personality. But we had not tested the matter. It has now been tested.

The result. Genetics wins. Two thirds of what can be measured of a humans personality can be documented as genetic and nothing else. He simply inherits his personality and that is that.

It gets worse. Of the one third of the personality that seems to be environmental, much of it seems to be due to some very specific condition. A child, for instance, might have a very strong relationship with some adult, and that relationship be important in the child's development. Here the adult, which seems to be a feature of the environment may actually simply be a matter of choice. The child decided to pursue the relationship. It may even be genetic to the extent that the child was programmed to pursue the relationship.

In the end, it seems to have been hard to find any influence of environment at all. Except it seems that some environments seemed to produce happy people and some environments did not.

It gets worse again. The measurements were sophisticated enough to suggest that behavioral traits are multi-qenic. That is to say, two genes that affect behavior may work together in a person to produce a personality trait that is different from simply the addition of what each trait would have done alone.

In other words, genetic mixing does not simply dilute traits, it destroys them. Assuming the initial traits to be advantageous, the crossing of two types may produce no bland average but a type that is inferior to both parents, not only may but should be expected to be inferior.

Mind you Tellegen and the others did not draw this conclusion. They only said that traits seem to be multi-genic and then stood back, waiting for the explosion.

Tellegen's work did leave open the opportunity for environment to determine how happy a child would be. This question has been explored explicitly by Diana Baumrind under the heading, "Parenting style."

I risk lumping and distorting the work unfairly, but I invite you get a copy of the original report from the Institute of Human Development at Berkely.

consider three variable, parameters of a child's behavior: how good are his grades? does he use drugs? does he say he is happy?

Now face facts. These behaviors correlate very strongly. There are stereotypically the happy, good grade, non drug using children and there are the miserable, grade failing drug users. So we will, for the discussion, lump them and call them happy or unhappy.

There are many parenting styles described. We will consider but two variables. Either the parent takes an interest in the child or does not. Either the parent sets rules for the child or does not.

That gives us four types of parents: Strict attentive parents, strict indifferent parents, permissive attentive parents and permissive inattentive parents. And we will now see which style produces the happiest child.

If we adopt the American position that the social order depends on laws and that economic growth based on competition is the sole purpose of life, then we have an expectation as to what parenting style is preferable.

We should prefer the style that is attentive but permissive. Since from the American standpoint there are no preferred rules of behavior, there is no point in teaching any to a child. Let the child make up his own. Encourage the child to experiment. Re will like his own ways best, find out what works for himself, and be better able to compete because he will see life from a fresh perspective.

This attitude leads of course to children experimenting with such things as playing in traffic and sticking fingers in light sockets. So the attitude is modified to say encourage the child to experiment as soon as he is old enough. Say when be becomes a teenager, he should try anything that comes to mind. Of course we all know what comes to a teenager's mind - the same thing that comes to an adult mind. Experiments with sex.

Rebellion against parents is expected. Setting rules for children only means that the rebellion will be more catastrophic.

From the American position, we should expect the parenting style that has the best chance of producing a happy successful child should be the attentive and permissive style. The next best style should be the indifferent permissive style. Or maybe the two should be reversed. Maybe any attention carries with it the likelihood of imposing restrictions. At the other end of the scale, the next worst style - much worse - should be the attentive but strict style. And the Very worst of all, an invitation to disaster, almost a guarantee of disaster, should be the inattentive but strict style

It didn't turn out that way. Again I oversimplify. It turns out the most successful style is attentive and strict. The next most successful is inattentive but strict, then attentive and permissive and last inattentive and permissive. In other words, we are all wrong. Permissiveness simply hurts a child. Indifference hurts too, but it does not hurt as much as permissiveness.

You see having a culture is a lot like having a family. It doesn't matter so much which one you have as it matters that you have one and care about it and fit in.

These rules that parents of successful children were imposing were not just arbitrary rules. They may have been different from one family to the next, this work was after all done in America, but in each case the rules were part of a consistent cultural framework extending back for centuries. Nay, in my heart I believe that each viable cultural framework extends all the way back to the horizon, to the beginning, to the first moment when there were humans, to the time when there were many answers to the question '~what is it to be human?'~

I concede, to the hurt of my own point, that there is more to life than making good grades in school, more to life than avoiding dire risks such as drugs and motorcycles, more in fact than being happy. For just a few people, a few strong, daring and bright and not many of those, there is the other path. That is the path of challenging preconceptions, of thinking what has not been thought, of saying it aloud.

This is a prescription for loneliness, poverty and misery. But for some it may be right. I should not call the life of Mozart a failure, nor that of van Gogh or Poe. I wish they had been happier and had been better paid for the treasures they gave us all. But I am not sorry they lived.

But those are the rare exceptions. By and large, every time you permit a child or teenager to do something you really don't think is right, you are doing that young one harm. You are denying him access to forty thousand years of cultural wisdom. You are setting him up to be an unhappy failure.

Love is the perception in another of what one understands to be the best in oneself. If you do not teach that child what in your best heart you think to be good and true, then you may not share in the end that which is best. You are denying the child the chance to share your love just as surely as you are at least limit the child's chance to share your love if you choose to have a child with someone who has a different genetic background.

For love is, after all, what children need most. Just as it is what we all need most. A human, a family, a social order, a nation can only endure on the basis of love.

A nation of laws alone cannot survive.

*

Yet the mood is there, "Lets all interbreed, intermarry, forget our differences, forget anything that makes us different and just think about getting rich. we'll all be the better off for it." The mood is like an express train hurling through the night, smashing through all opposition. The locomotives are Einstein, Freud, Hitler and Marx. And in the train follow Americans, Russians and Europeans in their hundreds of millions. And in the way: the world with her billions.

There are already four crowbars on the track. The allies won the war but lost the peace. The fossil record shows that the diversity of any population is maximal at the beginning and can only decline thereafter. It turns out that behavior, barring a disastrous childhood, is determined by heredity, and that behavior is multi-genic. It turns out that a successful childhood is one in which the child is taught the rules of one of several internally consistent, time proven and ancient cultural patterns.

The fifth crowbar. Last August 2, workers named Barton and Jones published an article in Nature magazine. What they had done was to study a number of Europeans, documenting what language they spoke and determining so far as possible their genetic makeup.

Then they undertook to correlate genetic makeup with language.

It seems like a monumentally innocuous project. Everyone knows that Europe is a patchwork quilt of languages. Everyone knows that there have been enormous migrations across Europe. Everyone has been told that Europe is a melting pot. That there is no hereditary difference between one European nation and the next; all the differences are cultural.

I remember my 12th grade civics teacher saying, "If you take an Englishman, a German and a Frenchman and put them in a sack and shake them up and dump them out, you will still be able to tell which is which, but you will only be able to tell on the basis of cultural differences. There isn't any genetic difference."

This statement is fully in agreement with the American-allied attitude that mixtures are good. After all, Europe is a mixture and no one can doubt Europe is a source of wonderful art, science, inventions, styles, institutions, foods and economic and industrial power.

Barton and Jones just tested the notion. And it turns out that what my teacher said was a lie.

She was saying what she had been told to say, so it wasn't her lie, but it was a lie all the same.

It wasn't a mistake. It wasn't as if someone had looked at the information and drawn the wrong conclusion. Nobody had looked. They just said what would sell. We were lied to.

It required some sophisticated statistical analysis to prove the differences, but remember, behavior is multi-genic. You would only expect the important differences to be seen by some tool that could deal with complex situations. At the time my teacher spoke, those mathematical tools were not even available. They couldn't have looked that way had they tried. But I doubt anyone tried. The human eye can perform multifactorial analysis. Anyone can go to Italy and Sweden and Ireland and look at the people. There is no question. They look different.

It turns out that in many places, when you cross a line dividing one language from another, you can detect a change in the genetic makeup of the people within a mile of the line. Just a few minutes stroll from where the language changes the genes can be proven to change. How much time and energy is an adult human willing to invest in finding a proper sexual partner? More than a few minutes stroll, I assure you.

The writers point out that it should be no surprise that language and genes follow the same distributions. The reason differences persist between populations is that the members of each original population are superior to any hybrid. This is true in languages. If you must speak French, speak it well. If German, than speak that well. Your own personal mixture won't help you communicate much.

of course the same thing is true of genes. The reason we have different species is that the species are better able to survive and reproduce thaft a hybrid of species. Otherwise we would all still be blue qreen algae.

And one species can survive precisely because there are other species around it.

So it is with humans. We need each other in all our differences. If we lessen our differences we lessen ourselves.

Perhaps there really was at some time the human troglodyte: the primitive who had no preconceptions and was able to diversify and become the present world in all its dazzling complexity. If so, No banshee bewails the parting of the primitive more keenly than

I. But there is no way back. We cannot resurrect that primitive. We can only keep as much of him, as many parts of him, as still survive.

This should not be a difficult thing. Surely it is a good thing to be human. Surely there are a number of different ways to be human. surely then all these ways are good. Surely then the destruction of differences does inestimable harm.

That is the final crowbar on the track. Even in crowded, mobile, variegated Europe, nations remain distinct in language and in heredity. The hybrid is impoverished compared with the purer line.

It is the things that make us different that make us human, that make us lovable, the one unto the other. Such is the answer to the riddle of the century.

And what does the next century hold? The United States accept more immigrants than the rest of the world together and Florida gets more than her share. Here in Florida we have more divorces than marriages. In one year Gainesville was number one in rape and number two in murder in the country. In one year more illegal automatic weapons were sold in Broward county than in the rest of the nation. There are more people on death row in Florida than in the rest of the world. One year Belle Glade had the highest rate of AIDS in the world. One year if you were born in Hillsborough county, your chance of having permanent devastating brain damage from maternal use of crack cocaine was measured in multiples of whole percentage points.

It does not look good.

Is there anything to be done? Well yes, now that you ask.

There would not be nearly so much of a problem if the United States were not involved. Europe is making an attempt to unite into a single economic and cultural force. The first attempt to do this was under Vercingetorix, who thought unity of Europe would make it possible to resist Julius Caesar. Caesar wound up having Vercingetorix carried through the streets of Rome in a cage. Subsequent attempts haven't worked out much better: the Inquisition, Napoleon, Hitler, Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin, Henry V, the whole rogues' gallery of the monsters.

We can only hope that this failure will not be accompanied by the usual blood bath.

But the United States. There is the real problem. Now there are no established language barriers. We are a hodgepodge. A mess. But whatever we do is going to have a profound influence on the ~est of the world.

So lets break it up.

It's simple. It's easy. We just send all the federal politicians home. It's even legal.

The constitution clearly states that anything which has not been specifically granted to the United States government is the right of the people and of the states. In other words, if a state government wants to secede and the people support that, they have that right.

It was tried before. The Southern states seceded and formed their own country. A year later the United States invaded and after the bloodiest war in our history conquered and annexed the South. It was all done at the president's orders. Congress never declared that war. It was completely illegal.

Sure, there is the matter of slavery that was mixed up in things at that time, but it is a dead issue. slavery is dead. You cannot buy and sell human beings anywhere on earth. slavery is a thing of the past, and good riddance.

I point out that all those places that had slavery a hundred years ago, and there were many, are rid of it now and without benefit of being conquered by the United States. Slavery had to go. No question. And now it is gone. No issue. The states still have the right to secede

All that is needed for a state to secede is to have a referendum to document the desire of the people and then have the duly constituted state government inform the federal government of the state's intention to secede and to offer to negotiate a settlement.

You see, there is this national debt. The seceding state will have to shoulder some portion of the burden of that debt. Exactly how much must be worked out.

For some states, it will be easier. Remember the South. There is the small matter of war damages. since the United States' war against the South was illegal, the southern states have the right to sue for reparations. The amount of damages plus interest will be far greater than than the whole of the national debt.

So it does not require unanimity to accomplish. Just a few states here and there need to declare their independence and sue for damages. The states that are left find themselves sharing a much larger debt among much fewer people. The debt is already insupportable. There will be nothing to do but disband.

What will be lost? For one thing, this great and aggressive power will have lost much of its punch. The United States now refers to a World village. "We now depend on a world economy," they say, as if losing it would be a bad thing, as if we were not better off some twenty or thirty years ago when international trade was miniscule. "It is a world village," they say, meaning that the sea is everybody's sea, the air is everybody's air and - get this

- that the oil is everybody's oil. No hoarding it just because it happens to be under your country. In the world village we all have rights to that oil.

A year ago I would have said this is madness. I would have said we need a United States to stand up to the threat of Russia, who is just like us only worse. But Russia is no longer a threat.

They are breaking up into independent republics, just like we can. No longer faced with such a terrible threat, we need not take painful and expensive precautions.

Break up the union, and what do you lose? A national debt, nuclear weapons, federal regulations and federal taxes. Which of those hurts to lose? None.

Certainly something will have to be done to make sure that the old and the poor are cared for. But that is true anyway. Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are already stretched to the limit, and we are in the enviable position of having a population that is loaded with middle aged productive people. Soon we will have a population loaded with old people. The present system won't work then anyway.

Certainly something must be done for the African Americans among us. There can be no just or lasting peace in America until the African has what he needs. He asked for education and he got bussing. He asked for justice and he got affirmative action. The black man is worse off than he was thirty years ago. That is what the federal government has done to him.

I say give him a land of his own. Not some deserted strip of desert like the Indian reservations or the Palestinian refugee camps or the South African homelands. Give him a fair share of the rich coastal land. Let him have his own country so he can live among people of his own.

Just where? I don't know. He can have this place. of course I would expect a place somewhat comparable among people of MY own.

The matter needs to be studied and approached thoughtfully. It will take a long time to get it right. Dividing the country up by states would only be a single step toward dividing by cultures. The Scotch Irish majority and Black minority are both widely distributed among southern states, for instance. But I say secession would be a bold start, a step in the right direction.

I say do it now.

Editor's note:

WILD SURMISE is an occasional newsletter on speculative matter.

If you have been following us long, you know by now that I, Edgar Poe Raven, your humble editor, am a pathological liar, mixing truth and falsehood remorselessly. This is in contrast with M, who always tells the truth and Booty, who will not intentionally mislead you but will sometimes say as true things he believes but cannot prove. old Moneybags, our esteemed benefactor just worries about his money, and Cooter the artist never talks.

Well a friend just cane back from Seattle with the news that in the pacific Northwest, there are Indians who take as their folk hero the raven. What's more, they say this raven is not so much creative as he is a trickster. Hmmm.

It is fall here, and as with every fall the miracle off the sea wall is coming back. As you know, the coast of Florida has hundreds, maybe thousands of miles of canals with little islands surrounded by sea walls and surmounted by little suburbanite homes. The canals, alas, are pretty much barren of life.

Old Moneybags lives in a house on a hill that once overlooked Clearwater Bay. After they built Bellair causeway, the hill overlooked something called Clearwater Harbor. Then they went into the harbor and started building islands, so the hill now overlooks something that looks a lot like a canal. After every hurricane Moneybags goes out to the islands and thanks the people there for putting their homes and their families and their bodies between him and the storm.

A few years ago, old Moneybags got to thinking that the spring in his back yard was undermining the sea wall, and that replacing the sea wall would be expensive. So he had the spring water collected and run into a little collecting pond, whence it runs down a little stream, over the wall and into the sea. And every year beautiful green things grow and little animals come. It is a little paradise, contrasting with the bare mud flats around, even contrasting with places where there is no sea wall.

You would think that scientists would be eager to rush in, to learn the secret and to turn the thousands of miles of Florida canal into a water wonderland. But not one has been even willing to go look. Such is the narrow view produced by the pressures of modern life.

Beating the Spear into the Pruning Hook

or At Least Throwing It Away

In light of recent changes in Russia, it looks like we are not going to be needing nuclear weapons at all. As long as we had need of them, it seemed rational to test them, to stay proficient in building, using and assessing them. Calls for a total ban in tests seemed like the thin edge or a wedge for getting rid of them altogether, something we hesitated to do as long as there was a bigger arsenal aimed at us.

But times are changing. It really doesn't look like Russia is a threat to us. In that case, I say ditch the ugly bombs.

George, our Yankee correspondent, writes that in 1963, 116 nations agreed not to test nuclear weapons anywhere but underground. These nations are to meet on January 7, 1991. There is a hope that they will agree then to abandon all nuclear explosions. 127 of these nations (yes, I don't follow Yankee arithmetic either, but this is important) say they will vote to end nuclear explosions. Only the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States have veto power. The Soviet Union supports the ban. The United Kingdom will vote with the United States. The United States intends to veto the ban because 1) if you are going to stay current with these things, you have to work with them 2) we still need the weapons 3) a ban would be meaningless because test could be done in secret.

George (our correspondent, not the president) doesn't agree. He says somebody who ought to know says tests are no longer needed. I say I don't much care, although I certainly wouldn't want the fire truck coming to put my burning house out to be driven by someone who had never driven before.

George says we have so many weapons we don't need to test them. That leaves me cold again, but I still say we don't need the weapons at all.

George says seismic testing will record all nuclear explosions. agree. I also think they will record air-fuel explosions, which can be just as powerful. So who needs the nukes anyway?

It looks like the US may veto the ban. That would be a pity.

Because something called the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty will lapse in 1995. That goes back to 1969, when 62 nations agreed not to share or accept nuclear weapons; 140 nations have now signed. At this time, the US, USSR, UK, china, and France have weapons. Pakistan, India, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Israel and Iraq may have or may soon have such weapons. One reason we seem almost ready to start a war with Iraq is that we think they may soon get nuclear weapons. Obviously somebody takes this sort of thing seriously.

MILD SURPRISE

Every child should have a bicycle Christmas. I fear there are those who never have a Christmas. I fear there are those who have Christmas but never a Christmas bicycle. After all, there are parts of the world where a bicycle isn't much use around Christmas. The children there must have to make do with ponies. But I had a bicycle Christmas, and whatever fate befalls me, they can never take that away.

It was after the Winter of the Spilt Milk. I am sure of that. Father, as was his custom had got up early that winter morning and built a roarinq fire of three logs and kindling. He always built a frugal but elegant fire. In order for a fire to work, there must be a mystery about it, there must be some little ingle nook here the heat can snuggle in and hide. It takes three logs to complete the mystery. Any more is an extravagance.

The morning had been cold. Winters are always colder when one was young. The morning air bit the ears and nose and choked up the throat, and the shoes made a more scratchy than usual sound on the concrete front steps. I had been sent to bring in the milk.

Now a family of active parents and three little boys goes through a lot of milk. And the milk had to be got in early, no matter that the front porch was colder than the refrigerator. since there were many quart bottles, I was under maternal instructions to brinq them in an old lathe basket.

I set the basket down and looked at it. One corner had rotted through. But if I put the bottles in the other end, it should be all right. Or at least I would have obeyed orders, which was the important thing.

I lifted the bottles into the basket. Something in me cringed at the sight of the pristine white virginal 'nilk bottles being smudged by the dirty old basket. I mean I liked the old basket too, it carried memories of bygone shopping expeditions and bustles of carrot top sticking up beside the end of egg carton. But somehow the basket didn't seem to be right for milk.

I laid hold of the handle and heaved. Much to my gratification the end of the basket with the bottles sagged down and the bottles didn't run over and slide out the hole. It was a heavy load for the small child I was. I could feel the pain from the inside of the knuckles all the way up to the bump behind my ear. But the basket came up, and I started into the house.

Crossing the front room, I gazed longingly at the merry tire. Maybe even I diverted my steps to pass a little closer to the fire, then bent my head toward the kitchen.

That's when I felt the bottom go out of the basket. The beautiful cold white bottles rushed toward the floor. Diving among them, I managed to get my arms around one almost before it hit. When Mother came out of the kitchen to inspect the catastrophe, I was on my knees still hugging the bottle. .11 saved one,~ I announced proudly.

But the bicycle Christmas was the next year, or the next or the next. According to Older Brother, who was a faithful helper of Santa, the bicycle had to be dismantled and rebuilt on Christmas eve. He described with relish Father working passionately away and the ball bearings spewed all over the carpet.

But Christmas morning it was there. A plain blue frame with silver fenders. No chain guard. No light or horn or bell. One speed. A good old American one speed heavyweight balloon tire bicycle. And, praises be, training wheels.

They say the most efficient transportation in the world is a boy on a bicycle. Far behind comes a distance runner at an easy lope. Then come the remora swiiraning, the albatross soaring. At the inefficient end of the scale are the mouse and the jet fighter.

We had our moments, I and that bicycle. How many times I caught a pants cuff in the chain when I did not, as taught by Older Brother, roll the pants leg up. How many times I tore her down, cleaned the coaster brake in kerosine and then repacked it in heavy oil. Row many times the chain came off a sprocket and I landed with my crotch on the horizontal bar.

And how I worked to learn how to ride without training wheels before Younger Brother, with his cat like reflexes, should learn to ride HIS bicycle without training wheels. How many falls. How many torn and bloody knees. How much sand and pebbles dug out of wounds with little fingernails.

And yes we had adventures. With that bicycle I could keep up with the others on long expeditions to Payne's Prairie and the Devil's Millhopper. I could pedal off to school or of an afternoon cycle down to the school yard and join in a pick up game of softball.

One day, while at softball, I watched a high fly ball land among the bicycles we had heaped at the far end of the field. The boy chasing the fly stopped when he got to the machines and then he picked his way in carefully to retrieve the ball. At the end of the inning he told me, "The ball hit your bicycle.

I shrugged. I had come to think of my bicycle as part of myself, indestructible, immortal, slow but infinitely enduring. No softball could touch it or me. I didn't hurt, so the bicycle couldn't be hurt.

When I went to leave, however, the front wheel would not turn. Looking down at it, I could see that the right strut holding the front fender steady had been bent. The strut had been pushed between the spokes. I reached down and pulled the strut back out with my right hand, and thought no more about it.

As the years rolled away, styles change. The three speed English bicycle was introduced. Light. Fast. Delicate. It looked kind of sissified to me. But the parents concluded that my old blue bicycle was too small for me and got me a new one.

The new bicycle was a red three speed middle weight. I had it for years. Bent the rims many times by smashing over curbs. Fussed with the brakes, which refused to lock up like a good coaster brake would. Had many a stirring time with that bike too. Then one day when I was at college, Father decided to save money by taking that excellent (and not so very sissified) bicycle to the university.

He told me later that he had been so alarmed by the speed and heedlessness of the traffic he went through that he sold the bicyle to be rid of the temptation of using it again.

No harm in that. The bicycle had served its term. It was sold for a good reason, even if that reason was to keep Father happy.

But what happened to my real bicycle? My first one? Somehow one day it was gone. I had no need of it. I had the glorious memories. I was only curious. Where do faithful old bicycles go when one gets a new one?

Years later, I moved into an apartment in Orlando. After a few months getting settled at work I started to decorate the place. It was Christmas season again. I was at the mall packed with shoppers and my fell upon a print of two young women with a bicycle. They had evidently spent the day out roaming, had picked some flowers and were now saying good-bye in the cool of the evening.

I will admit it. I like girls. I like pictures of girls. I liked the picture because of the girls. I bought it and took it home and put it on the wall.

I admired the girls, wondering how one met such wonderful creatures, envying the bike that one of the girls straddled and the other girl touched. The print was generally of a blue cast, and the bicycle was blue, too, with silver fenders.

I thought, "It's the very same model as one I used to have. Same shape of handlebars and fenders. Same colors. Same single horizontal bar. No chain guard. Then the thought went through me like a bolt. I rushed up and inspected the picture closely. The right front fender strut was bent.

My bicycle had written home. And somewhere out there it had even made new friends.

M