Wilds6

WILD SURMISE

JULY 1986 # 6

AN ALMOST ANONYMOUS INFORMAL NOTE

The Seven Stories of Justice

"The Universe is not just .... babies starve and die without time to sin." Cox.

"The Universe is neither just nor unjust, being unbound by human concepts." Tower.

"If so, then the Universe is ... unbound by the human concept 'is,' and thus Tower's statement manifests the fallacy of self exclusion." King.

"Sometimes it is; sometimes it isn't." M.

There is an unstated assumption in the first statement above. That is that it is better to be alive than to be dead. More specifically, there is a distinct advantage (or disadvantage) in living long enough to be faced with at least one moral choice. Since a couple thousand of you have let that assumption go unchallenged for a half a year, there is probably something in it. There must also be a case for saying "Universes with a capital and meaning something more than the ordinary "universe." The ordinary universe has people, and people have ideas of justice and injustice, so the universe is both just and unjust. I take it that there is a general consensus that making moral decisions against the background of that greater Universe is a serious part of the business of life. We make moral decisions in various contexts. We will consider seven of them: personal, family, among friends, legal, national, international and cosmic. First, justice in the ordinary universe, starting with oneself.

Being fair to oneself is easy enough once one has made up ones mind to do so. For instance, the decision of whether or not to commit suicide has been played up from time to time as a very profound one. Shakespeare's Hamlet has a fine gloomy soliloquy about suicide starting out, "To be or not to be. n It sounds very important, but in the end all he has to say is that he finds life disagreeable and death frightening.

To put the question of suicide in a reasonable context, compare it with the decision of whether or not to eat pork pie. Thus: in the case of suicide and eating pork pie, is it a real question; will the world be a different place depending on the decision? Well, yes, in both cases. Is it a practical decision? Could one actually manage it? Again yes, most likely. Is it acceptable with regards to ones up bringing? Well, that depends on the up bringing in both cases. Would it be pleasant? Most likely no in one case, most likely yes in the other. Would it interfere with ones doing other things? Yes on the one hand, probably not on the other. Is it a good idea? Generally no on one hand, well not particularly bad on the other in most cases. Would it hurt ones loved ones? Ah, now the context is different.

Decisions one makes purely on the basis of ones own needs may be brain racking and nerve wrecking, but have no moral component. They aren't h_ decisions. These hard decisions come along only with regard to other people.

The first obvious context in which things can be just or unjust is with regard to ones loved ones. Love is the perception in another of what one regards is the very best in oneself. That being the case, suicide is sure to hurt ones loved ones, no matter what the cultural expectations. Arguable exceptions are extreme circumstances where the act of suicide might better be described as self sacrifice or choosing a less painful or degrading form of death. But even in such a case, it is going to be dreadfully painful to any who love the suicide. Love is not equivocal, not balanced. If I love you, I may not sense your flaws in just proportion to your virtues. Any injury to you or loss of you strikes me

with the uncounterpoised impact of portcullis and drawbridge falling together.

Under happier circumstances, love works very nicely if it is exchanged. If two love each other, they are quite content to exchange tokens without any nice balance being struck. In a relationship, one goes half way and then one giant step; in love one goes the whole way to the limits of ones strength. There is no expectation that strengths be equal. It is not unjust when they are not.

Love between a man and a woman is considered highly desirable. It is the only proper circumstance for the rearing of children. If there were strict adherence to the rule that there shall be no children where there is no love, I much doubt there would be an over population problem anywhere.

I would distinguish between two mental sets: there are love minded people and there are dominion minded people. In a dominion relationship, someone is in charge. Someone tells the other what to do, when and how. Dominion minded people are a vigorous crew. They are full of impressive remarks, like, "Love is a transitive verb." "There is active love; there is passive love." n Love is doing whatever it takes to express that love." Or even, "Love is doing whatever it takes to get that love."

The distinction between the mental set of love and the mental set of dominion is not confined to the human. The rooster will fight for what he wants, and he wants all the hens he can find. The peacock struts for what he wants. The male bower bird invests substantial time and energy building a little edifice of twigs and decorating it in hopes of luring the female. These are birds that will make no contribution to the raising of the young; the whole male effort is to have dominion over the female, from which time she does the rest of the work. The drab male mockingbird makes no such show, but he works as hard as the female. Among wild swans I cannot tell a male from a female at a glance; swans mate for life and share the work of life.

Birds are dominion minded or love minded depending on the species, not the individual or the tribe as among humans. The love minded resemble each other, are loyal and share their efforts. The dominion minded

male has plumage that contrasts with that of the female, vibrant, bold, iridescent, brow beating, swashbuckling, with colors you have not dreamed of. Unmistakable in its message, it says to all the world, this is a male. Yet I hold the song of the mockingbird to be beautiful beyond all the mating plumage of all the birds of paradise.

You can spot them, you know, the dominion minded. You can size up a couple at a hundred paces. Look for the contrast in hair and eye color. Look for the clean car. Look for the elegant clothes, again in contrasting styles. Look for one to be standing a little taller, looking a little worried, for the other to be slightly slumped, depressed, moving more slowly. There is a case of dominion. Someone is in charge, or thinks he is. Look for the woman to be expected to take on double duty as full time bread winner and full time home maker. Look for trouble somewhere down the road.

This is not to say that dominion is bad. WILD SURMISE readers presumably include a proportion of dominion minded. That should present no problem. Dominion minded folks are pretty tough and unlikely to take offence. It is only that dominion belongs to a different kind of relationship. It is a context of friendship, not of love.

Nor is it to say that couples who are not physically similar are not capable of sharing love. They may perceive in each other something other than their physical bodies, perhaps a common interest in music or social consciousness. In fact, the only thing I have ever seen that stood in the place of looks was a shared religious faith. Nor do I mean some vague religion of nature that one makes up as one goes along, but a proper institutionalized religion with a name, others who share it, and a regular defined time and place of practice, one they take very seriously and invest a substantial amount of time with. Even then, religion is better shared along with other things than the only link.

Parents and children love each other frequently if not invariably. It is no surprise they should since they resemble each other. M says that as a child he would complain of unfairness from time to time, arguing his case with niggling detail and a child's demand that all things function perfectly all the time. At such times, his father would lower his voice and say, "Try to keep your voice well modulated, son." When M had restated his case in an acceptably gentle and musical tone of voice, his father would say cheerfully, "Well, what do you expect, justice?" His message was, according to M, "You need not trouble yourself with nice attention to detail; you are surrounded by love. What is it that you want?"

Again, the distinction should be made between love and dominion. At first blush, it would seem that the parent has dominion over the child. It is the parent who establishes meal times and bed times, who is bigger, able to act independently, interacts with the world, has the money. A very young child takes as a matter of course that he has rights in a household. As he grows older, he may reflect that his rights are not so automatic as he thought, that he is very dependent. But upon maturing, he learns that he was never quite without rights. In this country, a parent may not starve or brutalize a child, may not molest the child or deprive the child of a chance at an education. It is not a special case for this society; it is a general rule that even a little baby has rights. The parents are required to provide.

There have been exceptions. I understand that in ancient Rome, a newborn was brought and placed at the feet of the father. If the father took the child up in his arms, the child became a member of the household. Otherwise, the child was taken out and exposed on a hillside. The bad part of this custom is it led to the death of a lot of little babies. The good side of it, I have never had clearly in mind.

In our society, an infant has the right to live as soon as he is recognized as an individual. A terrible consequence of our social diversity is that there is not complete agreement on when that moment is. I know of no one who would deny the right of a couple to refrain from intercourse if they do not want a child. Nor does anyone propose that any infant who needs only love, food and shelter in order to live a healthy full life should ever be deprived of them. Over the months in between, the value systems of good and decent people come into terrible conflict. One hears of violence, of bombings and arson directed at abortion clinics. Such criminal acts are utterly reprehensible, and easy to condemn. But it seems to me that there is no way to say of these felons that they have brought violence into the debate. An abortion, although legal, is violent whatever the reasons behind it, just as a fire bomb is. A hard question that a prudent person seeks never to have to deal with on a personal basis. On a general basis, abortions were being done in large numbers in this country long before they were legal. It would be a hard thing to ask people to go back to those bleak and dangerous days.

Another right the child has is the right to both parents. In our society, for this reason, parents are expected to stay together. Although this expectation is cut off with tragic regularity, it is still the norm, still the model. We are expected to be swans, not peacocks, to mate for life. To act like swans, we should think like swans.

Easy enough to encourage marriage on the basis of love rather than dominion. It is called making a "good match," and it has been known about for ages. The problem is what to do with a marriage already made on the basis of dominance, one in which there are already children, one in which there is trouble and by the very structure of the relationship, there is a tendency for it to fall apart. To turn such a relationship into a match, obviously, somebody has to change.

At first this should seem little problem. It is the dominant member that must change. After all, it is the dominant member who has reserved the right of initiative. It is the dominant member who has the faith in action. It is he who says things like, "Love is a transitive verb" and who believes them, who (if anybody can) can make them stick. It is the dominant member who must undertake to change language, clothing, manner, religion, friends, tastes and whatever it takes. It must be he, for there is nobody else. For the other partner to change is only to emphasize the very pattern of dominion that is the threat.

There are problems with this. First, people don't adapt well. People die. Statistics on sudden death indicate that if you prevent heart attacks, say by giving a drug called cholestyramine, which lowers blood cholesterol, you will not change the death rate. For every heart attack you prevent, somebody dies of suicide or an automobile accident. Cholestyramine does not cause depression or alter driving reflexes. It simply seems that under certain circumstances, mostly major stress resulting from the kind of major change we are talking about, the body dies. If one way is not open, another is found. In a totally different study, it was found that Vietnam veterans down to this very day have a higher death rate than their otherwise identical age matched contemporaries. The increase in death rate that has been documented has been entirely due to suicides and automobile accidents. Asking people to change is tampering with their very survival.

A second problem with asking the dominant member of a couple to change is that he may already have those who actually love him, even if not his spouse. In undertaking a major change in his style and value system, he may, of necessity, lose their love and they his. He will no longer be the same person, and what was lovable about him may have ceased to exist. They may lose each other. Perhaps not, of course, but that is the order of magnitude of the effort involved. It is the kind of sacrifice he must be prepared to make, even, if in the end, events do not demand it.

Less grievous is the fact that the breadwinning member of a mismatched pair faces a handicap in making a living out in the big world. Don't kid yourself that he does not. Business, unless you are a Pict making his living by your own sweat on your own plot of ground, is a social undertaking. Announcing oneself as dominion minded is a hostile gesture with consequences hard to overcome. Not that it's that big a problem, the dominion minded being such a tough lot.

So there is no good way out. It seems a situation that a prudent person would avoid.

Excluding situations that involve the needs, and thus rights, of children, dominion is a perfectly acceptable relationship between friends. So are puns, practical jokes, midnight telephone calls, unrequested advice, unsecured loans and general obnoxiousness. Far better avoided, of course, but quite valid ways of getting along. The test of friendship is, of course, option. If both parties are free at any time to become strangers, then there is no general need for justice in a friendship except as demanded by those involved. Although friendship spans perhaps the most various and intriguing of the kinds of human context, it is not one that involves difficult questions of justice. Once the friendship breaks up, of course, there are often very knotty problems disentangling. But such problems are problems of the relationships of strangers.

Somewhere closer than the stranger but more distant than the friend lies the tribe.

Since the tribe has no legal status, thus being unable to adapt quickly to changing situations, and since the tribe has no individual identity, most would simply say that the tribe does not exist, has no just sway over, commands no loyalty from, the individual. For day to day purposes, it is bunk at best and satanic at worst.

But there is such a thing as tribal loyalty. I have heard of Latin groups looking forward eagerly to a Latin president of the United States. I have heard of Hungarian

Americans working for freedom in their "home" countries. Similar actions are not out of the national interest of the United States, but since they are not specifically carried out in the best interest of the United States, they are examples of the tribal interest coming a bit ahead of the national.

The very conservative nature of tribal loyalty is its strength. People do not adapt well. Friends come and go quickly, and nations may come and go more quickly still. But the tribe lives on as long as there is a substantial number in it. Its relative rigidity is more human in its scale than most objectively documented human institutions, because if they do not die for cause, humans may live a long long time and love the things they knew long long ago.

They say that the Jewish population outside Israel intermarries at a rate of 40% and has children at a rate of 1.5 per family, and that means that the number will drop from 9.5 million now to about 6 million in forty years. One assumes that by then the rate of fall will increase, since finding a match will be that much harder.

Well it just doesn't seem right. These were people who only forty odd years ago were dying at a horrendous rate because of their tribal loyalty. I have never heard of an evangelist in Hitler's Germany converting large numbers of Jews on the principle that once they were Christians, they would no longer be Jews and thus would be safe. I don't know if it would have worked. Had it been tried, we should have heard about it. But it would have been inconceivable. The apartness, the specialness of those people meant too much to them to toss about for convenience or even safety.

Of course, the overwhelming bulk of the not

ness is the murders that were occurring back then. But there seems to be a residual not

ness in the present. Hitler had two dreams, one of uniting Germany and the other of wiping out Jews. The unification of Germany, was probably a bad idea in that Germany has always consisted of many tribes. Except for the making of money and the waging of wars, Bavaria and Prussia might better seek their goals along their separate ways. It wasn't all that bad an idea. Virtuous people might approve. But that dream is, for the foreseeable future, hopeless. East Germany is dominated by Russia and West Germany is part of the Western World. Until the superpowers contrive to settle their differences, no power on earth can unite Germany.

The other, the evil dream seems to be coming true of its own, coming true just because not enough people really care. Nor is it an outrage only against the ghosts of the past, but against the hopes of the future. How much harder will it be for the children to find love, if that means finding someone whose background is a reasonable match for their own. It's already hard enough. Across the board, about half of marriages in the United States end in divorce.

Perhaps it is as simple as this. It is unjust for a person to leave his tribe, and it is unjust to force a person to remain with his tribe.

Force is the monopoly of government. (In the United States, federal and state governments use force independently, if not in actual competition.) Within a nation, the laws between strangers are divided into the criminal code and the civil code. A crime against the state is a crime so vile that the state cannot overlook it. Like mass murder or driving without a seat belt. (That last seems maybe not quite so vile as some.) When a crime is committed, the state undertakes to hunt down the criminal and bring him to justice. The first step is to determine the facts.

From time out of mind, certainly as far back as Sumer, some courts had the problem of deciding what the truth was. The judge not only conducted the trial, he actually investigated. According to M's wise older brother, there is a story of a judge in the ancient world who decided a case in which two men had made a verbal contract beneath a tree. One man now insisted on the fulfillment of the bargain, and the other denied there ever was a bargain. There was no witness but the tree, so the judge sent the plaintiff, the man who claimed there had been a contract, to the tree to ask the tree to come testify in his behalf. The man left, and presently the judge said to the other man, "Where is he? Could he have got to the tree and back yet?" To which the man said, "No." When the other returned and said the tree would not come, the judge announced that the tree had already been there. The defendant had known where the tree was. Therefore there was a tree. Therefore there was a contract.

Good trick. Pity you can only use it once every eight thousand years. But the tone is very different from that of an American court. Under the system of English Common Law, widely used in the United States, it is not up to the court to discover the truth. It is only up to the court to decide which of two contending sides has proved its case. This is even true in the criminal code. English Common Law assumes that the state is just another of the many power structures in society. It has a life of its own, its own needs and own purposes, and some of these purposes are not above suspicion. It is up to that state to prove a crime before the court. It is not up to the court to investigate.

In a civil case, the misdeed is against another person. If you do something for me, and I fail to pay you, you are quite at liberty to shrug it off. The state will not step in, has no vital interest at stake. If you do not shrug it off, you are not at liberty to come around and beat it out of me. You must take the case to court and prove there that I have failed in my duty. Civil law breaks down into contract law and tort law. Contract law has to do with the obligations between people when they make a contract. Tort law has to do with the obligations between people when there is no contract.

Once the facts are determined, there comes the question of applying a remedy. In some questions, this is easily done by demanding that one person give some money to another person. Sometimes the remedy is happier. A judge in New York City was faced with a man who had strung a rope between the towers of the World Trade Center and then gone out and done acrobatics many stories above the street. It was obviously against the law and had caused a big traffic jam. The sentence was to put on the same show in Central Park on a rope eight feet off the ground so everyone could get a good look at it.

Sometimes the remedy of money is awkward. How does one put a price on pain and suffering? Sometimes deciding on a remedy is horrendous, as in cases where the court imposes imprisonment or execution. There does not seem to be broad agreement on the purpose of imprisoning a person. It can be seen as a way of rehabilitating the person, getting him out of the circumstances in which he committed the crime and giving him a different start. It can be seen a way of punishing him, hurting him as he has hurt the state. It can be seen as a way of slowing him down, getting him away from society so that at least for a while society is safe from him. It can be seen as a deterrent, making it seem less attractive for the next person to try the same thing.

On the point of rehabilitation and on the point of deterrence, imprisonment seems to work very badly, and execution is even worse, according to those who keep track of such things. I have never seen the proof of this, but I have been assured repeatedly that it has been proved. So far as retribution goes, it seems odd that a power as big as the government really needs to hurt back every time it gets hurt. Maybe there is a need to prevent blood feuds in a society, and if enough people really thought the government was not taking proper steps against certain acts, they might be tempted to take things into their own hands. Whether that really happens, presumably, could be found out by whatever means they seem to have found out that deterrence doesn't work. I doubt anybody takes the prevention of feuds seriously in this day and age.

That leaves the matter of simply preventing the same person from doing the same thing again. In order to do this, there is no need to have anything as violent as a death penalty, nor is it vital that imprisonment be unpleasant. Instead of the death penalty, it might be possible to invent for the irredeemable some sort of permanent imprisonment.

If the purpose of imprisonment is only preventing further harm by the same person, it is not clear that alcohol or even drugs need to be withheld, depending on the circumstances. There was a time in the days of sail when sailors were forced into duty. Such men had to be treated at times as if they were prisoners. Part of the discipline involved a daily rum ration. It was thought that this made the ship run better for everybody. A rum ration for criminal prisoners, provided it did not produce violence, would not be inhumane. Yet it is not the custom.

So it is in the application of a remedy, particularly in criminal cases, that the law is hardest to understand.

The law at any one time is the combination of previous court decisions, of laws and of human wishes and understanding. It is like the palace of Arnheim, HA mass of semi

Gothic, semi Saracenic architecture, sustaining itself by miracle in mid air; glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, and pinnacles. n It is also, for all its anomalies, the most nearly rational of the various systems of justice that we deal with.

When things and people begin to cross national boundaries, questions of what is right and what is wrong become even more difficult. Ponder this one. The nations of the European common market have made the deal that they will not erect trade barriers against each other. In Germany, for centuries, there has been a law that nothing can go into beer except malted cereal, hops, water and yeast. Nothing else. Well in order to make a consistent brew in great quantities cheaply, it is often a good idea to do things like poison the yeast, inject carbon dioxide, add preservatives and coloring agents. Such beer cannot be sold in Germany. Now the ancient law is in conflict with modern trade agreement. There is not much disagreement that German beer is rather better than most beer, nor that competition with foreign giants will destroy a large number of small German breweries. But in all likelihood, it is the ancient law and a lot of little old breweries that will go under, because under the rules of the common market, the old law is an arbitrary trade barrier and will have to be repealed. It doesn't seem quite right, but there it is.

As an analogy, consider a coral reef in a tropical sea. The coral reef gives the sea its wine dark color, and if you descend into the water, the reef teems with life manifold in its forms. A few yards away from the reef, the bare sugary sand seems to support little life at all. The appearance is deceptive, for in part the sea above the barren sand supports the microscopic life that feeds the reef community and along with the sunlight disposes of the wastes. The reef community needs the empty wastes of the sea more than they need the reef. But the diversity of life on the reef is striking. Here it is that these strange fish can find shelter from predators. And here the predators hunt them. Without the reef, the reef predators would eat out their entire food supply and then perish. Competition is a fine thing, but there must be limits to it. Most species need a place to hide. Most forms have a vulnerable time or undefended side. National boundaries, like reefs and tribal boundaries, prevent the devastation of unrestricted competition, and so allow competition to continue.

Or consider this: I am a good cantaloupe picker and you have a field full of cantaloupes. I will pick your cantaloupes, and we will both make money. Also people who eat cantaloupes will be able to buy better ones cheaper. Everybody wins. But alas, I live in one country, and you live in another. Since we still each represent the others best opportunity, I come pick your cantaloupes as before. But that means someone in my country with a full field can't get his pickers so easily and workers in your country make do with less because they have to compete with me. Of course they will still be able to get cheaper cantaloupes.

It might be more complex. Suppose it isn't your cantaloupes I want to pick, but a farm like yours I want to start. Or a small business. I am still the best available, so it is in your interest to let me come. Whether that is a good idea depends partly on how desperate you are to have the kind of entrepreneur that can set up a small business and how desperate my country is for the same thing.

Such things happen. Part of the prosperity of California is no doubt due to a nice climate and hard working people. Some is no doubt due to a free and open attitude. But a lot of it is due to the availability of an enormous number of Mexican laborers who are willing to work illegally for less than workers have established as their right in the rest of the United States. Slave labor, it's called. It made Sumer great, it made Rome great, it destroyed them.

Worse, Mexico itself is beginning to look ever more brittle, ever more of a political problem. Small wonder, if the talent who should have been their middle management, their junior bureaucrats, their small business men have been picking cantaloupes in California. If you forever drain off the best, what you are left with is not as good as what you started with.

This is without considering the ultimate damage done by changes in the culture of the receiving country nor the difficulty for children growing up in a society in which it is ever more difficult to find a proper mate because of the deterioration of the societies ability to form a consensus. New ideas are not being introduced into the world, only people moved around so that they associate with fewer and fewer people who share their own ideas to an acceptable degree.

Migration offers another problem. Five hundred years ago, the population of Britain and the population of North America were reasonably stable over a long term. In Britain, this had been achieved by dividing the land into little arable plots and having the custom that no one could get married until he could afford to, until he had his own little plot of ground. People waited regularly into their thirties, and many never married at all, but by and large they lived in peace with their neighbors while they waited for a chance. In North America, the land was left just about wild. The population was controlled by cultural mechanisms that included a large investment in tribal warfare. The situation was stable until English speaking people began to come to North America in large numbers. Faced with an incredible abundance of good land, the Scotch Irish began to reproduce at an enormous rate. The situation was inherently unstable. The American Indian did not profit by the immigration of a peaceful, industrious, creative and generally tolerant race.

Different population densities are like any other form of diversity. If populations move unrestrictedly, there will be only one population density in the end: the densest.

When one starts to watch countries dealing with each other, the moral landscape is often harsh. To be sure, there are times of generosity. Nations help each other as good neighbors should. I have seen pictures from the Netherlands taken after a storm had breached the dikes. One picture was of a French helicopter in the teeth of the storm scouring a dike for survivors. Another was an enormous American military transport unloading emergency supplies. Sometimes, the attempt to help is ill conceived. But mostly intentions are good and resources are available.

Mostly it is people who deal in international trade across national borders, but occasionally, countries themselves do the bargaining. In some countries, the government and the big business interests act in cooperation. Whatever the combination, the rules that apply are generally the rules of good trade, such that it is possible for a private American firm to do business with the Russian government without much of a change in business routines.

People living under separate regimes can deal effectively with subtle problems. There have been times when nomadic tribes have shared land. One tribe would have access to the land at a certain time of year, and another would graze it at another time. Even though the groups were autonomous, they could deal with each other as business partners, dividing up the resources fairly, which is to say, in the same way as it had always been done before.

When nations go to war, things get a lot less reasonable. Someone once likened an energy crisis and the response it called for as, "The moral equivalent of war." Well, war is a moral obscenity. It thrusts people into the making of choices that no one should have to make. Good, well disposed people harm good, well disposed people in the process; ill disposed people do things they should be ashamed of. War is an attempt to impose will through force, but those exerting that force may not have a very clear idea what that will is. Sometimes, nobody seems to have a clear idea. Another situation prudent people avoid.

Do you remember the Vietnam War? Do you remember the unlit despair of those days, when young people were shot by police? When the spectre of revolution was not far from peoples minds? When we buried our dead by night for fear of sniper fire? Through

it all, the American soldier kept to his ranks, maintained his discipline. Despite the lack of support from the people for what the Presence doesn't seem offended, it just intimates that perhaps on the occasion in question you didn't give it much choice.

"You didn't have to say anything," you say, your tone bitter enough to clean bacon grease out of a drain. "You approached me with comforting words. I told you what I thought, and you said it was going to be all right in spite of every appearance."

This time the Presence speaks as a voice. Despite your woebegone state of mind, the voice is cheerful, understated, patient, almost teasing. It is like the voice of a parent who finds that his child, who has a legitimate complaint however gracelessly he is making it, is disposed to talk it over rather than holding his breath until he faints or sobbing until he vomits. The parent may well have patience. Talking beats listening to another tantrum.

The voice says, "I don't suppose you would take into consideration the fact that without that comfort, you would not have survived?"

"No."

"I didn't think so."

"The fact that I am still alive is precisely the point. If you had not lied to me, I would not have survived it. I survived it trusting that things would be all right and it wouldn't be like it is right now, but it is like it is."

Perhaps by this time, you have noticed a softness in the air. Perhaps the shabby tree you have slumped against seems a little more graceful. The ground is softer and grassier. You pass it off as a trick of your body chemistry. There is a pause while the Presence waits for you to get to the point. You do. Heedlessly.

"You know, I really don't want to have anything to do with you. As far as spending all eternity with you, forget it. I'd rather spend it somewhere else. After this, I can't have any respect for you at all. I don't want to see you, don't want to talk to you, don't want to think about you."

This time, the voice is different. There is no shred of mockery, no shred of indulgence, no shred of patience although still neither haste nor anger. The pitch is inaudibly low, the subsonic buffeting of the wind. "And just what kind of God would you follow?"

Call right," you say. "Fair question. I'd rather have a God that would make a happy world. A world in which everyone was happy all the time. And everyone was good. There would be no fear, no pain, no pointless loss. Everyone would live a nice long time and die gently, painlessly and with dignity. People would love each other. When anyone fell in love, either it would be returned or he would recover from it. No one would watch anyone throw themselves away because no one would throw themselves away, because people would understand and care about themselves. And each other. It would be a world of peace, joy and trust. I think people would laugh more, too."

The voice returns to its cheerful, prodding, slightly ironic tone.

"That sounds like a nice world. Why don't you make one like that?"

"Who, what, me? I can't make a world."

"You could do it. You could write a book, or a bunch of short stories. You could make drawings or paintings. There are a lot of ways you could make a world. You could do it just by talking about your own world that way. Create such a world by implication in your speech and actions."

"Write a novel in which there is no unhappiness, no pain, no suffering, no craving, no hurt? That's stupid."

"Why?"

"Well, it would be pointless. It would be shallow. It would be trivial. Important things deal with real issues."

"Hmmm. You know I've always thought there was a lot of gloom and unhappiness in the things you write. Do you write about that sort of thing for amusement, or to make yourself feel important?."

"All right. All right. I take your point. If I'm not interested in making a pain free world, why should you."

"I still think you might..."

"Look, all I really want is a God who would tell me the truth.."

"And you'd listen?"

"It shouldn't be all that hard to listen. Suppose a person is willing to listen and do what he thinks is right. Do what he's told is right. Why shouldn't it be all right for him?"

"Well, there are decisions of other people. Many things that look like blind chance are other people's decisions. Some are not, of course."

"Well what about that? Why should anyone suffer for any reason except someones use of free will?"

"You would not take much comfort in the thought that every ill that befell you was someones fault."

"But a lot of our suffering is brought on by our own stupidity and pig headedness.."

"Yes."

"Well, then, why can't I decide not to be stupid and pig headed? Why not have a God who gave useful guidance? Who'd tell you in no uncertain terms what was right, who'd steer you in the right direction."

"The relationship such a God would have with you would be one of dominion rather than love."

"All right." By this time, you have mentally screamed yourself hoarse. "So life would become trivial again. Cringing along waiting to be thumped again by the Divine Fist at the first independent move. Much more interesting getting thumped for no apparent reason at all. n Now with a hoarse whimper, which is quite a trick when you are just thinking it. "But at least you might have given a guy a warning. Might have pointed out that this kind of thing happens."

"You've read Jonah. And Judges chapter 11. And you've certainly read Judges chapter ."

Well, in Jonah, &oaf declares that He is going to destroy the great city of Nineveh, and, after some hesitation, Jonah announces the coming destruction. In the event, God changes His mind. In Judges 11, Jephthah promises God that if God will let him slaughter the children of Ammon, Jephthah will make a burnt sacrifice of whatever comes out the door of his own house when he returns. In the event, and not surprisingly, it is his daughter who does so. What's worse, Jephthah keeps his promise. And in Judges 20, a brutal crime has led to war between the tribe of Benjamin and the rest of Israel. Each day the children of Israel cry before the Lord, '!Shall I go up again to battle against my brother Benjamin." And the Lord says, "Go up against them." The episode includes family injustice, tribal injustice, legal injustice, national injustice and cosmic injustice all at once. This kind of thing really does happen. Talking to God is not safe.

"All right," you whisper. "Point taken. Warning made. But why? Why? Why?"

"If it were not so, if you could always have an answer, you would never have to make a choice. You would never need make a moral decision as long as you lived."

The ground has become hard and cold. The tree bites into your back. You uncoil stiffly and make your way back toward the ordinary pathways of your life.

You still have to decide to live, of course. And you will think about that very hard. But in the end, it is no more profound a question than whether to eat pork pie.

Don't forget the onions.

Booty

Editor's note:

Wild Surmise is an occasional newsletter on speculative matter. Next month, Booty will talk about cars, and the following month on peace. If you want to add yourself or anyone else to the mailing list, just drop us a note. It's still free. If you want off the list, just let us know. Many thanks to all of you for helping to keep us anonymous. And warmest thanks for the generous contributions some of you have sent.

The other day there was a great pounding on the front door of Moneybags' big house on the cliff over the sea. I went out to see what was up. There, mounted on a white horse with bloodshot eyes was a tall fellow in white armor, pounding the door with the butt of his white lance. He had a white shield and a white cloak with a gold border and a gold plume on his white helmet.

"What are you looking for?" I asked. "The almost mythical Booty, he of the tenuous ideas, or the near legendary M, he of the dubious adventures?"

"None," he bellowed, "But the fabulous Wild Surmise Official Laboratory Assistant, she of the unutterable beauty!"

While I went to look for her, M came up soundlessly, took the fellow's helmet, turned it inside out and handed it back to him. When we got back, M was alone except for a steaming pile of something where the horse had been standing.

"Where'd he go, M?"

"Dunno. I just offered to straighten his collar and he left."

It might have been worse. Booty might have gone up and tried to explain something to him.

Last minute note:

Some months from now, Booty thinks he may do an article on cosmology. If you are interested in such things, the July, 1986 Scientific American has on page 38 an article "Very Large Structures in the Universe" by Jack 0. Burns. It is current, authoritative, and very well written. Besides introducing data about superclusters, that is strings of galaxy clusters, he reviews current thinking in cosmology in a very compact and lucid way. If you want to learn about current main stream scientific thinking about the universe, this is your chance. If you already have an interest in such things, you should enjoy it all the more. We highly recommend this article on its own merits. And if you think you may still be reading WILD SURMISE around the end of the year, this would be very good as something solid to have in mind before watching Booty take off and run.

MILD SURPRISE

In the end, it was only Nick gathering firewood for breakfast, and we went on down the river to the end, reached the Allagash, shot the foaming McGargle Rocks, probed the Allagash Falls, camped by night beneath limber pines and watched the moon drift over along the wild river and gleam on the silvery bottom of the canoe.

In the beginning, there was shopping to do. John, who had come up with the idea of a canoe trip in the first place, and I trekked down to the Calumet market and looked for the kind of supplies we would need. Roxbury is not exactly the jumping off place for many back woods expeditions, but we did our best, trying to balance good food against light weight and imperishability against few tin cans and little glass. When it came to sugar, I noticed that a five pound sack was a much better value than a one pound sack, so I picked up the five pound sack. It seemed like a lot of sugar, and the only use I could think of for it was to sprinkle into our tea of evenings; maybe we could pour out a few ounces to take along. But when Nick looked over our choices, he announced that the sugar would be solid gold and we should take it all. Days later, I overheard the others whispering about our dwindling supplies and suggested we could just eat the sugar. It turned out that it was the sugar they were worried about. Mixed with river water and Kool

Aid, it had been washed down our throats in many and many a welcome quart.

We loaded up in Nick's tiny white sports car and John's tan Oldsmobile convertible, an ancient monster with the general dimensions of an aircraft carrier. There was no way the aluminum canoe would go on the sports car, so we put down the top of the Oldsmobile and lashed the canoe over the windshield and trunk. That meant making the whole journey with the top down, but no problem there.

We arrived late one day at the lake side, which was to be the top of the trip. While the others stashed the canoe behind some bushes, I stood looking out at the sullen, still grey water. I didn't feel good. The lake was too quiet, too cold. I just couldn't see how we were going to be able to force passage from there to our pulling out place so many miles below. The others did not confess if they shared my mood, and soon we put off to drop one of the cars down below. Night closed as we drove through deep woods back toward the highway. Somebody recalled, unnecessarily I thought, the story of how a car in a similarly secluded place had been charged by a moose. The driver, not hearing the moose's challenge, knew nothing until the enormous animal came tearing out of the woods and hit the side of the car.

We drove through the night until we were close to the town where we were to leave the car. Instead, we reached a town that on the map was on the far side. We pulled the cars together for a quick conference, decided we had missed it and started back. We reached another landmark that told us we had passed the town again. I think we went back and forth a couple more times before giving it up and deciding to try again in the morning. We rolled out our sleeping bags in a field.

Perhaps the others had sensed my jitters, because they casually gave me the place in the middle. On one side was Nick, who was so big and hairy that people who got mad at him used to threaten to turn him into a rug. On the other was John, more compact, if anything more heavily muscled in proportion to his height. Intense. Clear eyed. Tireless. What matter if the inky dark beyond was playing tricks with time and space, the nearest few yards was crowded with friends.

In the morning, I awoke to find a metal tapering thing against the clear dawn sky. It was right over my head. I rolled over to check. Yes, it was a flagpole. The base wasn't three feet from the top of my sleeping bag. We had camped out in the court house square of the town we were looking for.

Getting dressed and breaking camp with as much dignity as we could, the town coming to life about us, we drove back to the lake. As we pulled the little boat out of the bushes and started to load it, a local came up to chat. I had the feeling he was the self appointed guardian of the boat, and wanted to make sure it was still in the right hands.

"Where you boys goings"

"Down the Allagash."

"This ain't the Allagash."

"We’re going to take the Musquacook River."

"This is the Musquacook. It's a lake."

"Our canoeing guide says there's a river."

"Water's mighty low this time of year."

"We figure the rapids won't be so high."

"Well, no, they won't, will they. Well you can always come back. You could fish here in the lake."

"Upstream?"

He decided that we were incorrigible and wished us good luck and good cheer, said open water might always be around the next bend, and tactfully declined to mention that we were three men and two canoes less than the minimum for a much less ambitious trip. We set out.

The glide across the lake was steady and gentle. In less than an hour we reached the place where the Musquacook river wasn't. At the pointed indicated by the book, we nosed up onto a thin spit of sand backed by a pile of driftwood. Somewhere the gurgle of water indicated that a trickle was finding its way through. Scrambling up onto the pile, the top of which must have been about ten feet above the level of the lake, we looked down on the Upper Horserace Rapids. The canoeing guide rated it as expert level and described how it just might be possible to run it. We were evidently going to have to drag the boat down it.

Dragging the canoe over the dried logjam was fairly easy, but the dry river bed was a mass of tumbled boulders with a little moisture deep down among them. It looked more like an old landslide than a river. We did it two feet at a time.

One, two, three, heave. Reposition feet. Get a hold again. One, two, three, heave. Reposition feet. For some hundreds of yards, we went down the rapids. Then it got worse, because the river bed leveled out and we lost the assistance of gravity.

By twilight, we had reached the Lower Horserace Rapids. The guide book spoke dolefully of the difficulty rescuing a spilled boat. A single glance up the steep boulder

strewn slope between marshy banks clad in impenetrable forest confirmed the impression. During the spring thaw, the Horserace Rapids must be awesome. In August, the scene was awesome in a different way.

The steady rhythm and exertion of moving the boat down the river bed had restored my sense of assurance. Here we were in the middle of the worst of it, and we were still alive. It was just a matter of grabbing the boat and pulling enough times. John, however, was feeling down. The progress we had made was not enough according to the map, not by a long shot. Food would run out. Someone might get hurt. Nick and I insisted that these were things that might happen, but which hadn't happened yet. I thought I knew how he felt. I'd felt the same way the night before.

It came down to where we would be able to spend the night. There I thought I could help. The woods were, indeed, thick and the ground moist, but by Florida standards it was a park. For one thing, you could actually see the ground. For another, there weren't a lot of snakes. And most delightful, you could force your way through it without being cut to pieces by thorns.

I undertook making a shelter. First, I forced a way into the woods several yards from the rocky river bed. Next I uprooted enough small trees and bushes to clear a campsite. Green branches in a thick mat would keep us off the moist ground. Then it was just a matter of putting up some long sticks covered with branches for a hut and laying the fire. We sat up late working out a strategy for the days ahead. That night it was John's turn to roll his sleeping bag out in the middle.

It takes but a night's sleep to turn a camp from a strange place to a friendly place. By the time we pushed off after breakfast, John's natural good humor had returned. Had we had enough water to float a boat, things could hardly have been better.

Since we didn't have enough water, we decided to carry. We could make much better time jumping from boulder to boulder as if they were stepping stones. But the technique of using stepping stones requires a combination of balance, judgment, timing instinct and planning that no two people optimize the same way. You just can't have two people at opposite ends of a metal white water canoe hopping over stepping stones in synchrony. Nick undertook to carry the canoe. He lashed paddles across the thwarts, padded them with a tee shirt and lifted the thing to his shoulders. I gave him what assistance I could, pushing branches out of the way with a fishing pole John had optimistically brought along. But Nick insisted that none but he touch the canoe.

Sometimes that day there was enough water to support some of the weight of the canoe, and we would load it up and drag it. Once, while we were dragging, we noticed with consternation that the water was getting up to our crotches and was too deep for convenient dragging. After a few moments confusion, we realized we could sit in the canoe and paddle it.

Once, as we rounded a bend, John made a sound with his throat that was more a swallow than a word. There ahead of us in the rocky river bed was a moose, great palmed antlers and all. We looked at the moose. The moose looked at us. Big. For several moments we all exchanged looks. At last the animal, picking his way easily through rocks that were such a problem for us, moved off with majestic silence and vanished into the woods.

Once we dragged the canoe past a tiny inlet in which two ducks had hidden. As we passed, they bolted, taking off low over the water. The first duck cleared the bow by inches. The second duck did not gain altitude fast enough and flew straight into the side of the canoe. He flopped back into the water and sank. While we boggled, the duck swam under the canoe, came up on the other side, took off, joined his fellow, and the last we saw they were flying low over the rocks in long sweeps far down the river."

Once a float plane came rumbling down the course of the river low enough to get a good look at us. We waved in token that all was well. He dipped his wings and went back the way he had come.

That night, we found a dry sandy bank well above the river bed. Someone had camped there before, and we found an old tarpaulin we made shift for a tent. Although we had dragged the canoe for many a mile, it had been carried for many a long mile and Nick was exhausted. His mood became gloomy.

As we sat around and talked by the orange firelight, Nick spoke of bears. How dangerous they were. How unpredictable. In this wild country we might be attacked by bears at any time.

John and I pointed out that we weren't being attacked by bears just at the moment, so we might as well not worry about it. That night, of course, it was time to put Nick in the middle. John and I reckoned that his melancholy mood would pass with a night's sleep, as ours had.

The next morning, when John woke up, he heard a crashing sound in the woods and the sound of wood breaking. He sat up suddenly and saw a vast shaggy form coming through the forest tearing off branches as it moved. "Bear," he thought. "Bear." He reached over and started pounding on Nick's sleeping bag.

For a moment, it must have seemed that Nick had already been eaten, because the sleeping bag was empty.