John C. Wright's Blog, page 127

Preventing Caesar-Worship and the Madnesses of Crowds

A reader with the iatric yet tumultuous name of Doc Rampage asks:

It is an old observation that when people are deprived of true religion, they will construct a false one, but why would the false religion be one that is so obviously and blatantly false? Why worship a mere man? I am starting to see how emperors and pharaohs were able to take on the mantle of godhood a phenomenon that always struck me as bizarre. Surely anyone could see that the rulers were just men, and surely the private mockery of such pretensions would quickly render the pretensions impossible to maintain. But after witnessing the Obama mania, I begin to see how strongly and irrationally people do want to make gods of men. It may not be at all appealing to me, but it is clearly appealing to many, many other people. It is rather a frightening revelation.

My comment:

I should urge my atheist friends that it is prudent for the commonwealth for men to worship a jealous God, because even if god is a fiction, it will draw away the natural human tendency to worship Pharaohs and Caesars and Fuhrers into a fictional being, one capable of doing no harm.

Of course, this still leaves the danger (as far as my atheist friends are concerned) of persons claiming to speak in the name of the fictional god. To correct for this, the synthetic religion should contain repeated warnings against false prophets and false Christs.

And, unlike every pagan religion in history, should maintain a Magisterium or teaching authority to prevent the religion from being devolved or brought into line with the natural human tendency to hero-worship of charismatic leaders. The religion should be intolerant of personal interpretation or novel doctrines.

Indeed, at a most extreme wish fulfillment daydream of the atheist, this synthetic religion should be able to force emperors who commit enormities to perform public penance, such as to walk bareshod to Canossa, or to put aside his royal insignia, don a shroud, and publicly plead for God’s mercy. This would indeed prevent the rise of hero-worship of worldly leaders as nothing else in history has ever done or could do.

It would be most important, of course, for this synthetic religion to have an international rather than a national character, and not to be brought under the control of a single national ruler, such as Henry VIII.

Oddly enough, this make believe religion which would fulfill all the daydreams of an atheist devoted to preventing the adoration of charismatic Fuhrers has a real world parallel which in history fulfilled this role.

Almost as if it were designed that way….

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The Catwoman Equation!

For those of you paying attention to the discussion in recent days in this space, all I can ask is, why are you doing something more useful?

Meanwhile, we are discussing SCIENCE! Yes, that triumphant march of knowledge based on observation and experimentation, making only repeatable and testable theories about the physical properties of physical matter, without allowing absurd flights of fancy or mere guesswork based on wishful thinking to intrude.

Which brings me once again to the so-called Drake Equation.  Just to jar your memory:

R = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy

f-p = the fraction of those stars that have planets

n-e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

f-ℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point

f-i = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life

f-c = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

As I have said ad nauseam, in order to be an equation, the factors on one hand have to be equal to something on the other hand. This is not an equation; it is a laundry list. Anyone can make a laundry list of any kind to suit himself.

In fact, let me add additional factors:

f-babe = the fraction of the civilizations mentioned above who produce life forms indistinguishable from mammalian homo sapiens, some or all of whose women posses physical good looks by 1950-70′s Eurocentric terrestrial standards of beauty, being nubile, fertile, buxom, svelte and comely.

f-badbabe=the fraction of goodlooking spacewomen who commit acts in abrogation of the local laws of their civilization, but with sufficient panache and daring as to be uncatchable by routine police procedures, such that they are not merely villainesses, but supervillainesses, requiring unusually heroic vigilantes to bring them to justice.

F-badbabemeow=the faction of goodlooking spacewomen supervillainesses who are are cat-themed, either donning or evolving cat-ears, feline tails, or just wearing black leotards or Lycra .

There you have it!

With just as much realism and scientific research as the Drake Equation, we have produced the Catwoman Equation, from which, by plugging in random values for factors none of which are known or can be accurately guessed in our current state of science, we can produce an utterly meaningless number which we can compare to nothing for confirmation.

This explains how many Catwomen there may be on the Moon, or elsewhere in the galaxy.

Okay, so a reader asked me to post a pict of Julie Newmar, and I had to make it sound like I had a reason. I don’t.

Nor did I go through the complex calculations needed to determine the probability of any space-cat-women would evolve on a world where their space-guns are shaped like kitty-cats, but the same sound principles of scientific statistics apply. (Note smaller and pinker cat-themed henchgirl on the right, who may also be a pop star.)

A more recent member of the Spacecatwoman Species, also armed with space-gun:

And what discussion of Space-Cat life would be complete without including a picture of the Cat-Women of the Moon, a movie about which the less said, the better. I refuse to admit having ever watched it, not even the scene where the astronauts throw a cigarette from the Dark Side of the Moon to the Lit Up Side to see its tobacco-y goodness burst into flame, despite the vacuum:

AND FOR NEXT TIME:

We use the Drake Equation to calculate how many planets in the galaxy are inhabited by sexy female space-devils:

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Mark Shea ask the Musical Question: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

Allow me to post a link to Catholic and Enjoying It, where we can stroll down memory lane together. Mr Shea writes:

Remember? Just a few short years ago when actual adults (lots of them, not just a few, and famous and powerful ones, not fringe, kook, and unimportant ones) were–publicly–saying this kind of stuff, not just with a straight face, but with an earnest, impassioned face and eyes glistening with tears of urgent messianic fervor?:

“We have an amazing story to tell,” she said. “This president has brought us out of the dark and into the light.”

– Michelle Obama

“Obama is, of course, greater than Jesus.”

– Politiken (Danish newspaper)

“No one saw him coming, and Christians believe God comes at us from strange angles and places we don’t expect, like Jesus being born in a manger.”

–Lawrence Carter

“Many even see in Obama a messiah-like figure, a great soul, and some affectionately call him Mahatma Obama.”

– Dinesh Sharma

“We just like to say his name. We are considering taking it as a mantra.”

– Chicago Sun-Times

“A Lightworker — An Attuned Being with Powerful Luminosity and High-Vibration Integrity who will actually help usher in a New Way of Being”

– Mark Morford

“What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation’s political history”

– Jesse Jackson, Jr.

“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

– Barack Obama

“Does it not feel as if some special hand is guiding Obama on his journey, I mean, as he has said, the utter improbability of it all?”

– Daily Kos

“He communicates God-like energy…”

– Steve Davis (Charleston, SC)

“Not just an ordinary human being but indeed an Advanced Soul”

– Commentator @ Chicago Sun Times

“I’ll do whatever he says to do. I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.”

– Halle Berry

“A quantum leap in American consciousness”

– Deepak Chopra

“He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians. . . . the agent of transformation in an age of revolution, as a figure uniquely qualified to open the door to the 21st century.”

– Gary Hart

“Barack Obama is our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings . . . He’s our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence.”

– Eve Konstantine

“This is bigger than Kennedy. . . . This is the New Testament.” | “I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often. No, seriously. It’s a dramatic event.”

– Chris Matthews

“[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.”

– Toni Morrison

“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. . . . He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh . . . Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves.”

– Ezra Klein

“Obama has the capacity to summon heroic forces from the spiritual depths of ordinary citizens and to unleash therefrom a symphonic chorus of unique creative acts whose common purpose is to tame the soul and alleviate the great challenges facing mankind.”

– Gerald Campbell

“We’re here to evolve to a higher plane . . . he is an evolved leader . . . [he] has an ear for eloquence and a Tongue dipped in the Unvarnished Truth.”

– Oprah Winfrey

“I would characterize the Senate race as being a race where Obama was, let’s say, blessed and highly favored. That’s not routine. There’s something else going on. I think that Obama, his election to the Senate, was divinely ordered. . . . I know that that was God’s plan.”

– Bill Rush

Pardon me while I take just a moment and say, in all seriousness to these people and all who took them seriously and parroted this twaddle: What on earth were you thinking?

Read the whole thing here.

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Sagan — a Demon in a Candle Lit World

Please read My Sagan Obsession over at Yard Sale of the Mind by one of my fellow alumni from St John College in Annapolis. I like the purple prose, and, better yet, I agree with him. Here is a snippet from the middle:

I believe that, far from belittling science, knowing the gory details helps one appreciate just how wonderful science is. When what seems like a crazy theory – plate tectonics, say, or relativity, or the revolution of the earth on its axis – a theory that defies what seems to be obviously true – turns out to be demonstrated as true based on a growing mountain of observation, experiment and argument, and over the egos and back-stabbing and pettiness of the people involved – well, THAT’s a triumph to celebrate. But science as presented by Sagan – we enlightened few, harmoniously united by our pure love of the Truth, who for completely selfless reasons, and armed with nothing but argument and integrity, battle the execrable ignorance of the unwashed, superstitious Many, eventually leading them, however dull and imperfectly, to accept the Brave New World we scientists have, despite their opposition, created for them – gag me.

It gets worse. I’ve read more than once someone call Sagan a ‘great scientist’. You mean, like Einstein, Faraday, and Newton? Guys whose contributions to science reverberate to this day and are incorporated into technologies used daily around the world?  THAT kind of ‘great scientist’?  The dude was a college professor and tireless self promoter who, even according to his fans, made only trivial, work-a-day contributions to his field such as any competent college professor of astronomy might make. What’s more, and more telling, his name is attached to at least two very dubious bits of pseudoscience – SETI and Nuclear Winter. In the first case, he championed the Drake Equation – a hopeless bit of fantasy masquerading as science, and in the second, he championed conclusions which the science itself hardly supported. At best, Nuclear Winter is an alarming theory that *might* happen IF a huge number of unknowns were determined to simultaneously fall toward the worse-case end of the spectrum. In both cases, Carl championed causes that not only did not improve our scientific understanding but concretely set the standard for using smoke and mirrors to promote political agendas.

But these projects sure did raise Sagan’s public profile.

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Size Does Matter

This is a follow up comment to my post about Scipio’s Dream and Carl Sagan’s “How Tiny is the Earth” speech.

What I do not understand is the purpose of the size-is-impressive argument in the mouths of agnostics and atheists.

I am, and all human beings should be who have the minimal scintilla of poetry in their souls, impressed by roaring oceans whose dim and far horizon forms the margin of the world, or appalled at the emptiness of sandy deserts, the majesty of mountains, or, for that matter, the size of elephant’s noses and the necks of giraffes. I would insert a joke about the mammary glands of Dolly Parton, but this would both betray my age and my lack of good taste, so I will not. But I do think the Grand Canyon is grand, and the view of Mount Rushmore. Like any small boy, I am properly impressed with a tall tree.

Unlike non-science fiction fans and non-astronomers, I am also impressed and even appalled at the size of the universe.

I may even be more impressed than the average sciffy fan, because I tend to set my space operas in non-warpdrive universes, so that it actually takes my heroine, for example, 33900 years earth-relative time to sail to the globular cluster Messier 3 in Canes Venatici at 99.99 percent of lightspeed. And that is not even Andromeda, the galaxy nearest to us, which is more on the order of two and half million years at the same speed, or as far in the future as the earliest Paleolithic is from our past. That says nothing about the distance to the Great Attractor in Virgo, the Void of Bootes, or other large scale phenomena which, in my latest book, I have decided are either weapons or war damage of various superhuman civilizations. — my point here is that I try to emphasize the unimaginable magnitude of what are ironically called “local” locations in space, both interstellar and intergalactic.

But, as a Christian, I believe God to be infinite. Infinite means infinite, not fifteen billion years old or fifteen billion lightyears in diameter. The universe in my imagination is never going to seem large enough to make the claims of any truly universal religion seems small.

The river god Asopus may be tiny compared to the universe, because that river turns out to be so microscopic compared with the rivers of the Milky Way and Eridanus, and likewise an angel who was just the guardian of the Milky Way and nothing more is the least pinpoint of the vast Uranian realm of the heavens.

But I can imagine the maker of heavens to be any size I please, for the same reason I can imagine Shakespeare to be shorter than Ajax but taller than Puck, since astronomers have convinced me to imagine the whole sidereal universe to be born from a seed smaller than the diameter of an atom during a time short than three seconds.

In sum, Mr Sagan cannot make me so impressed with creation as to render me unimpressed with the creator, or to make me feel, as Huck Finn does, that there are too many stars to have been made.

As an argument, it is not an argument at all, merely an emotional appeal: the idea is that so vast a thing as the universe could not be made by an even vaster thing who would appear in the form of a burning bush to Moses and concern Himself with real estate arrangements on a speck of waterfront property between Africa and Asia Minor.

But even as an emotional appeal, the argument does not engage my emotions. If the universe were only as big as the World of Tiers from Phillip Jose Farmer, say about the diameter of a solar system, would the idea that it was a created artifact be easier or harder to conceive? (And keep in mind before you answer that the Worlds in Farmer were indeed artificially created, including our own, which turns out to be just a planetarium and all extrastellar objects illusions.)

On the other hand, Scipio’s Dream does engage my emotions to jar me out of the smallness of worldly concerns. Carl Sagan’s comments, albeit with less depth than Scipios (because, as an atheist, he can give no objective reason for ascribing a non-arbitrary and rational meaning like humility to the contemplation of an irrational and arbitrary cosmos) likewise have the same emotional appeal: it puts the smallness of even the greatest human ambitions in shocking cosmic context. We are mites living on a mote.

Even had Napoleon conquered the Earth, and, with rocketry, the Moon also, the countless zillions of Emperors and Empresses from Mercury to Pluto the all the planets of all the star systems of the Orion Arm, not to mention those dwelling on ringworlds and Dyson spheres along the other and larger arms of this galaxy and the satellite galaxies of the Magellanic Clouds, who indeed would laugh at his ambition, as their ambitions in turn are laughed at by the Emperors of Trantor, who rule a galaxy which may or may not be smaller than the one ruled by the Emperors of Coriscant. If you see my point.

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Earth Looked so Small as to Make me Ashamed of Our Empire

This is more like a guest commentary than a question, so you, dear reader, will experience two opinions for the price of one. Let us hear first from Carl Sagan, then from the reader, then I will offer my own comment.

Unfortunately this is print, so I cannot wow you with my powers of voice impersonation. I do a pretty mean Carl Sagan, as well as an excellent Phil Silvers or Hans Conried. Therefore, readers,  I ask you to use your powers of auditory imagination, and to hear in your mind’s ear Mr Sagan pronouncing the following words with his signature explosive b’s and sibilant s’s, and the slight pauses before each adjective, as if Mr Sagan savors the taste on his tongue of the precision of his words.  Imagine a voice vibrant with good humor, almost joy, and the ever so slight musical pomposity of tone:

Carl Sagan:

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines…every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

“Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

“In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

“It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

One of my readers has this reaction:

“The quote is rather moving, and it can easily bring forth a swirl of emotion as the picture itself did for Sagan. In his rush to indict humanity for fighting for their respective homelands, though, he contradicts himself.

“Note how he dismissively speaks of the Earth as a dot, and all of the great wars fought over its territory as trivial quibbling of insects fighting over a piece of fallen fruit. He says that those humans fighting for their homelands, for their freedoms, for their property, or even for their lives don’t realize that they are fighting over nothing when there is a great big cosmos out there. However, he turns around and says that the pale blue dot is the only home we’ve ever known, and that it needs to be “preserved and cherished,” since there is nothing like it elsewhere. The problem is that far from being insignificant, the Earth is the only known planet to support life, so all those people were fighting over a piece of prime cosmic real estate; it’s not as if we can go out and live in the great big cosmic stage. In fact, that cosmic stage is full of deadly radiation, so it’s a miracle we’re here at all.

“The second issue is even worse. In dismissing humanity as insignificant, then going on about “[dealing] more kindly and compassionately with one another,” we see a totalitarian streak. If humans are not valuable individuals but insignificant ants crawling around on a little sugar cube, then smashing them in the name of global unity is okay. After all, he says that humanity is posturing, self-important, and delusional, and that the picture should remind them of their place — that they and all they care about are nothing. One can assume, then, that they shouldn’t complain when their fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a dot is taken away, and they are casually cast aside to make room for Lord Sagan’s New World Order. Nothing like compassion or respect for your fellow man can survive in such an environment, since compassion is just as meaningless to the cosmos as violence. This is the very opposite of the Christian understanding, which says that individuals are special.

“Besides, go back far enough and the entire Milky Way is a dot. It’s dots all the way back!

“Mr. Sagan meant well when he said what he said, but he is sorely mistaken if he thinks that teaching people of their insignificance will improve their behavior. All it does is embolden tyrants.

“What do you say, Mr. Wright?”

Ah, someone has unwisely asked me to pontificate! Step well back. I use large and windy words.

My comment is this:

I agree in part and disagree in part with this reader’s reaction. I agree the quote is moving, and I salute the sentiment behind it. Being Christian, I applaud the merit of humility. Since Mr Sagan was an atheist, he had no rational reason to applaud or seek humility.

First, I see nothing necessarily totalitarian or tyrannical in dwelling on the insignificance and loneliness of Earth. I do agree that dwelling on the smallness of the Earth combined with the statement, which I dismiss as false, that ” there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves” is a typical piece of modern postchristian arrogance, and I must admit all modern tyrannies justify themselves as being programs for improving the lot of men through eugenics, social engineering, socialism, aborticide on the grounds that there is no help coming and that all improvement is “up to us”.

Second, Mr Sagan condemns generals and emperors fighting to become masters of part of the Earth, not partisans struggling to preserve their homes, and this to me sounds like a condemnation of Napoleon and not of Washington. Whether he means to condemn all wars or merely unjust wars is left to the interpretation of the reader.

Third, Mr Sagan does not say, but when he speaks of imagined self importance and no one coming to help, knowing him to be an atheist, I assume he has a second meaning to those words: since outer space is empty, there are no angels in our heavens, no saints among the stars. I assume he is not speaking of expecting help from Vulcans or Kzinti or the Tharks of the dead sea bottoms of Mars.

If he thinks the smallness of Earth in contrast to the vastness of heaven proves anything about the helplessness of man, and the godlessness of the universe, he has it exactly backward. Back in the days when ships traveled no farther than the coasts of Carthage or the Isles of the Cassarides, and Thule was as far beyond reach as Taprobane or Cathay, the appalling vastness of the universe was visible from your hut’s back window, without any need to pick up a telescope, since the peasant in the Oecumene ruled from distant Byzantium could look at a forest or a fisherman look at a sea which stretched from past continents, past fabled lands and oceans, to lands utterly unknown, zones of the globe the philosophers called Perioeci and Antipodes and Antioeci. In those days, you could walk off the edge of the map in a month or so.

From the quasars to the Big Bang, we modern men have made the universe smaller, not bigger, and so if the smallnesses and comfort of the cosmos encouraged the conceits of faith, we would be a more faithful world than the medieval or the ancient, not less.

Fourth, my overall impression of Mr Sagan’s meditation on the smallness of the speck called Earth is that I am unfortunately reminded of similar postchristian pieties mouthed by lunatic materialists, who one moment say that the “selfish gene” dictates all our actions and behaviors, and that self-sacrificing altruism is merely a misapplied mechanism for increasing the survival rate of nephews and cousins, and then in the next breath, urge all and sundry to overcome deliberately their innate genetic programming to prefer kin to strangers, and therefore to deal with the strangers and sojourners with justice and kindness.

Logically, if pseudo-Darwinian just-so stories like this are true, then kindness to strangers is a misapplication of a blind genetic mechanism of kin-survival, it is destructive of that mechanism to be deliberately kind to anyone not kin, and will ergo lead to the progressive elimination of the trait of kindness to strangers in any bloodlines which practice it. And again, in a materialist universe, which has neither the God of the Christians nor the Good of the Platonists nor yet the Unmoved Mover of the Aristotelians, the only moral authority claimed in the just-so story for kin-altruism is that such behavior is ultimately selfish, if not for one’s self then for a cluster of accidental molecules replicated throughout one’s cells. If the gene mechanism is something we can deliberately overcome, then the gene mechanism has no moral authority over us. And yet again, if the gene mechanism is something we can deliberately ignore, in a godless and non-Platonic and Non-Aristotelian universe, once we have abandoned kin-altruism, and we no longer care about the survival of our bloodlines, we have no reason whatever to prefer saintly self-sacrifice for the sake of strangers to utter sociopath selfishness and the enslavement, rapine and murder of strangers.

The same pattern is repeated by Mr Sagan, this time using the awesome gigantism of the stars and voids of outerspace rather than the microscopic miniaturism of the genes. The first step of the pattern is to make man humble. We thought our free will determined his knowledge of the good, but, no, man is actually the puppet of a selfish gene. Likewise, we thought we were the center of a Ptolemaic universe, but, no, his world is a small speck in the heliocentric solar system of a dim and minor sun in the arm of a smallish galaxy, and not even the largest or most central cluster of the Virgo Supercluster. The second step is to impose a burden upon man. We must “therefore” overcome our innate nature and be kind to each other. We must “therefore” realize that no help is coming and it is up to us.

I use scare quotes to emphasize that the comment is illogical. It is however, quite poetical. Indeed, the poem is one you might know, namely Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

With all due respect to Matthew Arnold, and to Carl Sagan, (but none to lunatic materialists, who sicken me) the selfsame logic goes just as easily the other way. Since the world is a small speck in a vast wildnerness of void, where there is no peace nor help for pain, and we are nothing puppets of blind and selfish genes, “therefore” let us not be true to one another, but look out for number one, live fast and die young, and commit whatever crimes we can get away with.

You see, humility only leads to obedience to moral authority if we just so happen to live in a universe where we know a moral authority. A humble solider will obey his captain where a proud one might balk, but if and only if the captain exists.

Humility is only the crowning virtue in the Jewish or Christian scheme of things, or among Christian heretics as Mormons or Mohammedans, where pride is the chief of sins. In the classical pagan scheme, arête or excellence is the crowning virtue, and hubris was to be avoiding only as a question of excess or overdoing it. The Imperators with pagan wisdom kept a slave in chariot during triumphant ovations to whisper “and yet you are not a god” only so that the victor would not overstep himself. The slave did not whisper “and yet you are a sinner, full of filth” nor did the Emperors in pagan days walk shoeless, taking one coat but not two, and a hank of rope for a belt and a stone for a pillow.

When Mr Sagan speaks of needing this photograph to tell us something new, to the tell us that the conceited religions grant man a privileged position in the universe, he simply makes an error, of which I can speak with some authority, for as an atheist I made the same error myself.

The medieval and pagan mind simply did not ascribe importance to Earth despite that it was the center of the Ptolemaic system, nor did the medieval mind, or for that matter the pagan mind, fail to notice the utter insignificance of man’s role in the world compared to the heavens.

I could quote Ptolemey himself, who said that the ratio between the size of the Earth and the distance to the starry sphere was “as a point to the heaven” or I could point at Dante, who made certain that the very center of the cosmos, and the point to which all corrupt and heavy matter fell was the center of the torso of the weeping fallen archangel Satan, or in other words the dirt of his bowels and intestines; but no, let me instead quote from a loftier perspective, and an author who encapsulates both the ancient and the medieval spirit.

Indulge me, dear reader, if I quote at length from Cicero, his work SOMNIUM SCIPIONIS or ‘Scipio’s Dream’ which contains, in my opinion, an exquisitely clear vision of the appalling magnitude of the immensity of time and space in which the ambitions and vanity of men were lost.

Scipio has a dream in which he is carried to heaven and looking down, sees what a small dim spot the Earth is.

And as I looked on every side I saw other things transcendently glorious and wonderful. There were stars which we never see from the earth, and all were vast beyond what we have ever imagined. The least was that farthest from heaven and nearest the earth which shone with a borrowed light. The starry spheres were much larger than the earth; the earth itself looked so small as to make me ashamed of our empire, which was a mere point on its surface.

Whereupon he is upbraided for looking at earthly things, and seeking earthly fame, by his ancestor Africanus, in these words:

“You perceive that men dwell on but few and scanty portions of the earth, and that amid these spots, as it were, vast solitudes are interposed. As to those who inhabit the earth, not only are they so separated that no communication can circulate among them from the one to the other, but part lie upon one side, part upon another, and part are diametrically opposite to you, from whom you assuredly can expect no glory.

“. . . all that part of the earth which is inhabited by you is no other than a little island surrounded by that sea which on earth you call the Atlantic, sometimes the great sea, and sometimes the ocean; and yet with so grand a name, you see how diminutive it is!

“Now do you think it possible for your renown, or that of any one of us, to move from those cultivated and inhabited spots of ground, and pass beyond that Caucasus, or swim across yonder Ganges? What inhabitant of the other parts of the east, or of the extreme regions of the setting sun, of those tracts that run toward the south or toward the north, shall ever hear of your name? Now supposing them cut off, you see at once within what narrow limits your glory would fain expand itself. As to those who speak of you, how long will they speak?

“Let me even suppose that a future race of men shall be desirous of transmitting to their posterity your renown or mine, as they received it from their fathers; yet when we consider the convulsions and conflagrations that must necessarily happen at some definite period, we are unable to attain not only to an eternal, but even to a lasting fame. “

Let me explain that reference. Certain ancients, particularly the Stoics, believed as the modern Hindu, did that the entire cosmos would be periodically destroyed and recreated in fire and convulsion. Some astronomers believe the Big Bang is the death moment of the previous universe, perhaps one identical to ours in every respect. The immensity of time contemplated by the ancients was similar to this.

“[…] mankind ordinarily measure their year by the revolution of the sun, that is of a single heavenly body. But when all the planets shall return to the same position which they once had, and bring back after a long rotation the same aspect of the entire heavens, then the year may be said to be truly completed; I do not venture to say how many ages of mankind will be contained within such a year.”

The annus platonicus or Great Year is a concept from the TIMAEUS of Plato, and is defined as the return of all planets to their exact spot in the zodiac.

“As of old the sun seemed to be eclipsed and blotted out when the soul of Romulus entered these [i.e. heavenly] regions, so when the sun shall be again eclipsed in the same part of his course and at the same period of the year and day, with all the constellations and stars recalled to the point from which they started on their revolutions, then count the year as brought to a close. But be assured that the twentieth part of such a year has not yet elapsed.

“Consequently, should you renounce hope of returning to this place where eminent and excellent men find their reward, of what worth is that human glory which can scarcely extend to a small part of a single year? If, then, you shall determine to look on high and contemplate this mansion and eternal abode, you will neither give yourself to the gossip of the vulgar nor place your hope of well-being on rewards that man can bestow. Virtue herself, by her own charms, should draw you to true honor.”

Mr Sagan is not saying anything that Cicero did not say better (and in Latin) centuries before, that the smallness of the world should inject humility into our souls, with this vital difference. Cicero’s Scipio lives in a sane hence supernatural universe where it is a ghost who speaks on behalf of the immortal gods, and he can speak without a blush of the proper object for a noble man, once humbled by the majestic immensity of the cosmos, to seek, that object being virtue. Mr Sagan, being more modern and hence having a cruder and more incoherent conception of the universe, can only speak of self-help (“it is up to us”) and of sentiments as kindness and compassion.

I call it cruder to speak of kindness and compassion rather than virtue and honor on the grounds that love of kindness is a sentiment rather than a virtue, feminine rather than masculine, as compassion does not necessitate self-command, temperance, or moderation, or prudence or justice to practice, merely having a large heart, or perhaps a bleeding one.

Sagan is one of those guys I liked when I was a kid, who now, with adult eyes, I feel about the same way I feel about Robert Heinlein: I have a particular sense of betrayal and disgust for anyone who would lie to a gullible and trusting child. And yet I still like and even admire them for the pleasure and edification they granted my younger years.

Specifically, I was graduated from high school and not yet in college when Carl Sagan’s COSMOS come on the local PBS channel in my youth. I adored the show. What science fiction fan would not? Adoring, I did not with critical skepticism regard Mr Sagan’s windy assertions about Plato and Democritus and Pre-Socratic philosophers. Comically enough, Mr Sagan places the origin of modern science in the mystical theory of Democritus, and makes no mention of its real origins in the Middle Ages, Aquinas, Grosseteste, Francis Bacon, and William of Ockham and like thinkers, including his hero Copernicus.

Instead he slandered Christianity by repeating the myth of Hypatia of Alexandria. In the myth her cause of death was not that she meddled in the explosive politics of the times, but because she was a pagan of refined learning; and instead of being a Neoplatonic mystic, in the updated version of the myth, she is killed for being a scientist. No one mentions that the “science” of the time meant being an astrologer. And added twist to the myth says that the Christians of that day and age, the world’s only force promoting the honor and equality of women (there are no female Buddhist saints or Confucian sages), were misogynists who hated females scientists more than they hated science because she was female.

As I said above, I believed all this garbage, and swallowed it hook line and sinker as gullibly as a large mouth bass, all the while congratulating myself on my skepticism and hardheadedness.

The quote from Mr Sagan is one of the several examples I have run across in my life of secular attempts at piety, which always strike as tin-eared and tone-deaf: trying to get a sense of wonder about what must be the least wondrous imaginable view of the universe. The secular view holds the universe to be a vast and inanimate machine, a watch thrown together by the blind and idiot watchmaker of directionless natural forces, an appalling void disturbed by specks of meaningless life, purposeless and without design, ergo not a cosmos, not a creation.

It is like trying to make the Azathoth of the Cthulhu Mythos seem lovely.

As with most things, any deep thought you hear a modern intellectual repeating, was probably said better, and in Greek or Latin, long ago.

“Since that which moves of itself is eternal, who can deny that the soul is endowed with this property?

Whatever is moved by external impulse is soulless; whatever possesses soul is moved by an inner impulse of its own, for this is the peculiar nature and property of soul.

And since soul is the only force that moves itself, it surely has no beginning and is immortal. Employ it, therefore, in the noblest of pursuits; the noblest are those undertaken for the safety of your country.

If it is in these that your soul is diligently exercised, it will have a swifter flight to this, its proper home and permanent abode.

Even swifter will be the flight if, while still imprisoned in the body, it shall peer forth, and, contemplating what lies beyond, detach itself as far as possible from the body.

For the souls of those who have surrendered themselves to the pleasures of the body and have become their slaves, who are goaded to obedience by lust and violate the laws of gods and men — such souls, when they pass out of their bodies, hover close to earth, and do not return to this place till they have been tossed about for many ages.”

He departed; I awoke from sleep.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Cover Art for THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA and Excerpt

Thanks to the miracle of the Information Age (thanks, Al Gore!) I have discovered the cover art for my latest book. This is THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA, second volume of the ‘Count to the Eschaton Sequence’ which began with COUNT TO A TRILLION.

The bad news is that the publication date is December 24, 2012.

The Hermetic Millennia

Complete with a nice comment by Spider Robinson!

And here is the ad copy from the jacket flap:

A kaleidoscopic vision of future history and human evolution, as witnessed by the one man who may hold the key to humanity’s salvation against an approaching alien threat

Continuing from Count to a Trillion, Menelaus Illation Montrose — Texas gunslinger, idealist, and posthuman genius — has gone into cryo-suspension following the discovery that, in 8,000 years, a powerful alien intelligence will reach Earth to assess humanity’s value as slaves. Montrose intends to be alive to meet that threat, but he is awakened repeatedly throughout the centuries to confront the woes of an ever-changing and violent world, witnessing millennia of change compressed into a few years of subjective time.

The result is a breathtaking vision of future history like nothing before imagined: sweeping, tumultuous, and evermore alien, as Montrose’s immortal enemies and former shipmates from the starship Hermetic harness the forces of evolution and social engineering to continuously reshape the Earth in their image, seeking to create a version of man the approaching slavers will find worthy.

AND for your reading pleasure, here is an excerpt

CHAPTER TWO: The Sea of Cunning
AD 2540
1.       The Bright Judgment Seat

 

The Master of the World was in exile.

The Senior of the Landing Party of the Hermetic expedition, the Nobilissimus Ximen del Azarchel, called Ximen the Black, sat alone in state atop the only throne ever to exist upon the gray and lifeless globe that formed the sole remnant and remainder of his reign.

Set between two topless pillars, the judgment seat was ivory hammered over with fine gold, set on a massive base and wide, adorned by spiral narwhale tusks that gleamed like the horns of mythic unicorns, and reared like spears. The high and arching backrest was adorned with the dark, triangular visage of a bull in rage, and from the image real horns projected, bent down as if to half-embrace who might in that seat, or menace any who stood before.

In the deadly brightness of a sun undimmed by atmosphere, the gilded and argent chair blazed like a mirror in the desert, a striking contrast with the dark-garbed figure seated beneath the bull’s face: a bright flame with a black heart.

It did not seem arrogance to Del Azarchel to make his seat to match the throne of Solomon described in the Book of Kings, for he deemed himself, with his multiply augmented mind, wiser than any ancient monarch, prophet, poet or magician.

Nor did the Djinn that ancient sorcerer-king was said to have sealed in brass jars and bent to his command seem any less fearsome and terrible than the mind housed in the amber pillars that arose to either side of the judgment seat. These cylinders were as thick around as a strong man’s thigh, as tall as two tall men. Traces of fluorine hidden in each rod-logic macromolecule gave the pillars a lambent fulvous hue, as if they were hewn of transparent gold.

Between these shining pillars the massive dais of the throne was black as midnight, and sat foursquare, and before the footstool descended six steps broad and shallow. Twelve life-sized lions hewn of black marble but with manes and eyes of blazing gold and fangs of hand-carved ivory stood rampant in pairs, one to either side of each step, frozen in mid-lunge. Scribed into the surface of each stair and set with star-sapphires, a different creature or emblem representing a figure of the zodiac cowered beneath the paw of each of the twelve black lions: a frightened water-bearer with dropped amphora, a shattered balance scales, a fallen virgin with scattered hair, a prone centaur with a broken bow, a supine bull twisted in agony. The throne almost seemed a chariot pulled by a dozen great beasts, trampling the constellations underfoot.

Del Azarchel wore the dark and silken garment of a starfarers, and needed no other robes of royalty. What he had worn beneath the light of the Diamond Star in Centaurus was august enough to serve him. The scholastic hood which normally hung down his back he had drawn to shade his features from the intolerable light. Within the triangle of the mouth of his hood, the glint of his white teeth between dark mustachios and goatee could be glimpsed, the drops of cold fire caught in the diamonds of his iron crown, and the strange light from no-longer-human eyes.

2.       The Presence Chamber

 

Dawn had been a week ago, so the sun was nearing noon. Untwinkling stars were in theory visible in the deathly black sky, but the human eye could not adjust to both extremes at once. Overhead was merely an abyssal dark that caused no vertigo, because there was nothing seen in it. There was no Earth to loom in the sky, nor would there ever be, for this was the Moon’s far side, which faced forever away from the world of men.

The Sea of Cunning, Mare Ingenii, was a cracked basin of obsidian crossed with fissures like whip scars, filling a crater sixty miles wide, with inkblots of dark lava spilling east and west. Here was a wasteland where no living thing had ever grown, no note of any sound had ever been heard and no grain of sand ever been stirred by any gasp of wind. Crater walls as white and pockmarked as the corpses of lepers blazed in the distance, turned to intolerable fire by the undimmed sun. The black slag of primordial lava flows formed a wrinkled carpet. The ground was shot and blistered, pocked and dinted by eons of impacts as if by mortar and machinegun fire.

Midmost, looking like a black coin dropped on the floor of a long dead furnace, was the dark floor of the presence chamber of the Master of the World. Unseen beneath, hollowed out of a lava tube, was an antique lunar base from the First Age of Space Travel, perfectly preserved and recently restored to life. Like the horn of a leviathan, one tower rose through the dark sand and broken plates of the Sea of Cunning to the surface. The roof of this buried tower was the dark floor of the throne room of Del Azarchel.

A dome so pure and featureless so as to be invisible embraced the chamber from zenith to the rim of the deck, and this floor was flush with the lunar skin, so that it seemed one could step without barrier from the dead world into the bubble of life. Within, the inhuman silence of the vacuum seemed to press like a weight upon the fragile dome, a silence that could be felt in one’s bone marrow.

Upon a floor set in this silent nothingness, seemingly exposed to outer space without canopy or barrier, grim as the lunar landscape, rose the bright judgment seat of Ximen del Azarchel on its dark dais. To left and right, lucent icicles, rose the golden pillars.  Before him and below was an immense table of black metal shaped like a hollow circle. The floor plates within that circle were tuned to black, but able, upon command, to put the images of all the Earth that he once ruled below the feet of Ximen del Azarchel, or spin out the mathematical trees and twigs of scenarios of predictive statistics, that he might see by what means he should come to rule Earth once again.

3.       The Iron Crown

 

Incongruously, finger-motion-sensitive screens could unfold like crystal wings from the leonine arms, or eye-motion-sensitive screens unlimber like a peacocks tail from the narwhale horn frame, to hang like a zodiac before his face, and the metal armature that held these screens would half embrace him like squid-limbed butler proffering polished trays of delights. All screens, now, were dark, for the miraculous world-wide information systems they governed were long ago decommissioned, blacked out, or blasted to wreckage.

He raised a hand gloved in what seemed black silk. Although there seemed to be none within the chamber to see that signal, nonetheless, upon that gesture, the five of his fellow Hermeticists rose from three circular iris-hatches in the floor, drifting upward with the eerie grace only lunar gravity allowed.

The men did not quite land, nor quite walk, but moved toes against the dark deck with ballet smoothness. Their black garments rippled like silk and silvery anti-radiation mantles fluttered like capes as they passed.

All men in the wide chamber wore similar bodies. The Hermeticists in their lunar-adaptive forms were tall and emaciated, lacking in water-weight, with dry cracks at lips and nostrils. Even the heaviest of them had a sunken, skull-like cast to his face, a strange leaden highlight to his skin, a side effect of the special nanomachinery lining their bones and filling their bone marrow to prevent microgravity decay. Their eyes were as mirror-shining as the eyes of a cat, or filmy as the eyes of a sea-beast, for growing additional micro-organisms meant to shield their eyes from accidental radiation exposure turned out, unexpectedly, to be less cumbersome than polarized faceplates or dark goggles.

Their shipsuits were built along lines opposite to those of the bulky atmospheric armor of the First Age of Space: an only mildly biomodified human skin, when mummified by skintight garb, was discovered to have sufficient tenacity to resist vacuum. A second cushion of very light material was used to hold a layer of partial atmosphere next to the skinsuit, in order to help with pressure differentials the free motion of human joints necessitated. This outer silk was a like a living layer of air pockets that expanded and contracted with each movement, granting the Hermeticists an eerie shimmering to play over them, like ripples seen on the scales of restless sharks.

There were silver fittings at waist and shoulders, and the heavy ring of a collar at the neck. All the men were bald as a monks, with skull-tight cowls that covered ears and cheeks and buckled beneath the jaw. Each wore his hood drawn up, but not sealed nor inflated. Goggles and mask hung below the throat like a second face.

There were only minor variations to the uniforms.

Melchor de Ulloa was a very handsome man, even in his lunar form. He was always wreathed in smiles of bewildered good cheer and in the scent of lavender. At his throat was an ornament like chicken’s claw within a circle, representing peace, a symbol called Nero’s Cross. He was the ship’s Political Officer.

Narcís D’Aragó, the cold-eyed Master-at-Arms, dangled a powered rapier from his baldric, and an Aurum pistol in his thigh holster. This weapon fired a nanotechnological smart package designed, upon impact, to disassemble nonliving material such as armor or clothing, and non-important material such as flesh and bone into a puddle, and next to form electro-neural connections to any nerve cells it encountered floating in that puddle, such as disembodied eyeballs, brain or spinal tissue, linking those cells to the nearest signal nexus for download.

Sarmento i Illa d’Or was a man of muscular bulk, broad shouldered as a bullock, light of step even under Earthly gravity, and in his gauntleted hand an emission wand called a soul goad, used to control thralls, parolees, or courtesans modified with skull implants via shocks of pleasure or agony that left no marks. Aboard ship he had been the quartermaster, and during the time of the World Concordat, the Master of the Feasts.

Jaume Coronimas, who had been an Engineer’s Mate aboard ship, and the Broadcast Power Master during the Concordat, wore a cowl pieced by two small holes, and through these rose from his scalp two tendrils like whip-antennae made of yellow bio-prosthetic metal, and these gold tendrils swayed softly toward the signal sources in the room, peering forth from the mouth of his hood like two inquisitive snakes. His face would have been thin and gray even had his skin not be adapted toward lunar conditions.

One man was not like the others. Father Reyes y Pastor, the expedition Chaplin, was in red, and wore ermine and scarlet cardinal’s robes atop his black silk. Hanging down his back was a broad brimmed red hat with elaborate tassels upon tassels, the galero. The hat was not on his head, for he wore the black hood of a scholar, proud of his academic achievements above his ecclesiastical station.

Ximen del Azarchel wore a uniform no grander than the others, save only for the dark metal circlet atop his air cowl. This was the Iron Crown of Lombardy, a band of gold and emerald segments, jointed with hinges and set with precious stones in the form of crosses and flowers. Within the band was a narrow circle of iron, if legend spoke true, beaten out of one of the nails taken from the True Cross. It was the most ancient insignia of royalty surviving Christendom, and held its most precious relict, and had been kept, until late, in the Cathedral of Monza in Milan. Extra segments made of ultra-dense metallic alloy had been added to enlarge the band able to fit Del Azarchel’s skull. One of these new segments was marred where a small caliber assassin’s needle had been deflected from his temple. A delta of scar-tissue running upward from the corner of his right eye to beneath his cowl was a memento of the same event, and surely made the wearing of that crown painful in his brow, even under the elfin gravity of the moon. Painful or no, he did not set the crown aside.

No more than a glittering hint of the crown was visible then, for all had drawn hoods for relief against the killing light of the unshielded lunar noon. The coppery eyes of the Hermeticists glinted like red coals in the mouths of dark, triangular furnaces.

The five drifted in soundless grace to their places at the round table. Places, not seats, for no chairs were needed, nor did human legs grow weary in a world of one-sixth weight.

There were more than six score empty places to each side of them. Each empty place was covered over with long, triangular silken lengths. These were the hoods removed from the shipsuits of the departed. Their tassels hung mournfully to the deck, swaying ghostlike in the ventilation of their own internal circuits.

The Hermeticists were alone. No servant had ever set foot in this upper sanctum, not a chambermaid to sweep, not a butler to present a bulb of wine, not a technician to set to rights the thousand intricate circuits of the information systems. No unmodified human could withstand the radiation that time to time poured invisibly from naked outer space a few feet overhead, detected by the dry clicking of counters. Nor was it in the present purposes of the Hermetic Order to acquaint mankind with the full spectrum of biotechnological modifications they employed for their own uses. Therefore the chamber was stark and bare, except for such things as the Hermeticists found it either a necessity, a divertissement, or a discipline of meditation, for their own hands to make or mend.

Del Azarchel spoke: “Faithful and beloved friends, equal partners in my reign, partners now in my downfall, the entire living world, the Mother Earth so fair and green, is lost to us, with neither a drop from her endless seas nor a wisp of her abundant airs and winds allowed to us here.

“This Luna, this hueless world of lifelessness, through turmoil and fire we achieved with the daring theft in her orbital shipyard of the great ship Emancipation. Her sails, as nothing else could do, turned aside the deadly force of the mirrors of the Giants, those same orbital mirrors which burned the cities of man like ants beneath a magnifying glass. That power became propulsion for us, for we turned death to life by that same alchemy of knowledge which assures us our supreme authority above mankind.

“As if sailing hither on a sea of fire, this dead world our new world we made, and found this ancient base, long forgotten from the First Age of Space Travel, on the far side of the moon, and far from the orbital mirrors of the Giants, and, with diligent work, and not without the sacrifice of loyal servant lives now mourned, our genius restored it from death to life.

“Here allow me to restore our hopes. History is merely one more language Monument Builders decoded, and only we, only we anointed few, can speak this language to issue decrees and cast spells in it.

Del Azarchel pointed, and all the floor lit up with branch on branch of Cliometric equations.

The calculation set was profound, reaching an illusory dozens of feet down below what now seemed a crystal floor. De Ulloa cried out in awe, Sarmento grunted, and the golden antennae of Coronimas perked up in surprise. Reyes y Pastor crossed himself, and even the impassive masklike face Narcís D’Aragó twitched and raised an eyebrow.

4.       The Allotment of the Eons

 

Del Azarchel addressed the remnant of the Hermetic Order.

“Each of you have seen the Cliometric projections. Some lines of evolution are dead ends. One will break through to the next level of intellectual topography, an event horizon of human augmentation beyond which no predictions can be made. Study the chessboard, Gentlemen! Where would you make your move? Not just Montrose, but human nature and inhuman entropy are all your oppositions in this game. Learned Melchor de Ulloa, you speak first.”

Melchor de Ulloa spread his supine hands, a gesture which could have been used either to placate or to beg alms. His voice was honey. “A society where everyone’s rights are respected produces liberty and this produces invention, discovery, change, and evolution. The main hindrance to man’s ever upward triumph is hatred, aggression, and fear. The only cure is toleration, education, and the growth of institutions based not on rigid rules and dogmatism, but on open-minded willingness to attempt all options, seek all experiments, try all, dare all, risk all: and thus will man discover all. This willingness is based on social factors independent of political economic structures: it is the artistic vision, the world view, of the consensus of the people that eventually shapes society.

“Scientifically speaking, this consensus is based on structures in the lower brain, related to various subconscious symmetry-recognition ganglia whose nature we have examined intimately during our work to elevate the Cetaceans to sapience. The Monument describes eighty-one nonverbal communications systems, of which one, music, is comprehensible to the nervous patterns of mammalian Earthly life.

“Artistic vision fathers cultural values, not the other way around; all moral codes are merely the epiphenomena of the irrational subconscious, and of the dreams only freedom can free. The correspondence between Whale Song and the brain structure of augmented whales has shown the relation of music to core psychology, whose values shape the culture and shape in turn the social institutions, which in turn shape the course of evolution. I see the doubt on your features, gentlemen, but I can demonstrate my claims with a simple spline equation. Give me control not of the laws nor the religions nor philosophy of man, but merely of their music, and I can guide Man to the Asymptote.”

Del Azarchel said, “I have already set in motion what is needful to destroy the Giants, and set the humans of normal intellect free from their control. I foretell a dieback, and a Dark Ages lasting until the Fifth Millennium. Once this is accomplished, I will grant to you between the years AD 4000 to AD 5000 to play out your experiment. Remake mankind as you wish. Learned Narcís D’Aragó, I see you object.”

Narcís D’Aragó stood as if at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back. His voice was ice. “Let us talk no more of natural right, or of phlogiston, or of fairy godmothers. Does a man have a natural right to life? That is quaint poetry, but let him beat against the waves of the sea when he is drowning to see what rights nature gives.

“We should stick to facts. The fact is that rights are artificial, a legal fiction, a manmade mechanism to increase group survival value, nothing more. Justice is strength. Without strength is no survival—and all rational moral codes have survival as their object.

“You recall the Fifth Postulate of the Negative Sum Divarication proof? It proves that the individual cannot survive without the group, and the group cannot survive unless the individual is willing to die for it. What is needed for mankind is logic, the stern and simple logic of survival.

“The existence of religion—pardon me, Father, but it is true—is based on a genetic marker inclining toward mystical altruism, all men being brothers and all that saccharine fluff.

“No. Rational altruism can beat mystical altruism hands down, for money, love, or marbles. Give me control of men’s genetics, and I can shape his destiny, and break human nature open like an egg, and release the dragon within.”

Del Azarchel said, “If Melchor de Ulloa falls short, then I will give you between the years AD 5000 to AD 6000 to accomplish your purpose. If he has achieved the asymptote within his allotted span, your task will be merely to aid him. Learned Sarmento i Illa d’Or! I have never known you to agree with Learned D’Aragó on any point. What say you?”

Sarmento i Illa D’Or, with the studied arrogance of a Hercules, crossed his huge arms across his broad chest, and tilted back his head. His voice was the murmur of a bear in winter, disturbed from long, cold sleep. “Bah! Control the emotional nature! Control the music! Control the genetics! Control the thinking! It is all hogwash. What about not controlling? What about setting mankind free? And I mean free of all restrictions, moral, mental, intellectual—everything. I say there is no rational moral code that does not take into account the simple scientific fact that all organisms seek pleasure and flee pain. This is the starting point of all rational thought about human nature.

“The trick is to tie pleasure into the proper incentives without imposing a system of control the sheep will detect and resent. To do this, you shape the future. You dig the canals and dikes, and merely let the water find its own way at its own pace into your channels.

“The factor that controls the future is demographics. When populations outstrip food supplies, human life is cheap, wages drop, sexual restrictions come into play, and to keep those restrictions, an apparatus of coercion arises that soon reaches all aspects of life. Ancient China was overpopulated, and it sterilized their ability to progress despite an immense head start; Europe outstripped them, because the Black Death had lowered the population level so that every individual life was precious—that, and not empty talk about the sanctity of life—that is what led to the group discipline D’Aragó talks about, as well as the liberty and tolerance De Ulloa mentioned. It is all in the numbers.”

“Shall I make you the angel of death, able to lower population rates?” Asked Del Azarchel with a dark look.

“No, Learned Senior. Give me the heavens instead, and I will raise them.” Said Sarmento.

“What?” said Del Azarchel.

“Demographics is based on food supply,” Sarmento rumbled. “Which is based on acquisition technology, whether huntsman, herdsmen or husbandman. So give me control of the climate, wind and weather. The ancient experiments in weather control were not implemented by a posthuman Iron Ghost, and so the many variables of climate adjustment could not be managed. If I can establish the growing season, shorten or extend it, then I can shape the agro-technology, the demographics, the pleasure-seeking incentives of human action, and thus the culture that will grow out of it.”

Del Azarchel said, “If D’Aragó falls short, then I give you between the years AD 6000 to AD 7000, but I will grant you longer if you ask, for I doubt your theory is sound.”

Sarmento said, “But I must have more time! The method I propose is very slow.”

Jaume Coronimas raised his finger. “Are you giving away blocks of a thousand years each, Learned Del Azarchel? Learned Sarmento can have half of my time. My proposal is more efficient.”

Coronimas had drawn a series of figures, calculations of his own, in the palm of his left glove with the stylus tip hidden in the finger of his right. Coronimas twitched his golden antennae downward and, at this gesture, the circuits displayed his work at his feet.

“Observe. The way to improve mankind is merely to improve him. The human nervous system is a machine, and it performance characteristics can be directly changed by changing various bits of neural hardware. We have been failing here because each man is trying to improve himself like Montrose did. I suggest a different approach: to improve the race while keeping the basic unit of the race, the individual, more or less the same. Give me control of man, all of him, and I can remake him into my image, and this will establish evolution—because it will not be evolution, will it? It will be intelligent design. My design. I can make them peaceful and sane and able to adapt to whatever troubles come.”

Del Azarchel said, “Then I will give you your five hundred years, if you can match your boast, but I will place in the midst of an era where it will do no harm if it goes wrong. Father Reyes, I see the pain in your eyes. What is it?”

Reyes y Pastor said, “With respect, Learned Gentlemen and Learned Senior, your thoughts are awry. We cannot plan for the next evolutionary step of man, any more than apes could perform brain surgery on an ape-cub and make him grow into a homo sapiens. The superman will be beyond us, and be nothing we can imagine. We must do the very reverse of all that has been said. We cannot control man to unleash evolution; we much unleash evolution and man will be swept up, buoyed up by wild forces beyond control, yes, whether he wishes or not, to the next form of human nature. The one true religion teaches — ah, I know how skeptical you all are, but history will bear out my witness! — the Holy Mother Church teaches that heaven cannot exist on Earth; to yearn in vain for earthly paradise and peace is the heresy of Utopianism.”

“If we are all heretics,” said Del Azarchel, “What is orthodox?”

“On Earth, life is nothing but the brutal struggle for existence, war of all against all. Blessed are the peacemakers! That word we spoken by Our Savior, and it is truth and holy truth, but, as holy truth, it has no application here in this valley of tears called life! Moral codes and liberty and genetic codes, logic and demographics, none of this, my children, is what life on Earth requires to reach the transcendence of the Asymptote. What has hindered us so far is that there are far too few us. Too few who think as we! Let me make a world in our image, a world of men who are unafraid to shape the destinies of all the men beneath them, and they in turn shaped by the men above them, so that all the raw power and agony of evolution will be released like a genii from its brass jar. What will come next, your math cannot predict nor mine!”

Del Azarchel said, “I will give you between AD 7000 and AD 8000 to work whatever purposes you will, Father Reyes; and the final period between then and AD 11000, when the Hyades armada arrives, I reserve to myself either to capitalize the triumphs all you gentlemen have accomplished, or abolish your errors, and in every way to prepare mankind to be what best will serve the intelligences from the Hyades stars. And yes, the race I make in those final days must discover and destroy whatever mad Montrose has prepared of war and revolution, for he seeks ever to bring the wrath of Hyades down upon us.

“The conclave is ended: each go your own ways, draw up your calculations, and prepare! We war not only against Montrose and his servants, and against the perversity of human nature but against the lingering tardiness of Darwin, and against death, time, and entropy itself!”

And the Hermeticists bowed toward the throne, then each man took his leave and descended, weightless as thistledown, through the deck hatches into the deeply-buried lunar fortress with no more noise than a spirit returning to its grave.

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Things that Make You Go Hmm…

All my recent posts of late have been links, for which I apologize to those who want to read ruminations about Sci-Fi, listen to an endless argument about materialism, or see pictures of Catwoman. Nonetheless, one more item of interest caught my eye. File this under ‘What is Wrong with the World’:

(CNSNews.com) – The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports.

The new human rights reports–purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered–are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role.

For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom in its reports…

Read the rest here. Hat tip to Mark Shea.

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Recanting Vice

A reader sent me this link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2156593/The-lads-mag-I-edited-turned-generation-porn–Im-father-I-bitterly-regret-A-remarkable-confession-longest-serving-editor-Loaded.html

One of the men who helped the current generation turn into pornography addicts, now that he has a child, remembers his sense of decency and is properly ashamed.

I have two comments:

Such shame is insupportable in the pre-Christian and post-Christian world. Pre-Christians (pagans) would commit suicide after the Roman or Japanese fashion when they discovered that there was no confession, no atonement, and no cure for sin, no way to undo the harm done, no way to clean the stain. Post-Christians (sub-pagans) attempt to medicate or self-medicate the shallow outward manifestation of shame, depression, and sometimes self-medicate themselves to death with bottle or needle. This is the slow suicide of postchristians more craven than noble pagans.

This man’s wakening of his conscience was through the grace of family life. As father he sobered up enormously, and came to this senses. You see, a self centered life is no life at all. Caring for the helpless life of son or daughter, becoming their leader and lawgiver and teacher makes one suddenly and shockingly aware that the laws of one’s life must be just and good and decent.

The obliterating hatred of family life expressed by nearly every antichristian political policy from bribing women to remain unwed via welfare to abolishing the institution of marriage as a legally recognized sacrament via no-fault divorce, to the coarsening loss of respect for women, demoting women in the name of equality and liberty from helpmeets desirable for marriage to silicon sexbots desirable for nothing.

Hell wants to destroy the family because the family often enough matures selfish bachelors to settled and decent men, men who begin to think in the long term and in the wider scope.

 

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From the Pen of Laura Resnick

One Steve Wasserman, whose name shall live in infamy for his fifteen minutes of fame, in The Nation holds forth as follows:

In certain genres (romance, science fiction and fantasy) formerly relegated to the moribund mass-market paperback, readers care not a whit about cover design or even good writing, and have no attachment at all to the book as object. Like addicts, they just want their fix at the lowest possible price, and Amazon is happy to be their online dealer.”

To which the excellent and imperishable Laura Resnick on her website replies with fine fettle:

OMG! This is such a relief! I’ve been so misled.

I can finally stop editing and taking pains to package my romance backlist well! NO ONE CARES! They’re just addicts!

I can finally stop editing and taking pains to package my fantasy backlist well! My readers don’t care about quality!

I can tell my dad, a science fiction writer, to relax and stop sweating over Hugo-quality material! No one cares! Science fiction readers are just junkies!

I can tell my publisher to stop spending all that money on my award-winning cover artist! An LA Times book reviewer has declared that it’s pointless! My readers are indifferent to brilliant cover art! We could probably just package the worthless sh*t that I write in a brown paper wrapper!

Whoa! So GLAD Mr. Wasserman enlightened me. The pressure to write well, the pressure on my editors to acquire and edit well, and the pressure on my cover artists and designers… Gone! It never mattered! Our readers our brain-dead junkies! Yay! What a RELIEF not to have to behave like REAL writers, editors, artists, and publishers, after all!

Hat tip to superversive. And a salute if not a toast to Laura Resnick. Well said, ma’am. Very well said.

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