Prince Kropotkin: Russia’s Answer to Charles Darwin

“Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?” (Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, 1902).

What would happen to the accepted history of human evolution if instead of an Englishman going to the Galapagos more influence would be given to a Russian going to Siberia? Whereas Charles Darwin based his theory of Natural Selection on what he, from his cultural background, observed in the Galapagos, Pyotr Kropotkin, in his youth travelled to Siberia on geographical expeditions, where he found that a completely different vision than Darwin’s could be both observed and then transferred to the theory of human evolution. Kropotkin observed:

I saw among the semi-wild cattle and horses in Transbaikalia, among the wild ruminants everywhere, the squirrels, and so on, that when animals have to struggle against scarcity of food, in consequence of one of the above-mentioned causes, the whole of that portion of the species which is affected by the calamity, comes out of the ordeal so much impoverished in vigour and health, that no progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of keen competition.

Mainly referring to animals within the same species, Kroptkin also observed in 1902:

In all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.

Referring to Darwin’s theories of natural selection and Herbert Spencer’s addition of the notion of the survival of the fittest, he wrote:

They all endeavoured to prove that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and knowledge, may mitigate the harshness of the struggle for life between men; but they all recognized at the same time that the struggle for the means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of every man against all other men, was “a law of Nature.” This view, however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.

Kropotkin writes about many examples of mutual aid within  the animal world, including beetles, crabs, termites, ants and bees. It is the examples that come from Russia which are more culturally unique to his study, for example the Russian steppe eagle:

One of the most conclusive observations of the kind belongs to Syevertsoff. Whilst studying the fauna of the Russian Steppes, he once saw an eagle belonging to an altogether gregarious species (the white-tailed eagle, Haliactos albicilla) rising high in the air for half an hour it was describing its wide circles in silence when at once its piercing voice was heard. Its cry was soon answered by another eagle which approached it, and was followed by a third, a fourth, and so on, till nine or ten eagles came together and soon disappeared. In the afternoon, Syevertsoff went to the place whereto he saw the eagles flying; concealed by one of the undulations of the Steppe, he approached them, and discovered that they had gathered around the corpse of a horse. The old ones, which, as a rule, begin the meal first – such are their rules of propriety-already were sitting upon the haystacks of the neighbourhood and kept watch, while the younger ones were continuing the meal, surrounded by bands of crows. From this and like observations, Syevertsoff concluded that the white-tailed eagles combine for hunting; when they all have risen to a great height they are enabled, if they are ten, to survey an area of at least twenty-five miles square; and as soon as any one has discovered something, he warns the others.

From the mammals he describes the examples of cooperation within deer, antelopes, gazelles, buffaloes, wild goats, sheep, wolves, squirrels, dogs, rats, hares, rabbits, horses, donkeys, deer, wild boars, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, seals, walruses and monkeys. His observations reinforced his view that competition weakened rather than reinforced the individual species; he concluded:

Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual Support. In the great struggle for life – for the greatest possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste of energy – natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible. The ants combine in nests and nations; they pile up their stores, they rear their cattle – and thus avoid competition; and natural selection picks out of the ants’ family the species which know best how to avoid competition, with its unavoidably deleterious consequences. Most of our birds slowly move southwards as the winter comes, or gather in numberless societies and undertake long journeys – and thus avoid competition. Many rodents fall asleep when the time comes that competition should set in; while other rodents store food for the winter, and gather in large villages for obtaining the necessary protection when at work. The reindeer, when the lichens are dry in the interior of the continent, migrate towards the sea. Buffaloes cross an immense continent in order to find plenty of food. And the beavers, when they grow numerous on a river, divide into two parties, and go, the old ones down the river, and the young ones up the river and avoid competition. And when animals can neither fall asleep, nor migrate, nor lay in stores, nor themselves grow their food like the ants, they do what the titmouse does, and what Wallace (Darwinism, ch. v) has so charmingly described: they resort to new kinds of food – and thus, again, avoid competition.

But how does this translate to human societies? Are these just observations on animal kind pushed to extremes, like the winter in Siberia, or are there lessons in there for humankind as well? Kropotkin thought there were lessons to be drawn for human evolution as well. He wrote:

Moreover, it is evident that life in societies would be utterly impossible without a corresponding development of social feelings, and, especially, of a certain collective sense of justice growing to become a habit. If every individual were constantly abusing its personal advantages without the others interfering in favour of the wronged, no society – life would be possible. And feelings of justice develop, more or less, with all gregarious animals. Whatever the distance from which the swallows or the cranes come, each one returns to the nest it has built or repaired last year. If a lazy sparrow intends appropriating the nest which a comrade is building, or even steals from it a few sprays of straw, the group interferes against the lazy comrade; and it is evident that without such interference being the rule, no nesting associations of birds could exist. Separate groups of penguins have separate resting-places and separate fishing abodes, and do not fight for them.

Kropotkin also specifically lectured in opposition to Thomas Huxley’s (the grandfather of Aldous Huxley) Evolution and Ethics lectures of 1893. Contrary to Huxley, Kropotkin believed that love, sympathy and self-sacrifice were more important than competition. In his own words:

Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience – be it only at the stage of an instinct – of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed.

Robin Monotti Graziadei is an architect and film producer. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Nullus locus sine genio.

Artificial Intelligence: An Oxymoron

Few topics gain more media attention today than the prospect of computers using AI (artificial intelligence) taking ever greater charge of human activity, even to the point where many fear AI will usurp humanity itself. This fear arises from the belief that AI has already become aware of its own existence and may decide that it is a form of life superior to less efficient human beings, who then will be judged by AI as an “imperfection” that should be removed from the planet!

This way of looking at AI computers arises from the inherently positivistic assumptions that tend to accompany a technological age, such as ours, in which natural science is seen by many as the only true and objective way of looking at the world. All this begets a kind of metaphysical materialism in which everything we find in the cosmos is the product of material entities and the physical forces which govern their behavior.

Since Darwinian naturalism views living things as the end product of material forces and particles, it is naturally assumed that the emergence of self-reflection and intelligence in man is also simply the natural product of eons of physical and organic evolution, such that complex neural networks found in highly evolved brains eventually gives rise to self-awareness and even complex forms of thinking in later hominins, including Homo sapiens. It is a short step to think of modern computers as simply artificial life forms that can develop—through a kind of self-programming—self-reflection, understanding and complex reasoning—even a concept of personhood, which they then apply to themselves.

Moreover, the natural sequence of logic here seems to be that, if material nature can produce thinking, self-reflecting organisms, such as man, then, with the advent of computers, super computers can be developed from material components which can even then “out think” human beings, as evinced by their ability to beat our best chess champions. The neural networks of artificial computers can exceed the capacity and natural programming of the human brain so as to produce superior thought processes as is now manifested by the advent of artificial intelligence.

Hence, the notion of emergence of “artificial intelligence” appears to be a scientifically correct depiction of the natural evolution of human intelligence which then begets the technology of super computers that can easily outshine even the mental capacities of their creators.

Does Richard Dawkins Really Exist?

The only problem with the above commonly accepted scientific view of reality is that it is based on a philosophical interpretation of the world in which nothing above the level of submicroscopic particles or waves actually exists as a whole thing. This theme I explain in detail in a YouTube video entitled: “Atheistic Materialism—Does Richard Dawkins Exist?”

Modern evolutionary materialists embrace what is essentially the doctrine of atomism that traces back to the Greek philosopher, Democritus (c. 460—c. 370 BC), who maintained that the world is composed of nothing but tiny, indestructible, inert, solid, material particles that interact mechanically. While this differs from modern quantum-mechanical “atoms” that are not inert, but interact through electric and magnetic force fields, the basic notion is still the same: fundamental units of matter compose all things and nothing really exists as a whole above the atomic level.

The inherent logic of both these basic atomistic worldviews entails that atomists themselves, such as Richard Dawkins, do not actually exist as whole beings. Atomism may exist as a philosophy, but atomists themselves do not exist!

As a simple example, you can produce dihydrogen oxide, better known as water, by combining oxygen and hydrogen into a single molecule. But, does the water molecule now constitute a single thing, distinct from everything else—or is it still just two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, temporarily sharing outer orbit electrons? Atomism would say that they are still just separate atoms of oxygen and hydrogen, now sharing a few electrons so as to act as a functional unity—no more a single thing in reality than is a horse and its rider. Modern physics and chemistry comport with this same atomistic interpretation.

This means in effect that nothing above the atomic level constitutes a single whole being, distinct from everything else—not fleas, not zebras, not cats, and not human beings (including Dr. Dawkins)! Atoms may engage in incredibly complex relationships with other atoms in this dynamically interacting world—including forming temporary combinations of organic molecules working synergistically according to their DNA “program” so as to present the functional unities we perceive as single things called “organisms.” Still, none of these “systems” constitute what philosophers call a “substantial unity,” that is, some whole being distinct in itself and separate from everything else. Atomism renders an interpretation of physical reality in which the interaction of uncountable atoms may form what looks like substantial unities, but which, at most, constitute merely functional unities that are in reality no more unified than a pile of sand or an automobile.

Atomism logically entails that we are merely amazingly well-organized piles of atoms!

To have real unity at levels above the atoms, you need some principle of unity that makes a thing truly the same kind of thing throughout its whole reality. Aristotelians call that principle the “substantial form.” For example, if we are one being, it is because our human nature is of one type or form. The form of our stomach is not “stomachness,” but “humanness.” We are human from top to bottom, side to side. Otherwise, we would not be one being, but just a pile of anatomical parts—or, at the deepest level, merely a pile of cooperating atoms.

The human substantial form, or soul (life principle), makes us a single, unified being or substance by pervading and specifying as human every single least part of our being that is truly “us.” This does not, of course, include things within us that are not actually part of our human substance, such as the urine in our bladders, or the acid in our stomachs.

Nonetheless, you cannot keep excluding such “non-human” entities within us without doing away with the entirety of our substance. That is, most of what we say belongs to the human body really does so and is human throughout. The nature of our toes is not “toeness,” but again, as indicated above, “humanness.”

Proponents of evolutionary materialism would maintain that their view of natural science is simply common sense, the only view of the world that comports with its actual composition of atomic or subatomic extended units of physical matter. But this entails that nothing and no one above the atomic level really exists, meaning that both the natural scientist as well as his laboratory assistants are merely glorified piles of atoms having an organizing schema of DNA, but no real existential unity—no common nature of “humanness” that unites all parts and subordinates them to a human nature that pervades their entire physical reality.

It is one thing to say that the human body is composed of atomic particles. But, it is quite another thing to say that the human being is nothing but those same atomic particles. The first statement is simply a statement of scientific fact. But, the second one is quite different, since it is a materialistic philosophical interpretation of the scientific fact—an interpretation that effectively denies the common sense reality that we live in a world composed of, not just unseen atoms, but of flowers, bugs, dogs, and people!

We all know that an automobile is an incredible functional unity that is composed of thousands of discrete and independently-existing parts. But, that does not entail that it is a genuinely-unified single being. That is why any speeding ticket is issued to the person who was the driver and not to the vehicle itself—even though it was the car that was observed breaking the speed limit. Moreover, even though the automobile far exceeds the speed of a human being in terms of ability to move through space, it lacks the existential unity needed to be subjectively responsible for its motor vehicle legal infraction. For the same reasons, even an AI computer or robot may function as an impressive functional unity—even far exceeding mere humans in computational abilities, and yet, such electronic-mechanical devices possess no more substantial unity than does the automobile.

On the other hand, human beings have a lived experience of existential unity which belies the reductionist simplicity of atomism. We are well aware of the incoming fire of all our senses presenting to our consciousness the multiple sensible qualities of numbers of physical objects external to our physical body. We are also aware that we can command and coordinate all the mental and physical powers of our person to ward off, say, the attack of an angry dog. Any abstract philosophical interpretation of unseen “atoms” which denies our immediate awareness of our own existential unity, as well as that of other things, like dogs and other persons, fails to comport with the total reality of human experience.

In the end, atomistic philosophical doctrines are no more realistic than Platonic ones, which insist that the Really Real world is not the one given in our direct experience of reality, but rather is some abstract expression of things actually unseen and unexperienced in our immediate awareness of ourselves and of the world around us.

In sum, the direct experience we have of ourselves is that we have capacities of sense experience, thought, and free choice which no individual atoms possess. Such qualitatively superior properties are not found in individual atoms. They are found solely in living organisms which exist as wholes governed by some formal principle which unifies and specifies them to be unified superior realities, such as plants, animals, or men. Physically inanimate objects—whether singular or somehow physically conjoined—simply do not have the qualitatively superior properties of living things. Such living properties are manifest solely when atomic units are part of a composite whole that exhibits that same nature throughout and activities proper to that nature. A dog is a dog from nose to tail because all of its parts act together to sustain the activities proper to the whole living canine organism.

Emergent Properties

Materialists will sometimes claim that sensory and intellectual activities found in man may not be found in bodily chemical components isolated in themselves, but that they “emerge” from atomic particles when they are combined into complex organic entities, such as animals and humans.

This may be true of simple electrical and mechanical properties, such as those manifested by atomic entities when combined into molecules. For example, hydrogen and oxygen are not liquids at room temperature, but when combined into water, they manifest that quality. But, certain qualities found in animals, such as the formation of images or sensation of objects of sight, manifest operations that are utterly beyond the limitations of merely physical objects and the atoms that compose them.

As I explain in my recently-published book, Rational Responses to Skepticism, (384-390), forming visual images or sensing visual objects entails knowing physically extended things as a whole, which is something no purely physical entity can do. What is universally true of all physical things, including atoms, is that they are physically extended in the space-time continuum, that is, with one part of them being in one part of space-time and another part being in another part of space-time. No physical thing can be in two distinct locations at the same time, unless it is one thing with diverse parts in different places—as our feet are in one place and our head in another.

In simple terms, that is why a television set presents the image of a dog by having thousands of diverse pixels illuminated or not illuminated over the breadth of the entire screen so as to form an image of the whole dog (from a single perspective). (A pixel or “picture element” is the smallest unit in a digital image.) But each pixel is either “on” or “off.” No single pixel represents the whole dog. TV sets do not “see” the objects they display on their screens. It takes a living dog to look at the screen and bark at what he sees as an entire dog.

This is also why every kind of physical recording, sensing, data processing device, and the like, necessarily uses some form of physically extended medium to display or express the content which it stores and/or manipulates. This is because it really “knows” nothing, but is simply retaining and/or rearranging the content of the objects it “apprehends” into a format that that living knowers alone can either sense or understand.

Thus, the “core storage and processing” mechanism of every data-processing machine is itself extended in space so that one part of it can represent one part of the “known” object and another part represents a different one, whether it be recorded on photographic film, a disc, a chip, tape, or any other physically extended object that can “point by point” represent something else—even written content, such as this article. This physical process of recording and manipulating data in no way constitutes actual cognition.

On the contrary, only an immaterial power that is not extended in space is able to grasp the whole of a sensed object as a single unified whole all at once. The dog sees the entire image of the dog on the TV screen, precisely because the dog’s sight—unlike the TV screen itself—is not composed of discrete physical parts that merely represent “on” or “off” of pixels, but rather is able to apprehend the whole as a whole because, being immaterial, it grasps the entire sensed object in a simple act that has no physical parts. (N.B., Grasping the “whole” does not mean seeing the object from all sides at once, but merely seeing the entire surface that presents itself from a given perspective.)

Some materialists claim that this immaterial ability of sense cognition to grasp whole objects in a simple act is merely a property that “emerges” from matter under suitable conditions—just as “wetness” appears in the place of hydrogen and oxygen gasses when they chemically combine. But this assertion clearly violates the principle of sufficient reason when applied to extended material things trying to apprehend physical objects as a whole. For it claims that discrete physical parts, which are themselves inherently unable to grasp the unity of whole sense objects, are still somehow the adequate reason for apprehending a visible object as a unified whole.

While “wetness” is still a physical property of certain chemicals in a combined state, being physically extended in space-time is precisely the limiting factor that makes physical things, as such, unable to explain the simplicity of the act of grasping a whole visible object all at once. That is, it simply is not in the nature of matter to do this. For matter to express all the content of a physically extended object in a single location is as impossible as it is for a TV screen to express an entire picture in a single pixel. That is why the material, as such, is not a sufficient reason for the performance of immaterial acts, such as seeing wholes.

To make the point even more clear, attempting to depict an extended object, like the image of a dog, on a single physical point would be like trying to put all its light content into a single pixel on a television screen. In the process all distinctions and visual content would be unified, but also no longer discernible. This is, in fact, what used to happen with the old electron tube TV sets when you turned them off. The horizontal and vertical output fields would collapse instantly, leaving for a few seconds nothing to see but a bright spot of light in the center of the screen, since all the picture data was now overlapped on itself in a single spot. The data was still there, but the image was destroyed!

Image and Concept

As if this limitation of matter were not enough to show that atomism alone cannot explain the lowest form of cognition, sensation, those acts which specify true understanding or intelligence are of an even higher form and are acts proper to true human beings alone.

Typical of the confusion which attends the empiricist mentality when confronted with traditional claims of the qualitative superiority of man over beast, the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) exhibited total incomprehension of the essential difference between the sense life of animals and the intellectual life of true human beings. He failed utterly to grasp the incommensurable difference between the sense image and the intellectual concept.

Since Hume’s empiricism entailed him maintaining that all we know are sense impressions, he viewed all knowledge as being limited entirely to the sensory order. Thus our direct experience of external objects is composed of vivid and lively sense impressions, whereas our knowledge of ideas is taken from memory or imagination and is less vivid. Modern materialists tend to follow the same reasoning.

Since for them all experience is ultimately merely sensory, no sharp distinction between images and ideas or concepts exists. All knowledge is conceived in terms of neural patterns in the brain so that images and ideas or concepts are essentially of the same nature.

But, in reality, there are sharp and easily provable distinctions between images and concepts—such that images belong to a form of internal sensation that always exhibits dependency on matter, whereas concepts are of a clearly immaterial and non-imaginable character. Images are said to be material in that they always appear under the conditions of matter. This means we find them always singular, concrete, and with material qualities like shape, color, and size that can be imagined or even realized in a painting or sculpture. You can imagine a cow or a square, but it is always this cow or this square with this particular color, size, or shape, which is also experienced as extended in space.

On the other hand, the concept or idea of “cowness” or “squareness” cannot ever be imagined or realized concretely, since it must apply to all possible cows and squares, and thus, cannot have merely the particular colors or shapes that are found in an image of one or even a group of them. You can imagine all the humans gathered at Easter in St. Peter’s Square, but even they would only be imagined as a sea of heads and would not express all the diversity of characteristics found in the concept of humanity, which covers every possible human that has ever lived or could ever live! This is not to mention the evident fact that concepts themselves cannot be imagined. For example, what is your image of justice (which is not merely a blind lady with scales) or of beauty (which is not itself physically attractive as a concept) or even of the concept of a concept itself?

Moreover, we understand concepts or ideas, but not images. We see a concrete realization of an image, perhaps, but we never can see a concrete realization of a concept. For that very reason, abstract art results in odd representations of distorted singulars when trying to depict such universal concepts as humanity or vengeance.

The bottom line is that, while images (1) are material entities as evinced by them always being under the conditions of matter and (2) are shared by both animals and man, universal concepts apply to all possible concrete instances of their content and are, thereby, abstracted from any particular material qualities at all. This means that human intellectual concepts—the meanings that underlie our linguistic inventions called words—are strictly immaterial in nature, and thus, exceed the power of any purely material being to produce. Indeed, the ability to form such immaterial concepts is the very basis for the Thomistic proofs for the strict immateriality or spiritual nature of the human intellectual soul, since the ability to form such strictly non-material entities exceeds the capacity of anything that is purely material in nature.

All this is but a brief summary of a topic I have treated in far greater detail in my book referenced above. (162-176.)

Why Artificial Intelligence is an Oxymoron

What has all the above analysis got to do with the question of artificial intelligence in computers? It is this. The entire presumption that computers can exhibit intelligence like human beings is, in the first instance, based on the belief that animals possess some primitive form of intelligence in the form of an internal life of interacting images taking place in neural networks in their brains. Since Darwinian naturalistic evolution views man as being simply a highly developed animal, it maintains that thought processes in the human brain are simply better developed abilities to manipulate images which constitute primitive thinking in higher animals.

Therefore, if—following this materialistic reasoning—human intelligence is basically a form of complex manipulation of images within the human brain, and if the brain and its images are material in nature—the end product of blind evolutionary processes, then, in principle, there is no reason that electronic computers cannot be programmed to manipulate their own material data in such a way as to actually constitute thinking and the possession of intelligence.

Indeed, are not computers viewed as “thinking machines” already? Do we not program them to use symbolic logic to analyze highly complex intellectual problems and draw probabilistic or absolutely true conclusions?

So, are not these thinking machines already exhibiting intelligence—even though, at least until recently, under the direction of human programmers? What does the concept of artificial intelligence add to this equation except the notion that the computers will “take over” the whole process themselves—become self-programming—and engage in intellectual pursuits of their own? Is that not what is already being claimed for AI computers and even AI robots?

But there is one small fly in the ointment. While computers can be programmed to manipulate symbols we humans encode for them, and while they can present to us the logical inferences derived from such formal logic, this does not entail that such computers actually understand the intellectual concepts or ideas which these symbols represent!

That is, you can get a computer to write “Cogito, ergo sum.” But that does not mean it has even a single iota of understanding about what it just wrote!

As we have shown above, while animals have a sense life entailing material images in their cognitive faculties, this does not entail that they possess intellectual understanding of universal ideas or concepts. But, it is precisely the understanding of meanings or concepts which constitutes the essence of intelligence. In fact, the word, “intelligence,” is taken from the Latin “intus” and “legere,” which means “to read within.” That is to read within the very nature of things. “Intellegere” means “to understand.” And it is from “intellegere” that we derive the English term, “intellect.”

Since human beings alone understand concepts or ideas, not mere images, human beings alone possess true intellect. That is, man alone, among all the animals, is an intellectual creature of God.

Hence, the train rushing toward expecting intelligence from blind material evolution is derailed at the point at which we move from experiencing mere images to making the claim that there is actual understanding of the concepts with which these images are merely associated. Indeed, we may have an image of a blind lady holding scales which is associated with the concept of justice—but, the image itself conveys none of the understanding of this noble concept and all its implications!

Even some otherwise well-educated present commentators frequently refer to possible space aliens as being “sentient creatures” of God. But Merriam-Webster defines “sentient” to mean “responsive to or conscious to sense impressions; aware; finely sensitive in perception or feeling.”

In a word, sentient creatures are mere animals, who share the powers of sensation. They have sense experience. But, that does not entail that they possess any intellectual powers. What is happening here is that these commentators are failing to distinguish sensation from true intellection. Man alone on this planet possesses true intellect, because man alone has the power to understand concepts, form judgments, and reason to conclusions. That is why traditional philosophers define man as a “rational animal,” meaning an animal with intellectual powers enabling him to engage in true reasoning whose content he understands—not the mere sense experience and association of images found in brute animals.

Computers—no matter how sophisticated—fail to fulfill the meaning of any form of intelligent beings on two counts: (1) they are not even things whose substantial unity is constituted by a single substantial form making all its parts to share the same nature, and (2) they have no intelligence at all, since to have intelligence is to understand the natures of the things symbolically represented by computer language. Not only do they understand nothing, but, unlike even a dumb bunny, they do not have sensation of anything at all—since they lack the substantial unity needed to be a living animal that is able sense physical objects as a whole.

Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron because it is a simple contradiction in terms. If something is artificial, it lacks genuine intelligence—no matter how complex and impressive its external behavior may be programmed or even self-programmed to appear. If something has true intellectual experience, it cannot be a mere artificial object. Rather, it is a natural creature with an intellectual, spiritual soul directly created by God.

Bad News for Captain Kirk

As an addendum consistent with the philosophical principles explained in the analysis given above, I cannot but think of the thousands of times Captain Kirk and his crew on Star Trek employed transporters in order to journey to distant stars or planets or even just to the surface of a planet or back up to the mother ship.

The basic concept of a transporter is that it disassembles the molecular structure of the person and uses the format of that molecular structure to assemble the same person at some distant point. This theoretical device is based on the assumption that an object or person is simply a properly-configured collection of atoms—in accordance with the false philosophical claims of atomism.

The only problem with this process is that disassembling the atomic structure of the person also destroys his really existing substantial unity, which means—simply put—you just killed him!

Whatever structure is attempted to be reassembled from molecules at the end point of the “transfer” lacks any substantial form to unify it. Since that substantial form happens also to be a spiritual soul, unless the God of all creation deigns to give ultimate proper organization to those molecules by creating and infusing a human spiritual soul into that matter, nothing genuinely alive and human can appear at the other end of the transmission!

More importantly, if you are Captain Kirk, what was your body remains totally disassembled back at the starting point and you are dead. It makes me wonder how many times a “Captain Kirk” died in the years Star Trek was on television.

Dr. Dennis Bonnette retired as a Full Professor of Philosophy in 2003 from Niagara University in Lewiston, New York, where he also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department from 1992 to 2002. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 1970. He is the author of three books, Aquinas’ Proofs for God’s Existence, Origin of the Human Species, and Rational Responses to Skepticism: A Catholic Philosopher Defends Intellectual Foundations for Traditional Belief, as well as many scholarly articles.

Featured: Creación de las aves [Creation of the Birds], by Remedios Varo; painted in 1957.

Professor Sucharit Bhakdi… Rabble-Rouser?

Professor Sucharit Bhakdi of Kiel, Germany, who has spearheaded the campaign against the “Covid” dictatorship and the MRNa “vaccines,” has recently been indicted on flimsy charges that boil down to rabble-rousing. What is more, a change to the German Criminal Code has just been waved through the Bundestag, one designed to facilitate a clamp-down on dissidents of every stripe, including those who do not buy the “Satanic Putin” tale. We review the issues here.

Since the 16th Century and the crusade waged by a certain ex-Augustinian and heavy feeder, unredeemed by his undeniable literary skills, and going by the initials ML, Germany’s enthusiasm for freedom of speech and freedom tout court, has been at best, lukewarm. Mendelssohn Moses, author of these lines, would merely remark that the views of that monk on the subject of my co-religionaries, though notoriously unflattering were perhaps less immediately disastrous than his views on the peasantry—8,000 murdered in the Peasant Wars of 1524 to 1526.

The fact remains that from the days of the bizarre ML, the German-speaking world, like England since the day of that other heavy feeder Henry VIII, has squirmed in fear of the authorities.

However, while in 2022, the entire German state apparatus is seen to fawn and simper before its NATO oppressors, Germany is not quite Sodom and Gomorrah: she has righteous men in her midst.

Such as Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, standing straight as a poplar. Although born a Thai, he has been a German citizen for decades, while his endless CV points to perhaps the most-decorated natural scientist in the contemporary German-speaking world:

1979 Justus Liebig University Giessen Prize
1980 Konstanz Medicine Prize
1987 German Society for Microbiology Prize
1988 Dr. Friedrich Sasse Prize
1989 Ludwig Schunk Prize for Medicine
1989 Robert-Koch-Förderpreis of Clausthal-Zellerfeld
1991 Gay-Lussac Humboldt Prize
2001 Aronson Prize
2005 H. W. Hauss Award
2005 Verdienstorden des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz
2009 Rudolf-Schönheimer Medal of the German Society for Arteriosclerosis Research

From the outset of the Scamdemic, Bhakdi spoke out on every occasion against the irrational “anti-Covid” measures, and then, well ahead of the curve, against the so-called MRNa-based anti-Covid “vaccines,” foreseeing precisely what forms of harm would likely arise. Suddenly, he and his wife Karina Reiss became international celebrities, and their books on the matter, best-sellers. (Separately, there is also an excellent dissection of the “Covid” scam networks by two intelligence specialists).

Where NATO Stalkers, Playing Goodie Two-Shoes, Make the “Law”

But in Germany, the hyena, not the bear, roams the wilds. The moment an intellectual pokes his head above the parapet, an army of hyena-like Goodie Two-Shoes pore over his every word, in hopes of finding a nano-particle of that catch-all substance, “anti-semitism.” (As an aside, allow me to add that Palestinians and “Arabs” are every bit as much the Semite as Papa Mendelssohn, save that anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and of course anti-Muslim sentiment is actively encouraged… one wonders why?)

Be that as it may, one day in April 2021, bursting out in disappointment at the lamb-to-the-slaughter attitude of Israel’s citizens in the face of the vaccine lobby, Professor Bhakdi exclaimed:

“Here we have a people who fled Germany, a Germany racked by outright Evil, and we find they have made (of their country) something worse even than was Germany then (…) What is disturbing with the Jews, is how quickly they learn. No other people learns so readily. But they have learnt what is Evil—and they have put it to work. Israel has become hell on earth.”—Die lebende Hölle.

On September 24, 2021, at an election meeting whilst campaigning for office on the Die Basis party ticket, Bhakdi declared that the “anti-Covid” injections were to be analysed in the context of an Endziel, a “final solution” or second holocaust.

If one can still speak of “law” in Germany’s current state of disarray, we are to believe that merely referring to a second holocaust would amount, in legal terms, to “relativising” that which struck the Jews in WWII. One fails to see how such a ludicrous argument might hold, but the point, of course, is to muzzle all opposition.

And so, in July 2021 we find the Public Prosecutor at Kiel, the town of Bhakdi’s residence, examining whether the Professor should be indicted for “relativisation” (sic) and “incitement to hatred” (Volksverhetzung), which roughly corresponds to that legal UFO known to the English-speaking world as “hate crime.” To the keen disappointment of some, in November 2021 the Prosecutor dropped the case for lack of suitable grounds.

The air resounded with relentless howling from the hyenas however, and by May 2022, Kiel’s superior, the Public Prosecutor for the State of Schleswig Holstein, had been got to file a complaint against Bhakdi for “incitement” to hatred and contempt, which was accepted by the Plön Circuit Court (Amtsgericht) in November, just in time for Bhakdi’s birthday. By the way, the legal position has been dealt with on several occasions and very competently, by a group of “dissident” Judges and Prosecutors, KriSTA.

In any event, assuming that poor Germany, littered with US bases and atomic weapons, may still exist in May 2023, the case will be tried in March 2023.

Bhakdi Attempts to Head Off the “Covid” Disaster

Allow me a digression here: Professor Bhakdi is a practising Buddhist, and something of a visionary, foreseeing the consequences of acts and events years, even decades in advance. For us Jews, Bhakdi is the very definition of a prophet. Like the vaccinologist Stefan Hockertz, who has had, literally, to flee Germany, or his colleagues Professors Vélot, Peronne or Toubiana in France, or the medical doctors Carlo Giraldi, Dario Giacomini and Giovanni Vanni Frajese in Italy, Bhakdi was right about “Covid,” right about the “anti-Covid” scam, right about masking, right about the D-dimer tests, right about the MRNa vaccines—while most of the Western world was hiding under the bed.

Fearing for the future of Man, and to crack us out of mass-hypnosis, Professor Bhakdi has a penchant for harsh, even ruthless language – prophetic if you prefer. Upon this being who suffers for Man and who is therefore vulnerable, unlike the grinning enforcers of this world, falls the latter’s rage, as they attempt to drive him to bankruptcy through legal fees, and to despair.

Wailing and Teeth-Gnashing? The Rest of the World has had Enough

Before looking at the changes to German law on Volksverhetzung, voted up shortly before midnight on October 20, 2022, allow me to return to the allegedly unique character of what happened to European Jewry between 1939 and 1945, the incessant droning repetition of which is designed to keep Germans cowed and on the leash for eternity.

Most historians would put the figure for the dead amongst my co-religionaries at roughly six million. WHAT then shall we say of the 26 to 40 million Slavs, Hungarians and Gypsies of various nations “lost in death’s dateless night” during Operation Barbarossa? Entirely burnt up, sacrificed—that is what the Greek word “holocaust” means. For Russia alone, though the exact figure remains unknown, 20 million civilians at least are thought to have been lost, and well over ten million soldiers, as the Wehrmacht broke over her borders. What if Operation Barbarossa had succeeded? Would there yet remain a single Slav on earth? Bear in mind that we are meant to believe that the Western Ukraine is not “Slav”. Therefore, what of the current alliance between Germany, NATO and the Stepan-Banderites in the Ukraine—is this not Operation Barbarossa II?

Accordingly, Papa Mendelssohn has a message to his co-religionaries: Watch your step. The peoples of the rest of the world have had it up to here with our non-stop wailing and gnashing of teeth over the events of 1939-1945, used to justify the many and varied crimes perpetrated before our eyes—or, face it, by us. Get to work on the veterinarian Albert Bourla and his bosses first. Given the kill-rate in Israel from the vet’s injection campaign, saving what’s left of us Jews is going to be a tall order. So, deal with it. (As an aside—have we yet the right to call ourselves “Jews,” as we blithely ignore Yahve’s Sixth and most fundamental Order to Moses? Which is THOU SHALT NOT KILL).

Professor Bhakdi is Not, nor Ever Has Been, a Volksverhetzer

On no account whatsoever, neither in the ancient nor in the modern sense of the term, can Professor Sucharit Bhakdi be said to be a “Volksverhetzer.”

The term Volksverhetzung is an ancient one, referring to acts that deliberately cause disturbance amongst the people. It is made up of the term Volk (people), and the ancient verb hetzen or verhetzen, which means “to stir up” or “incite.” Might there be some sort of relation between the verb hexen, to cast an evil spell, and hetzen? Whatever—the fact remains that in modern times, the legal purview of such an offence must always be very narrow indeed, and restricted to those rare circumstances where an agitator willfully stirs the crowd to perpetrate a crime against persons or property. A very recent and telling example of Volksverhetzen and Hexerei (witchcraft) is when provocateurs excited the crowd to burn fifty Russian-speaking trade unionists alive in their offices at Odessa on May 2, 2014.

And so we have the latest wording (October 20, 2022) of Section 130 para. 5 of the German Penal Code:

“Whosoever shall approve of, deny or crassly downplay whether in public or at a demonstration, a gesture amongst those referred to at Sections 6 to 12 of the International Criminal Code directed at a group referred to at paragraph 1, point 1 (of the German Criminal Code), or against an individual on account of his belonging to that group, in such fashion as to incite to hatred or violence against such persons or group and to disturb the peace, may be sentenced to fines or to three years’ goal.”

As the Göttingen legal scholar Dr. Wolfgang Bittner observes, Sections 6 to 12 of the International Criminal Code concern genocide, crimes against Mankind, against persons, operations and humanitarian emblems, and war crimes that involve forbidden methods of means of war. That Section’s purview is so vast, that a Prosecutor or Magistrate will enjoy virtually unrestricted latitude faced with dissidents of any stripe. What of Demonstrator X marching down the street, whilst somewhere lost in the crowd Demonstrator Y, a hirsute fanatic or provocateur, waves about a sign with irresponsible scribblings? Might X be prosecuted for marching in the same crowd? With the new wording of Section 130, the answer may very well be Yes.

“Political convictions” and New Section 130

Neither is Colonel (Reserve) Edgar Siemund a happy camper—as one sees from his remarkable commentary, published on November 3rd in the on-line Austrian weekly Wochenblick.

Col. Siemund, a practising lawyer, notes that the German Government claims to have had new Section 130 para 5. voted up, only further to grievances raised by the EU, when Germany “failed” to implement EU Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JAH dated 28th November 2008 on various forms of racism and xenophobia. That Framework Decision however, dates from 2008, while the Bundestag was called upon to vote in October 2022—out of the blue and near midnight—on this rider, smack in the midst of NATO’s Operation Barbarossa II.

Secondly, Col. Siemund pointed to a fascinating little “Whereas” (N° 10) of that Framework decision, where one reads:

“This Framework Decision does not prevent a Member State from adopting provisions in national law which extend Article 1(1)(c) and (d) to crimes directed against a group of persons defined by other criteria than race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin, such as social status or political convictions.”

Are we to understand that harsh critics of the Ukrainian Banderites such as Arno Klarsfeld, may henceforth be indicted for Volksverhetzung, having objected to the Banderites’ “political convictions?”

As one will readily perceive, like most of what passes for EU legislation, these self-proclaimed “legal” texts are so poorly drafted, as to admit of virtually any interpretation or rather, manipulation. That this is precisely the aim, is scarcely conjecture.

Following Col. Siemund’s lead, we shall skim through the all-purpose terminology offered up on a platter to Prosecutors, terminology for which the new German Section 130 does not trouble to propose a definition, whether linguistic or legal.

  • leugnet (to deny) : should a researcher express doubt as to a received “truth”, has he ipso facto become a “denier?”
  • gröblich verharmlosen (crassly relativise or minimise): who shall define the semantic field of the adverb “crassly”? What does “relativising” a murder mean? Merely placing it into a military or social context? Would a silly, vulgar joke brawled out at a drunken get-together suffice ?
  • zu Hass aufzustacheln (inciting to hatred) : what is “hatred”? Lack of respect for a Banderite? How does one “incite” third parties to hatred? Does that take years? Months? Minutes? Must the inciter hold sway and authority over the incited?

As an aside, it is my conviction that the notion of “hate crime” has no place, in any form, in any modern legal system. Either the hater undertakes an overt, criminal act against persons or property, or engages in an overt, criminal conspiracy to commit such acts. What he may think, whom he may hate, will always remain irrelevant to the law—unless actual harm be done. Or unless we intend to carry on policing Thought—a trend which cannot but lead to mass psychosis, outbreaks of rage and thus criminality on an unheard-of scale.

Surprise!—The Non-Existent “Russian” Lobby and Sundry “Dissidents”—The Law’s Real Target

On November 5th, 2022, Ulrich Heyden, a formerly mainstream and now “controversial”, Moscow-based reporter, observed in Rubikon Magazin
that the German Parliament, manifestly intent on setting up a legal grey-zone, expressly declined to restrict the notion of Volksverhetzen in criminal law, to those rare cases where a domestic or international Court had already found that some form of war crime or crime against humanity was indeed involved.

According to Heyden, a prominent Green Party MP, Canan Baryam, after expressing delight at the opportunities the new Section 130 might afford against the opposition party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), let the cat out of the bag to Legal Tribune: “one can full well imagine a state of affairs,” where the new Section 130 might be relied upon against those who fail to toe the NATO line on “Putin’s” war in the Ukraine. “For example”, she said “in the context of the Russian war of aggression, endorsing a war crime against the Ukrainians as a group via slogans or signs carried aloft at a demonstration, could become an indictable offence.”

New Section 130 Cunningly Interwoven with the G10 Act

As though the above were not enough, on to the hidden nasties. Like Dr. Hans-Georg Maassen, former head of the Bundesverfassungsschutz (domestic intelligence services) now considered to be a “dissident” and a “conspiracy theorist”, Col. Siemund has happened on another worm in the bud. Section § 3 para. 1 S. 1 Nr. 6A of the Act dealing with limits on the secrecy of private correspondence (Gesetz zur Beschränkung des Brief-, Post- und Fernmeldegeheimnisses)10, known as the G10 Act, refers back to the aforesaid Section 130.

Given the rarefied responsibilities Dr. Maassen held until very recently, it may not be found amiss to cite his Tweet from October 26th in full:

“Take a close look at the new wording of Section § 130… it’s an onslaught on freedom of opinion. Few realise that Section § 3 para. 1 S. 1 Nr. 6A of the G10 Act refers back to it. (…). The latter Section deals with monitoring telephones, WhatsApp, e-mails etc. and the post by the intelligence services, which monitoring may be set up as soon as someone even thinks of Volksverhetzung. Since we now have a broader purview of Section § 130 of the Criminal Code, Section § 3 of the G10 Act may be implemented without restriction. The law as it stands today, was already unworthy of a free democracy, since the intelligence services may listen in to someone on mere suspicion of Volksverhetzung (as opposed to some capital crime). With the broadened purview of the offence under Section § 130 and consequently, extension of Section § 3 of the G10 Act, not a shred remains of the secrecy of private correspondence.”

Just perhaps, writes Col. Siemund, those who live in glass houses might not want to throw stones – while 12 million Germans have been forced or coerced into taking the “anti-Covid” shots with the disastrous known effects, the unvaccinated have been ostracised and deprived of basic rights. One day rather sooner than one might imagine, these twisted laws may be twisted back against the perpetrators of these new forms of injustice … such as one Nils Dampz, who, from German public television’s ARD studios at Los Angeles, in an article attacking Elon Musk, went on to refer to non-conformists as “rats, racists or conspiracy theorists”.

Meanwhile, back at the Ramstein air base in Hessen, the earth trembles at the arrival of US bombers, whilst Foreign Minister “Miss Piggy” Baerbock baldly states that the Ukraine’s interests must prevail over those of Germany’s citizens. Behind the back of Chancellor Scholz, away in China attempting to patch up the broken crockery, Miss Piggy then receives US Secretaries Blinken and Vikki “Cookie Handout” Nuland.

Keep calm and carry on. As the Gauleiters winkle away at their work of death and destruction, a shadow government is arising in every nation of Europe, made up of those who like Sucharit Bhakdi, are Thomas Mores who will keep their head.

[On November 30, 2022, Professor Bhakdi spoke, via video, to a sold-out conference in Austria, to which Herbert Kickl head of the FPÖ, sent a message of greetings when he was unable to attend at the last minute].

Mendelssohn Moses is a Paris-based writer.

Lies, Spies and US Bioweapons on the Verge of Armageddon

Initially, when the Russians brought the existence of the Ukrainian biolabs to the attention of the world, it was denied outright—the official Western response was—”those Ruskies just never stop lying.” And having shut down RT news, hardly anyone in the West knew anything about the Russian claim except that it was being made and it was therefore “disinformation,” and only conspiracy theorists believed it. Given there still has been no declaration of war by any Western country against Russia, one might think the “voices of social conscience” and the “guardians of truth” might at least be curious to know why the Western population was generally being “protected” from Russian news sources because the bright sparks thought the people just too dumb to be able to distinguish between truth and lie.

For a few years now, the bright sparks have decided that they alone know “the truth.” I am not sure which “settled science” it was exactly that decided that Russian media always tells lies, and that Western people are too gullible to be trusted with open access to Russian media. But it must have been the result of some scientific study by irreproachable “scientists,” because the masters of social conscience know and own the science on any given topic, and it was only us stooges that thought that such control of information was further proof of the dangerous totalitarian stranglehold of the Western world’s “leaders” and their mental enforcers.

But glory be, thanks to Victoria Nuland, that brain box and Democrat wife of Republican neo-con Robert Kagan, the current Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and former Assistant Secretary of State European and Eurasian Affairs, the US go-to girl in the “Revolution of Dignity” (you know, the one where “Dignity” meant burning alive their political opponents in Odessa—which local Russian speakers put at close to 400. But, hey, what would they know—they only lived there)—the story needed to by updated. Nuland clarified to the hapless Marco Rubio, who, when questioning her, expected her to respond that there were no labs, that they were actually just perfectly safe biolabs, conducting public health research. But with Russians in the picture, Nuland took on the role of Cassandra to warn that said labs in Ukraine were now a cause for concern, because their benign public health research was sure to be turned into “bioweapons” by those evil Russian.

Of course, the issue of biolabs and bioweapons is central to what is happening now—and is yet another factor in Russia’s “invasion.” And to make sure we would all share “the correct” memory of all this, on June 9, 2022 AD, the Pentagon released a Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts with Ukraine, Russia and Other Former Soviet Union Countries. I think the centerpiece of the document is this:

The United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades. The collaborative programs have focused on improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.

On its release, some journalists, like Steve Sweeney from People’s World reported (June 14) that “The Pentagon said on Thursday that it has operated 46 biolabs in Ukraine handling dangerous pathogens, after previously dismissing the charges as Russian propaganda.” PolitiFact quickly weighed in with “The 46 facilities referenced in the articles and in the government’s fact sheet are owned and operated by Ukraine.” In the world of PolitiFact “working collaboratively” does not seem to be a synonym for funding. But while for the strict grammarians and guardians of “facts,” a tomato is definitely not a tomahto, the pertinent issue is smothered in the race to present nice, neat, clean facts to prevent us from ever believing anything that was not put together by team Goody Global Two Shoes—and that is the point made by bioweapons analyst Francis Boyle:

One of the latest explanations from a U.S. State Department spokesperson is that Ukraine has ‘biodefense’ laboratories, which are ‘not biological weapons facilities.’ The problem with making a distinction between ‘biodefense’ and ‘biowarfare’ is that, basically, there is none. No biodefense research is purely defensive, because to do biodefense work, you’re automatically engaged in the creation of biological weapons. All dual use research can be used for military purposes, and often is. As explained by Boyle, the idea behind ‘biodefense’ research is that there might be a natural pathogen out there that can cause a pandemic, or someone might release an engineered biological weapon, that we need to prepare a cure for.

How did such an obvious point pass the mental geniuses who tell us what to think? By the way Boyle is a human rights lawyer for all sorts of causes that generally fit neatly into the educated politically activist academic consensus (a critic of Israel and exponent of Palestinian rights, an advocate for indigenous and first nation rights, a supporter of Hawaiian self-determination, an international-law expert and legal adviser to the first Bosnia-Herzegovinian president). Then, he took an interest in bioweaponry and connected it to COVID. At once he became a “conspiracy theorist.” Anyone who thinks Big Pharma is capable of hazardous decisions, leveraging government and being involved in cartel collusion, and profiteering, and that it should be subjected to the kinds of protocols that no longer seem to exist for any of the larger corporation—is now labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”

If such a prime fact as Boyle’s about the nature of “biodefense” is smothered by weasel words, and by simply deferring to official statements made by the very operatives whose operations are being questioned, how was it ever possible for questions about government bioweaponry to get a serious airing in the public sphere? Answer—it was not possible, because the rules governing the “public square” no longer favor any kind of critical discussion—the public square itself dictates “the acceptable answers” to topics, and the public square is what the owners of that square say that it is—for the public square is very much a private possession.

But apart from the logic that Boyle brought to the conversation, even before every major news outlet in the country was falling over itself to attack right-wing conspiracy theorists, Newspunch counterpunched by demonstrating what a bunch of fraudsters the factcheckers are—when it reached back into the archives and found a piece from BioPrepWatch.com published in 2010: “Deleted Web Pages Show Obama Ordered Ukraine BioLabs to Develop ‘Deadly Pathogens.’” Allow me to reproduce the rest of the report:

Thenationalpulse.com reports: The article, which also highlighted the work of former Senator Dick Lugar, was additionally included in Issue No. 818 of the United States Air Force (USAF) Counterproliferation Center’s Outreach Journal.

Lugar said plans for the facility began in 2005 when he and then-Senator Barack Obama entered a partnership with Ukrainian officials. Lugar and Obama also helped coordinate efforts between the U.S and Ukrainian researchers that year in an effort to study and help prevent avian flu,” explained author Tina Redlup.

A 2011 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Anticipating Biosecurity Challenges of the Global Expansion of High-Containment Biological Laboratories explained how the Odessa-based laboratory “is responsible for the identification of especially dangerous biological pathogens.

This laboratory was reconstructed and technically updated up to the BSL-3 level through a cooperative agreement between the United States Department of Defense and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine that started in 2005. The collaboration focuses on preventing the spread of technologies, pathogens, and knowledge that can be used in the development of biological weapons,” the report continues.

The updated laboratory serves as Interim Central Reference Laboratory with a depozitarium (pathogen collection). According to Ukrainian regulations, it has a permit to work with both bacteria and viruses of the first and second pathogenic groups,” explains the report.

A separate document detailing Ukraine’s biolab network from the BioWeapons Prevention Project outlines in greater detail the scope of pathogens the facility has conducted research with.

Among the viruses the lab studied were Ebola and “viruses of pathogencity group II by using of virology, molecular, serologica and express methods.”

Additionally, the lab provided “special training for specialists on biosafety and biosecurity issues during handling of dangerous biological pathogenic agents.”

The unearthed biolab facility follows intense scrutiny over the U.S. government’s decision to fund risky, “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan at a Chinese Communist Party-run lab with military ties.

The combination of algorithmic-controlled information and the vanishing of web sites that disprove the approved “line” of the cabal at Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc., as well as the CIA, the FBI and the Government—is now such a conspicuous feature of our information flow in the West that an obvious question arises—how can anyone, who wants to get at the truth of things, still believe any official news source today? With respect to the war, in general, and the biolabs, in particular, the only position that is now permitted to be published in mainstream media is that if the Russians claim something, it is ipso facto propaganda and false. All nice and Manichean. And the way this seems to now be proven is that Government intelligence officials tell us so. Once upon a time academics and journalists were far more inclined to think that if the CIA said something there was a fair to good chance it was a lie.

So, before we carry on with looking briefly at the history of US biowarfare and what the Russian arguments and claims about US biolabs and weapons are, and why this should be widely known and discussed, instead of being denounced, and shutdown—let us just remind ourselves of a few unpleasant truths about the CIA, and why it is utterly imbecilic (and fully in keeping with the our age of the imbecilic) that journalists have derived their facts and larger narrative for understanding the Russia-Ukraine war from the Central Imbecilic (sorry, I meant, Intelligence) Agency.

Trust US. We are the CIA

Those of a certain age will most like be familiar with Phillip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which is Agee’s first-hand account of his twelve years as a CIA agent during his time in Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico and Washington. The essentials are laid out in a couple of early paragraphs of the book, where he writes:

When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book. Even after recent revelations about the CIA it is still difficult for people to understand what a huge and sinister organization the CIA is. It is the biggest and most powerful secret service that has ever existed. I don’t know how big the KGB is inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small compared with the CIA’s. The CIA has 16,500 employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. That does not include its mercenary armies or its commercial subsidiaries. Add them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of thousands of people and spends billions every year. Its official budget is secret; it’s concealed in those of other Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends. By law, the CIA is not accountable to Congress.

In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria, Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Zaire and Ghana. In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the repressive regime of the colonels. In Chile, The Company spent millions to “destabilize” the Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and leftists. In Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup, the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican Republic the CIA arranged the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal ex-president Juan Bosch. In Cuba, The Company paid for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Sometime later the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It is difficult to believe, or comprehend, that the CIA could be involved in all these subversive activities all over the world.

Since Agee’s diary. there have been other accounts of the CIA, mainly by former operatives or academics, which go into the details of all the election rigging, coups, assassination attempts, false flag operations, torturing and various conspiracies (yes, shock, horror! the CIA has a history of conspiring to overthrow regimes, and fuel revolts and start wars). Before the Left was a woke joke, and the CIA had set up shop as a diversity service provider, scholars like William Blum (see his Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) would write books exposing the various dirty tricks and machinations (installing bloody dictators, arming terrorists, working with drug runners, arms runners and money laundering—all for the good of the world. I thoroughly recommend Douglas Valentine’s 2017 book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World—it also has a chapter on the CIA in Ukraine. Here is synopsis of another book, Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic, by former DEA agent, Michael Levine which gives a pretty good account of what the CIA have been up to in the more overtly criminal stakes:

…the CIA has perverted the American criminal justice system by protecting drug dealers and murderers from prosecution; that Federal judges and prosecutors alleged to have broken narcotics laws have been protected from investigation; that the government of Bolivia and South American drug cartel leaders have been assisted and even paid by the CIA…without CIA support, South American cartels and the epidemic of cocaine and crack use in the U.S. would never have occurred.

During the Maidan revolution in 2014, McCain and Nuland were doing photo ops with Svoboda (the neo-Nazi political party) leader Oleh Tyahnybok and his cronies who were busy assisting in regime change. After all, at the end of the Second World War US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, recruited General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II, who “successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals.” This was hidden from the public for some fifty years, until documents pertaining to this history were declassified in 2002. The following from The National Security Archive in 2005 is worth quoting:

The documentation unearthed by the IWG (The Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group) reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers.

The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material in May of 2004, in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis. The introduction to this book emphasizes the dilemma of using former Nazis as assets:

The notion that they [CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corp, Gehlen organization] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation. Some American intelligence officials could not or did not want to see how many German intelligence officials, SS officers, police, or non-German collaborators with the Nazis were compromised or incriminated by their past service.

Apparently, the Nazi spies were a disaster! As the report continues:

Lack of sufficient attention to history-and, on a personal level, to character and morality-established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed ‘democratic convictions’ were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them (some could be blackmailed), these recruits represented a potential security problem.

But now that Russia’s geopolitical concerns are strategically regional and have nothing in common with the globalist aspirations of the former Soviets, many of the very people who previously were very willing to denounce the CIA for its interventions in Chile, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, Greece, Iran, Indonesia etc. are more than willing to read from the script prepared by the CIA. Still, the take-home point from any of the left-leaning books on the CIA, written in the last thirty years or so, is that the CIA acted covertly, criminally, and very often under the veil of “plausible deniability;” which is to say, it was often left free to do whatever it thought necessary, without there being any followable line of command that would link its actions to the President—and, of course, it lied—constantly. It also involved itself in propaganda. It is obvious that the entrenchment of nefarious practices tend to continue well after any rationale for adopting them has vanished. On the issue of propaganda, the following from Agee is important:

The CIA’S role in the US propaganda program is determined by the official division of propaganda into three general categories: white, grey and black. White propaganda is that which is openly acknowledged as coming from the US government, e.g. from the US Information Agency (USIA); grey propaganda is ostensibly attributed to people or organizations who do not acknowledge the US government as the source of their material and who produce the material as if it were their own; black propaganda is unattributed material, or it is attributed to a non-existent source, or it is false material attributed to a real source. The CIA is the only US government agency authorized to engage in black propaganda operations, but it shares the responsibility for grey propaganda with other agencies such as USIA. However, according to the ‘Grey Law’ of the National Security Council contained in one of the NSCID’S, other agencies must obtain prior CIA approval before engaging in grey propaganda. The vehicles for grey and black propaganda may be unaware of their CIA or US government sponsorship. This is partly so that it can be more effective and partly to keep down the number of people who know what is going on and thus to reduce the danger of exposing true sponsorship. Thus editorialists, politicians, businessmen and others may produce propaganda, even for money, without necessarily knowing who their masters in the case are. Some among them obviously will and so, in agency terminology, there is a distinction between ‘witting’ and ‘unwitting’ agents.

Sound familiar? Allow me to align this with a piece by NBC (April 6 2022) that is breathtaking in its combination of chutzpah and imbecilic integrity. The headline reads “In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn’t rock solid.” “It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence,” one U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them [the Russians], Putin specifically, before they do something.”

It continues:

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine. President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions. It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.

Who needs rock solid when the government and its intel are so great?

Let’s consider one last piece on the CIA—Tim Weiner’s, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. It is a fairly sober account of the CIA by a journalist whose recent pronouncements—short of anything resembling proof—on this war seem to me to make him prey to his own quarry. But his book of 2007 makes some good points. The first is a good summing up of the limits of “intelligence”—which is salient to why it is insane for journalists to think they are doing a democracy anything other than a disservice by parroting the “talking points” of their “intelligence” sources: “Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. Garrett Jones, the CIA station chief during the disastrous American expedition in Somalia, put it plainly: ‘There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps,’ he said. “One hopes they won’t be fatal.”

The second, is a good summary of how the intelligence game changed with the war on terror, and how that “war” has led to how the CIA now operates:

The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before–beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama. It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before–beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before–most famously in 1997, in the case of Mir Amal Kansi, the killer of two CIA officers. But Bush gave the agency a new and extraordinary authority: to turn kidnapped suspects over to foreign security services for interrogation and torture, and to rely on the confessions they extracted. As I wrote in The New York Times on October 7, 2001: “American intelligence may have to rely on its liaisons with the world’s toughest foreign services, men who can look and think and act like terrorists. If someone is going to interrogate a man in a basement in Cairo or Quetta, it will be an Egyptian or a Pakistani officer. American intelligence will take the information without asking a lot of lawyerly questions.” Under Bush’s order, the CIA began to function as a global military police, throwing hundreds of suspects into secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and inside the American military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba for interrogations. The gloves were off. “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush told the nation in an address to a joint session of Congress on September 20. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.

Of course, the justification for the “war on terror” moved from the war against the Taliban to the war against Iraq; and while the rationale of that war, mentioned below, was based on false information, the real rationale enthusiastically repeated on numerous occasions by Tony Blair was that it was the task of democracies to overthrow tyrants wherever they were. Hence the requisite procedure in the international arena becomes one of declaring one’s enemy a tyrant to legitimate regime change. And as was signaled with the passing of the Magnitsky Act back in 2012, which enabled the seizure of Russian assets, the decision that regime change had to occur in Russia precedes not only the present war in the Ukraine, but the Maidan.

And if anyone out there still thinks the CIA is a trustworthy institution (and I have not even touched upon its various debacles which have been addressed by other authors) let’s go to the third passage from Weiner, which I think particularly pertinent because even the slew of pro-war Democrats might remember where they purportedly once stood (of course, I am joshing. Most of them went in boots and all with young George W and the CIA. So much for principles):

President Bush presented the CIA’s case and more in his State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003: Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to kill millions, chemical weapons to kill countless thousands, mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ-warfare agents. “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” he said. “Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. All of this was terrifying. None of it was true.

In a nutshell, there is nothing about the CIA’s history which indicates that it is a trustworthy operation. The good thing about most of the left-wing writings on the CIA—and even though I am often critical of the Left, I have always thought this aspect of their investigations to be a valuable contribution to any public considerations of state action—is that they invariably identity the nexus between corporate interests and the state. An iconic expression of the problem was by Major General Smedley Butler back in the 1930s in his War is a Racket:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Nothing has changed in that the real reason for NATO expansionism and for the most brazen proxy war funded by way Western governments funneling tax payers’ money, without resorting to anything remotely resembling electoral approval, to send weapons to Ukraine.

Far less reported are NATO’s nuclear war games which are being held some six hundred miles from Russia. And what is simply not known at all—is what the Russians are saying about US bioweapons.

A Brief History of The US Bioweapon Research and Why the Russians Are Bothered

US government research into biological warfare originated in the Second World War in response to British and French concerns that the Nazis might attack with biological weapons. They didn’t, but the Japanese were also developing biological weapons that they would use against the Chinese—they experimented on prisoners, poisoned wells, and dropped plague infested fleas over cities and rice fields. The Soviets had also been attacked with biological weapons, and after the war they convicted some of the Japanese researchers, although the Soviets had already been working on biological warfare from the 1920s and would become world leaders in bioweaponry until the Union collapsed.

The defeat of the Japanese provided a valuable source of new recruits for the US government in the area of biological warfare. The extent to which the US was able to make use of the Japanese research is not altogether clear, but we do know that both in the US and Japan secret research was being conducted, involving known war criminals for the next forty years. This information started coming to light in the 1990s when, as Sheldon Harris in his book of 1994, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover Up, the Clinton administration “began to lift the veil of secrecy concerning United States; experiments with human subjects in hundreds of studies during and since the end of World War II.” Forgive the lengthiness of the quote from Harris; but as most people will not be aware of this, I think it important to cite in full; and it nicely provides something of a history of US, Japanese and Soviet bioweaponry:

We now know that American scientists tested humans with mustard gas, other chemical agents, exposed others to radiation tests, and still others to a variety of pathogens without the subjects’ knowledge or consent. In many instances, the most distinguished scientists from the most prestigious American universities participated both in deceiving their patients and in conducting the experiments. Even today, those scientists still active in the field, and their host universities, deny involvement. Recently opened former Soviet archives disclose that the Soviet Union inaugurated a large-scale biological warfare program beginning in the mid-1920s. Humans were used often in experiments that covered a variety of diseases potentially useful in biological warfare. Research facilities were established throughout that vast nation, and, according to Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin, such research continues covertly today.

The Soviet cover was partially blown in 1979 when a massive outbreak of anthrax affected a large area around the Urals city of Sverdlovsk. The most conservative estimates are that at least ninety-six people were infected, and that some sixty-six people died as a result of the outbreak. The true figures, no doubt, are higher. The most terrifying aspect of the outbreak was the disclosure that the Sverdlovsk biological warfare plant accidentally released less than one gram of anthrax spores, possibly as little as several milligrams. It does not take much imagination to calculate how much death and destruction the release of a few grams of anthrax spores into a heavily populated community could cause.

In Japan, scientists who participated in involuntary human experiments during World War II, and earlier, dominated the administration and controlled the areas of research of the country’s National Institute of Health for one half-century after the war ended…it should be noted here that at least seven of the NIH’s Directors and five of the Institute’s Vice Directors, during the 1930s and 1940s, engaged in biological warfare experiments which employed human test subjects. The National Institute of Health is a government-supported agency. Yet these known war criminals were employed by this institution, were given great powers within the organization and continued to use humans without their consent, and often without their knowledge, in investigations that were carried on during the course of more than forty years. It is known that experiments were authorized on prisoners, babies and patients in psychiatric hospitals in 1947, and from 1952 until 1955 by the NIH’s Vice Director Masami Kitaoka. Another researcher conducted bacteriological experiments on infants hospitalized in Tokyo’s National First Hospital in 1952. Later, this same researcher, from 1967 until 1971, used shigella in experiments on soldiers in Japan’s Self-Defence Forces. In May 1985, an NIH researcher experimentally injected an unapproved vaccine against a Japanese encephalitis virus into nearly 200 hospitalized children without their parents’ consent. At different times over a three-year period, 1987, 1988, 1989, Kuniaki Nerome experimentally tested two types of genetically modified vaccine against influenza on approximately forty hospitalized children. Their parents were unaware of the tests and did not give their informed consent for the vaccines to be used on their children.

There are a number of international treaties being drawn up that seek to outlaw biological warfare, and, by implication, involuntary human experimentation. The United States, Russia (the former Soviet Union) and Japan are signatories to the various international agreements outlawing human experimentation, and the production of biological warfare agents. Nevertheless, both these activities appear to be flourishing today in all three countries, as well as elsewhere in various parts of the world. It appears that human testing, biological and chemical weapons will be part of former President George Bush’s so-called new world order for some time to come.

It is true that in 1969 President Nixon made a statement signaling the end of US offensive biological weapons programs and in 1972, along with Soviet Union, the Biological Weapons Conventions, outlawing biological warfare. What one makes of this very much depends upon what one thinks of the efficacy of international declarations, pieces of paper and signatures, and whether one thinks public gestures disclose hidden operations.

One investigative journalist who was doing his job well was Gordon Thomas. Early in his book, Spies and Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare, in the midst of discussing the anthrax attacks that took place in the US in October 2001, he writes:

In 2004, the U.S. armory of weaponized biological agents consisted of 19 bacteria, 43 viruses, 14 toxins and 4 rickettsiae. Their use remains outlawed under the Geneva Protocol of 1925. Within five years of the protocol’s creation Italy, Belgium, Canada, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and the Soviet Union had all signed. The United States did not sign until 1975. By then the U.S. had developed a massive biochemical arsenal. Shortly before the September 11 attack, the Pentagon admitted that at Nellis Air Force base, one of the most secret in America, it had established the world’s largest stockpile of biological and chemical weapons. It had been created largely by CIA scientists. One of these scientists had been an obsessive “biochemist whose work pioneered the research which eventually led to the stockpile. His name was Frank Olson.

On that terrible September day in 2001, Olson’s son, Eric, was living in the family home in Frederick, Maryland, a short distance from Fort Detrick, where his father had worked for the CIA. That establishment then—and now—remains a restricted place, guarded by a variety of electronic defenses and armed “guards. As the television set in Eric’s living room endlessly replayed the 9/11 scenes of destruction from New York and Washington, he typed into his computer—on which he had stored so many astonishing matters relating to the death of his father—the most astounding claim of all:

“My father was murdered because the CIA feared he would reveal the biggest American secret of the Cold War, perhaps of all time. It is the secret of how the CIA was involved in biological warfare as well as mind control. My father had a key part in both programs.”

The takeaways from this very brief history are simply that the US has engaged in bioweapon research; that it has stockpiles—an “armory”—of weaponized biological agents; and that it is extremely secretive. Everything can of course have a purely benign spin—the research is purely defensive/preventative. It exists to save us from bio attacks by terrorists or rogue states—like Russia—and that it is important to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting hold of the research and having access to the biological agents. As we all know the United States is still the only state to have used nuclear weapons. It sets itself up as the moral arbiter of nations and what constitutes a just international order. It is entitled to be an exceptional state—that’s part of its Calvinist heritage (hard to believe when you see its public clowns today)—but it sticks to it. The question is: is the USA a force for the angels? Or does it say one thing and do another? Is its bioresearch all for the human good? Or is it a potential source of devastation?

Irrespective of what you or I might think, the thing that must be born in mind when the Russians went on the offensive about the biolabs in the Ukraine, and the US went from denial (and when that became too implausible) to “nothing to see here, all above-board, and there is nothing remotely dangerous in any of this.”

Apart from what seems to me to be the Western explanation—one can very easily find out why the Russians are bothered, and why it might even be reasonable for them to be bothered when one listens to what they are saying. And what they are saying is deeply disturbing, and as far as I can see it, while the very idea that Ukrainian/ US biolabs could be genuinely perceived as a serious threat to Russia is ridiculed and ‘factchecked’ by repeating government/ intelligence press releases, anyone who reads the Russian Government Report, The activities of the biological laboratories of the US Department of Defense in Ukraine will see that, at the very least, there is a story here, and that to bury it is but one more egregious example of the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our “idea-broking” professionals.

An essential component of that story is the connection between the end of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO (which the West refuses to concede is any serious cause of aggravation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and which involves “experts” and “journalists” repeating the lie that none ever said NATO expansion would stop with the end of the Cold War), and the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. That Program was initiated by the US government working in cooperation with the Pentagon and CIA—the Pentagon Division was originally entitled the “Defense Special Weapons Agency,” before changing its name to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the US Army Institute for Medical Research on Infectious Diseases. The Program’s ostensible purpose was the elimination of stockpiles of Soviet nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, which effectively gave the US control over former Soviet biological weapons.

Although, it might be a source of puzzlement for those who think that the USA, unlike any other imperial or hegemonic power, simply acts for the good of all human kind—and that it and its allies are not driven by the strategic self-interests of their ruling classes—the “Cooperative Reduction Program” not only involved taking over the stockpiles (and specialists trained in developing and studying pathogens and bioweapon technology) in Russia, but also countries “along the perimeter of the borders of Russia: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan,” before expanding into other parts of Asia and Africa.

What was meant to be an elimination program morphed into something far more in keeping with a geopolitical strategy commensurate with the continuation of NATO expansion and the United States’ mission of a unipolar world, and a source of concern for the Russians, viz. “one after another transferred their collections of dangerous pathogens to the United States in exchange for American help. Who neutralized them in America, how and whether they were actually destroyed—remained a mystery.”

But then everything to do with the labs was a mystery—which, on a tangential though not completely unrelated matter, is why the issues of the laboratory source of COVID, and the pharmaceutical and financial and political networks involved in the origin of the pandemic (whether true or fake) are still smothered in deceit and mystery.

In any case, what was officially presented as a program of elimination turned into an opportunity too good to miss, as an extensive network of labs working with dangerous viruses were set up in former Soviet countries: “All of them were financed by the US Department of Defense, were called differently everywhere and were created, as a rule, on the basis of scientific research institutes and SES, created back in the Soviet period. One of the features of this program consisted in the fact that in each country not one object was erected, but a whole cluster at once. Part of it was concentrated directly in the capitals of the former republics, while related institutions were located in different parts of the country.”

The Report then identifies what it calls two “strong opinions” about this network in the former Soviet republics, and they are worth citing at length:

First. American biological programs in the post-Soviet states are a way to circumvent the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and Their Destruction (BTWC). Despite the fact that the Convention was signed back in 1972, to this day, the control mechanism does not work largely due to the efforts of the United States, although the world expert community spent more than 45 years developing it. In 2001, the US demonstrated to the world that it had active bioprograms. After the attack on September 11, 2001, deaths of anthrax among people suddenly began to be recorded, and postal envelopes became the transmission route of this infection. The US Congress conducted an investigation (later it turned out that the recipe was combat and came out of the walls of the US Army bacteriological center at Fort Detrick). The attack against its own people, attributed to terrorists, gave huge political dividends to the US leadership. Now there was a formal reason to declare that the States are victims of biological terrorism and therefore unilaterally withdraw from the mechanism of collective control over the implementation of the BTWC. In autumn 2001, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced this in Geneva. At the same time, a biological threat reduction program (the Nunn-Lugar program) was proposed, and the United States began large-scale construction of military biological laboratories, including around Russia. But holding the United States accountable for conducting biological experiments that violate the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons is almost impossible. The US does not recognize the International Criminal Court and was not a signatory to the founding Rome Statute….

Second. The United States, after the collapse of the USSR, became very concerned about the conditions for the storage of pathogens and, as a result, the threat of a biological attack on America. The global American project declares its goal to minimize these threats, which is why tens and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in laboratories in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Moldova, and Ukraine. They say that dangerous strains of microorganisms may leak into the environment in these countries. However, it does not explain how, for example, Armenia or Uzbekistan can organize a biological attack on the United States or why the laboratories are mainly located in large cities with a high population density or at a close distance from them. After all, it is much more logical, if there is even a minimal threat of pathogen leakage, to build such facilities in a desert area in order to eliminate the possibility of the spread of pathogens and epidemics.

As for the more specific purposes of the research, the penultimate paragraph of the Report sums it up thus:

The activities of American biological laboratories damage the economy, including by indirect methods (due to the destruction of livestock of diseased livestock, discrediting livestock products on local and world markets), as well as the human potential of Russia (reduction of general immunity and resistance to seasonal diseases, ability to reproduce, decreased efficiency, etc.), the diversion of significant forces and resources of the state to combat artificial outbreaks of infectious diseases. As a result the dependence of the attacked countries (Russia, China and Iran) on the products of the Western pharmaceutical industry is increasing, hoping in the future to offer medicines against artificially caused outbreaks of infectious diseases.

The Report also notes the mutuality of political, military and corporate interests that are embedded in bioresearch, and the geopolitical conditions that the US needs to establish and maintain for it to be effective. Again, I quote at length:

US biolaboratories located along the borders of the Russian Federation have a number of common features. These objects are strictly classified and are located in cities or near cities with a population of over a million (Odessa, Kharkov, Almaty), near seaports (Odessa), airports (Tbilisi, Yerevan, Kyiv) or in earthquake-prone countries such as Armenia (Yerevan, Gyumri, Ijevan) , and even in areas with a probability of 9-magnitude earthquakes (Almaty). The construction of laboratories as part of projects to counter biological threats allows the United States to fully control the biological situation on the territory of both the respective post-Soviet countries and their transboundary neighbors. Virologists know that there is only one step from studying bacteria to creating a bacteriological weapon. In addition, the biolaboratories created by the United States, operating in a closed regime, are removed from the control of the governments of the countries in which they are located. Laboratories are often staffed by Americans with diplomatic immunity, and local health officials do not have direct access to these facilities.

The number of laboratory staff, from 50 to 250 people, far exceeds the number of personnel needed to maintain modern civilian laboratories with stated goals. The heads of the facilities are often appointed by persons from among the military loyal to Washington or intelligence officers. So, the CRL in Tbilisi was previously headed by the chief of Georgian intelligence Anna Zhvania and he was subordinate not to the Ministry of Health, but to the Ministry of Defense of Georgia.

In the case of Ukraine, and unlike other parts of the former USSR, it was not until the Presidency of George W. Bush that bioweapon research was conducted there. Like Obama and Trump after him, George W. originally campaigned on a foreign policy platform of cooperation with Russia—but that counted for zero once elected, and his regime’s setting up of military laboratories in Ukraine would be an important part in a chain of events that has led to the brink we now live upon.

The Report quotes the Political Scientist Dmitry Skvortsov: “Now there are 15 military laboratories in the country at once, and their activities are absolutely non-transparent and unaccountable. Hence the conclusion: these facilities were created by the Pentagon as manufacturers of biological weapons. Otherwise, why aim to prevent the spread of ‘technologies, viruses and pathogens’ used in the development of biological weapons in facilities where these weapons have never been developed?”

The Report also quotes the former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Mykola Azarov complaining about the secrecy surrounding the research and the lack of controls able to be exercised on the research.

When the story about the existence of the US/Ukraine biolabs was labelled “misinformation,” before being changed to “so what? It’s for our own good,” one might have thought that would be some follow up by journalists about claims of odd viral outbreaks in Ukraine. But that has never happened. Just because journalists do not report things does not mean such things do not exist. And the Report points out that there have been bacterial and viral outbreaks in Ukraine of the sort which indicate laboratory sources.

For example in 2010 and 2015, there were California flu pandemics:

…when the epidemiological threshold was exceeded in 20 regions. From October 2015 to February 2016, more than 350 virologically confirmed deaths from this type of A (H1N1) virus were registered in Ukraine, with 40% of deaths were young people from 18 to 26 years old who did not have chronic diseases.”

Also,

Since 1995, no cases of cholera have been registered in Ukraine. And suddenly in 2011 in Mariupol, 33 people get sick at once. In 2009, 450 Ukrainians in Ternopil suffered from a rare virus that causes hemorrhagic pneumonia. In 2014, there was another outbreak of cholera in Ukraine, which came from nowhere—then 800 people fell ill. The same thing happens in 2015 and 2017: about a hundred cases were registered in Mykolaiv.

In 2015, fatal cases of leptospirosis, rabies and other pathologies, which have long been forgotten in the EU countries, were recorded in Ukraine. In 2016, an epidemic begins in the country botulism, from which four people die, and in 2017—eight more, only according to official data.

In January of the same year, 37 residents of Nikolaev were hospitalized with “jaundice”, six months later 60 people with the same diagnosis were hospitalized in Zaporozhye. At the same time, an outbreak of hepatitis A was noted in Odessa, and 19 children from the boarding school were sent to the hospital in the Odessa region. In November 27 cases of infection have already been recorded in Kharkiv. The virus was transmitted through drinking water.

The Report also notes:

…the existence of 13,476 permanently dysfunctional anthrax sites in the country, which no one deals with, and some of them graze cattle. Only in the Odessa region there are 430 potentially dangerous objects where animals can catch the disease.

This is exactly what happened in 2018, when anthrax broke out in several villages of the Odessa region: five people ended up in the hospital with a skin form of the disease. In the Sumy region there are at least 20 animal burial grounds with anthrax, and not designated in any way.

The situation with the incidence of botulism is also close to catastrophic. In 2016, 115 cases of botulism were reported in Ukraine, of which 12 were fatal. In 2017, the country’s Ministry of health service has confirmed an additional 90 cases and 8 deaths. In subsequent years, the trend continued: 13 outbreaks were registered in the first three months of 2020 botulism, 15 people got sick, including one child of 9 years old.

The Report also draws attention to another tactic of biological weaponry that might be easier to ignore because its effects are far less dramatic and overt—and that is the release of many “small viruses, colds, varieties of runny nose, multiple strains of influenza,” that do not kill or seriously injure those affected, but which impact the general well-being and energy of a population.

And then there are the epidemics affecting agriculture and the economy:

With the beginning of the active work of DTRA in Ukraine, mass deaths from epidemics began not only of people, but also of animals. Avian flu and African swine fever have dealt a heavy blow to the country’s agriculture. For example, in 2015, 60 thousand pigs were killed and burned at the Kalita agricultural plant alone. At the end of 2016, the EU banned the import of poultry meat from Ukraine due to the epidemiological situation in the country. According to published data, since 2017 Ukraine already imports more sausage than it exports. Thus, Ukraine from a competitor in the market of agricultural products is turning into a market for these products from the EU and the USA. The money invested in the laboratory is returned.

Another example were the outbreaks of bird flu was in 2016 and 2017 that led to a temporary bans by the EU and some Eastern European countries on Ukrainian poultry.

Finally, let me cite one last section of the Teport which discusses another report undertaken by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) “analyzing the risks associates with activities in the field of American biological laboratories. In particular, the document notes that the program provides for the accumulation in the Kherson Regional Laboratory Center of the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Service of Ukraine of samples of pathogens from different regions of Ukraine under the pretext of studying the specifics of local strains and determining the degree of virulence of the obtained samples among the population”:

The next stage of cooperation, according to the SBU, should be the generalization and referral of research results to the Center for Biological Research at the US Defense Ministry, ostensibly to attract American specialists to develop vaccine samples that are maximally adapted to the residents of a particular region. The persistent efforts of the United States to resume the project indicate the intention to establish control over all domestic studies of pathogens of particularly dangerous infectious diseases that can be used for creation or modernization of new types of selective biological weapons. At the same time, it is not excluded that in the conditions of broad rights and powers guaranteed by the program, a foreign party will be able to study its own test systems on the territory of Ukraine, which creates a potential threat to epidemiological and epizootic situations, both in the region and in the country as a whole.

In sum, what the Russians fear about the biolabs is that research has been done with the explicit intention of breaking down the “national biological protection system.”

I have not the slightest doubt that if these claims were being made about the Russians the mainstream media would be creating a state of utter hysteria in the Western population. Already Western propaganda has succeeded in dehumanizing not only the Russians, but anyone who does not go along with the primary main stream media and the Pentagon and Intelligence claims made about the cause, meaning and justification of the war.

For my part, and as I have indicated in various essays for the Postil, I cannot ignore the constant calls for depopulation coming from the World Economic Forum and the likes of such gigantic brains and compassionate people as Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari—and I cannot but think that bioweaponry can easily be used for that purpose.

Indeed, I ask myself, if it is necessary to save the planet by killing a few billion people, why wouldn’t our global leaders resort to biological weaponry? Perhaps that weaponry might be used in the most charitable way by simply attacking the reproductive capacities of the weakest of the species—and the weakest would be those who come from nations whose biological protective systems have been weakened through the deliberate release of pathogens.

That is not a conspiracy theory, it is simply posing the question, why would those who openly conspire to achieve the world they want—one with far less “useless people,” and as Harari points out without the least hesitation or sense of shame, most of the world’s population simply no longer have any further use—also not do the deeds that achieve their ends?

One way of doing the culling is to condemn entire peoples by dehumanizing them—initially by taking out nations who have been branded as “monsters,” and when that is not enough simply moving on to the useless.

As for those of you who think the concerns of the Russians “monsters” are just lies and propaganda, you might ask yourself why have they just drafted a proposal urging the UN Security Council to “set up a commission consisting of all members of the Security Council to investigate into the claims against the US and Ukraine contained in the complaint of the Russian Federation regarding the compliance with obligations under the [Biological Weapons] Convention in the context of the activities biological laboratories in the territory of Ukraine,” and present a report by November 30, 2022?

Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen books. He also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.

Featured: “The Triumph of Death,” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder; painted ca. 1562.

The Marching Morons

This story first appeared in the April 1951 issue of the science fiction magazine, Galaxy.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man, of course, is king. But how a live wire, a smart businessman, in a civilization of 100% pure chumps?

Some things had not changed. A potter’s wheel was still a potter’s wheel and clay was still clay. Efim Hawkins had built his shop near Goose Lake, which had a narrow band of good fat clay and a narrow beach of white sand. He fired three bottle-nosed kilns with willow charcoal from the wood lot. The wood lot was also useful for long walks while the kilns were cooling; if he let himself stay within sight of them, he would open them prematurely, impatient to see how some new shape or glaze had come through the fire, and—ping!—the new shape or glaze would be good for nothing but the shard pile back of his slip tanks.

A business conference was in full swing in his shop, a modest cube of brick, tile-roofed, as the Chicago- Los Angeles “rocket” thundered overhead—very noisy, very swept-back, very fiery jets, shaped as sleekly swift-looking as an airborne barracuda.

The buyer from Marshall Fields was turning over a black-glazed one liter carafe, nodding approval with his massive, handsome head. “This is real pretty,” he told Hawkins and his own secretary, Gomez-Laplace. “This has got lots of what ya call real est’etic principles. Yeah, it is real pretty.”

“How much?” the secretary asked the potter.

“Seven-fifty each in dozen lots,” said Hawkins. “I ran up fifteen dozen last month.”

“They are real est’etic,” repeated the buyer from Fields. “I will take them all.”

“I don’t think we can do that, doctor,” said the secretary. “They’d cost us $1,350. That would leave only $532 in our quarter’s budget. And we still have to run down to East Liverpool to pick up some cheap dinner sets.”

“Dinner sets?” asked the buyer, his big face full of wonder.

“Dinner sets. The department’s been out of them for two months now. Mr. Garvy-Seabright got pretty nasty about it yesterday. Remember?”

“Garvy-Seabright, that meat-headed bluenose,” the buyer said contemptuously. “He don’t know nothin’ about est’etics. Why for don’t he lemme run my own department?” His eye fell on a stray copy of Whambozambo Comix and he sat down with it. An occasional deep chuckle or grunt of surprise escaped him as he turned the pages.

Uninterrupted, the potter and the buyer’s secretary quickly closed a deal for two dozen of the liter carafes. ”I wish we could take more,” said the secretary, “but you heard what I told him. We’ve had to turn away customers for ordinary dinnerware because he shot the last quarter’s budget on some Mexican piggy banks some equally enthusiastic importer stuck him with. The fifth floor is packed solid with them.”

“I’ll bet they look mighty est’etic.”

“They’re painted with purple cacti.”

The potter shuddered and caressed the glaze of the sample carafe.

The buyer looked up and rumbled, “Ain’t you dummies through yakkin’ yet? What good’s a seckertary for if’n he don’t take the burden of de-tail off’n my back, harh?”

“We’re all through, doctor. Are you ready to go?”

The buyer grunted peevishly, dropped Whambozambo Comix on the floor and led the way out of the building and down the log corduroy road to the highway. His car was waiting on the concrete. It was, like all contemporary cars, too low-slung to get over the logs. He climbed down into the car and started the motor with a tremendous sparkle and roar.

“Gomez-Laplace,” called out the potter under cover of the noise, “did anything come of the radiation program they were working on the last time I was on duty at the Pole?”

“The same old fallacy,” said the secretary gloomily. “It stopped us on mutation, it stopped us on culling, it stopped us on segregation, and now it’s stopped us on hypnosis.”

“Well, I’m scheduled back to the grind in nine days. Time for another firing right now. I’ve got a new luster to try . . .”

“I’ll miss you. I shall be ‘vacationing’—running the drafting room of the New Century Engineering Corporation in Denver. They’re going to put up a two hundred-story office building, and naturally somebody’s got to be on hand.”

“Naturally,” said Hawkins with a sour smile.

There was an ear-piercingly sweet blast as the buyer leaned on the horn button. Also, a yard-tall jet of what looked like flame spurted up from the car’s radiator cap; the car’s power plant was a gas turbine, and had no radiator.

“I’m coming, doctor,” said the secretary dispiritedly. He climbed down into the car and it whooshed off with much flame and noise.

The potter, depressed, wandered back up the corduroy road and contemplated his cooling kilns. The rustling wind in the boughs was obscuring the creak and mutter of the shrinking refractory brick. Hawkins wondered about the number two kiln—a reduction fire on a load of lusterware mugs. Had the clay chinking excluded the air? Had it been a properly smoky blaze? Would it do any harm if he just took one close—?

Common sense took Hawkins by the scruff of the neck and yanked him over to the tool shed. He got out his pick and resolutely set off on a prospecting jaunt to a hummocky field that might yield some oxides. He was especially low on coppers.

The long walk left him sweating hard, with his lust for a peek into the kiln quiet in his breast. He swung his pick almost at random into one of the hummocks; it clanged on a stone which he excavated. A largely obliterated inscription said:

ERSITY OF CHIC
OGICAL LABO
ELOVED MEMORY OF
KILLED IN ACT

The potter swore mildly. He had hoped the field would turn out to be a cemetery, preferably a once- fashionable cemetery full of once-massive bronze caskets moldered into oxides of tin and copper.

Well, hell, maybe there was some around anyway.

He headed lackadaisically for the second largest hillock and sliced into it with his pick. There was a stone to undercut and topple into a trench, and then the potter was very glad he’d stuck at it. His nostrils were filled with the bitter smell and the dirt was tinged with the exciting blue of copper salts. The pick went clang!

Hawkins, puffing, pried up a stainless steel plate that was quite badly stained and was also marked with incised letters. It seemed to have pulled loose from rotting bronze; there were rivets on the back that brought up flakes of green patina. The potter wiped off the surface dirt with his sleeve, turned it to catch the sunlight obliquely and read:

“HONEST JOHN BARLOW
“Honest John,” famed in university annals, represents a challenge which medical science has not yet answered: revival of a human being accidentally thrown into a state of suspended animation.

In 1988 Mr. Barlow, a leading Evanston real estate dealer, visited his dentist for treatment of an impacted wisdom tooth. His dentist requested and received permission to use the experimental anesthetic Cycloparadimetbanol-B-7, developed at the University.

After administration of the anesthetic, the dentist resorted to his drill. By freakish mischance, a short circuit in his machine delivered 220 volts of 60-cycle current into the patient. (In a damage suit instituted by Mrs. Barlow against the dentist, the University and the makers of the drill, a jury found for the defendants.) Mr. Barlow never got up from the dentist’s chair and was assumed to have died of poisoning, electrocution or both.

Morticians preparing him for embalming discovered, however, that their subject was—though certainly not living—just as certainly not dead. The University was notified and a series of exhaustive tests was begun, including attempts to duplicate the trance state on volunteers. After a bad run of seven cases which ended fatally, the attempts were abandoned.

Honest John was long an exhibit at the University museum, and livened many a football game as mascot of the University’s Blue Crushers. The bounds of taste were overstepped, however, when a pledge to Sigma Delta Chi was ordered in ’03 to “kidnap” Honest John from his loosely guarded glass museum case and introduce him into the Rachel Swanson Memorial Girls’ Gymnasium shower room.

On May 22nd, 2003, the University Board of Regents issued the following order: “By unanimous vote, it is directed that the remains of Honest John Barlow be removed from the University museum and conveyed to the University’s Lieutenant James Scott III Memorial Biological Laboratories and there be securely locked in a specially prepared vault. It is further directed that all possible measures for the preservation of these remains be taken by the Laboratory administration and that access to these remains be denied to all persons except qualified scholars authorized in writing by the Board. The Board reluctantly takes this action in view of recent notices and photographs in the nation’s press which, to say the least, reflect but small credit upon the University.”

It was far from his field, but Hawkins understood what had happened—an early and accidental blundering onto the bare bones of the Levantman shock anesthesia, which had since been replaced by other methods. To bring subjects out of Levantman shock, you let them have a squirt of simple saline in the trigeminal nerve. Interesting. And now about that bronze—

He heaved the pick into the rotting green salts, expecting no resistence, and almost fractured his wrist. Something down there was solid. He began to flake off the oxides.

A half hour of work brought him down to phosphor bronze, a huge casting of the almost incorruptible metal. It had weakened structurally over the centuries; he could fit the point of his pick under a corroded boss and pry off great creaking and grumbling striae of the stuff.

Hawkins wished he had an archeologist with him, but didn’t dream of returning to his shop and calling one to take over the find. He was an all-around man: by choice and in his free time, an artist in clay and glaze; by necessity, an automotive, electronics and atomic engineer who could also swing a project in traffic control, individual and group psychology, architecture or tool design. He didn’t yell for a specialist every time something out of his line came up; there were so few with so much to do…

He trenched around his find, discovering that it was a great brick-shaped bronze mass with an excitingly hollow sound. A long strip of moldering metal from one of the long vertical faces pulled away, exposing red rust that went whoosh and was sucked into the interior of the mass.

It had been de-aired, thought Hawkins, and there must have been an inner jacket of glass which had crystalized through the centuries and quietly crumbled at the first clang of his pick. He didn’t know what a vacuum would do to a subject of Levantman shock, but he had hopes, nor did he quite understand what a real estate dealer was, but it might have something to do with pottery. And anything might have a bearing on Topic Number One.

He flung his pick out of the trench, climbed out and set off at a dog-trot for his shop. A little rummaging turned up a hypo and there was a plasticontainer of salt in the kitchen.

Back at his dig, he chipped for another half hour to expose the juncture of lid and body. The hinges were hopeless; he smashed them off.

Hawkins extended the telescopic handle of the pick for the best leverage, fitted its point into a deep pit, set its built-in fulcrum, and heaved. Five more heaves and he could see, inside the vault, what looked like a dusty marble statue. Ten more and he could see that it was the naked body of Honest John Barlow, Evanston real estate dealer, uncorrupted by time.

The potter found the apex of the trigeminal nerve with his needle’s point and gave him 60 cc.

In an hour Barlow’s chest began to pump.

In another hour, he rasped, “Did it work?”

“Did it!” muttered Hawkins. Barlow opened his eyes and stirred, looked down, turned his hands before his eyes—

“I’ll sue!” he screamed. “My clothes! My fingernails!” A horrid suspicion came over his face and he clapped his hands to his hairless scalp. “My hair!” he wailed. “I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got! That release won’t mean a damned thing in court—I didn’t sign away my hair and clothes and fingernails!”

“They’ll grow back,” said Hawkins casually. “Also your epidermis. Those parts of you weren’t alive, you know, so they weren’t preserved like the rest of you. I’m afraid the clothes are gone, though.”

“What is this— the University hospital?” demanded Barlow. “I want a phone. No, you phone. Tell my wife I’m all right and tell Sam Immerman—he’s my lawyer—to get over here right away. Greenleaf 7-4022. Ow!” He had tried to sit up, and a portion of his pink skin rubbed against the inner surface of the casket, which was powdered by the ancient crystalized glass. “What the hell did you guys do, boil me alive? Oh, you’re going to pay for this!”

“You’re all right,” said Hawkins, wishing now he had a reference book to clear up several obscure terms. “Your epidermis will start growing immediately. You’re not in the hospital. Look here.”

He handed Barlow the stainless steel plate that had labeled the casket. After a suspicious glance, the man started to read. Finishing, he laid the plate carefully on the edge of the vault and was silent for a spell.

“Poor Verna,” he said at last. “It doesn’t say whether she was stuck with the court costs. Do you happen to know—”

“No,” said the potter. “All I know is what was on the plate, and how to revive you. The dentist accidentally gave you a dose of what we call Levantman shock anesthesia. We haven’t used it for centuries; it was powerful, but too dangerous.”

“Centuries . . .” brooded the man. “Centuries . . . I’ll bet Sam swindled her out of her eyeteeth. Poor Verna. How long ago was it? What year is this?”

Hawkins shrugged. “We call it 7-B-936. That’s no help to you. It takes a long time for these metals to oxidize.”

“Like that movie,” Barlow muttered. “Who would have thought it? Poor Verna!” He blubbered and sniffled, reminding Hawkins powerfully of the fact that he had been found under a flat rock.

Almost angrily, the potter demanded, “How many children did you have?”

“None yet,” sniffed Barlow. “My first wife didn’t want them. But Verna wants one—wanted one—but we’re going to wait until—we were going to wait until— ”

“Of course,” said the potter, feeling a savage desire to tell him off, blast him to hell and gone for his work. But he choked it down. There was The Problem to think of; there was always The Problem to think of, and this poor blubberer might unexpectedly supply a clue. Hawkins would have to pass him on.

“Come along,” Hawkins said. “My time is short.”

Barlow looked up, outraged. “How can you be so unfeeling? I’m a human being like—”

The Los Angeles-Chicago “rocket” ‘thundered overhead and Barlow broke off in mid-complaint. “Beautiful!” he breathed, following it with his eyes. “Beautiful!”

He climbed out of the vault, too interested to be pained by its roughness against his infantile skin. “After all,” he said briskly, “this should have its sunny side. I never was much for reading, but this is just like one of those stories. And I ought to make some money out of it, shouldn’t I?” He gave Hawkins a shrewd glance.

“You want money?” asked the potter. “Here.” He handed over a fistful of change and bills. “You’d better put my shoes on. It’ll be about a quarter-mile. Oh, and you’re—uh, modest?—yes, that was the word. Here.” Hawkins gave him his pants, but Barlow was excitedly counting the money.

“Eighty-five, eighty-six—and it’s dollars, too ! I thought it’d be credits or whatever they call them. ‘E Pluribus Unum’ and ’Liberty’—just different faces. Say, is there a catch to this? Are these real, genuine. honest twenty-two-cent dollars like we had or just wallpaper?”

“They’re quite all right, I assure you,” said the potter. “I wish you’d come along. I’m in a ‘hurry.”

The man babbled as they stumped toward the shop. “Where are we going—The Council of Scientists, the World Coordinator or something. like that?”

“Who? Oh, no. We call them ‘President’ and ‘Congress.’ No, that wouldn’t do any good at all. I’m just taking you to see some people.”

“I ought to make plenty out of this. Plenty! I could write books. Get some smart young fellow to put it into words for me and I’ll bet I could turn out a best-seller. What’s the setup on things like that?”

“It’s about like that. Smart young fellows. But there aren’t any best-sellers any more. People don’t read much nowadays. We’ll find something equally profitable for you to do.”

Back in the shop, Hawkins gave Barlow a suit of clothes, deposited him in the waiting room and called Central in Chicago. “Take him away,” he pleaded. “I have time for one more firing and he blathers and blathers. I haven’t told him anything. Perhaps we should just turn him loose and let him find his own level, but there’s a chance—”

“The Problem,” agreed Central. “Yes, there’s a chance.”

The potter delighted Barlow by making him a cup of coffee with a cube that not only dissolved in cold water but heated the water to boiling point. Killing time, Hawkins chatted about the “rocket” Barlow had admired, and had to haul himself up short; he had almost told the real estate man what its top speed really was—almost, indeed, revealed that it was not a rocket.

He regretted, too, that he had so casually handed Barlow a couple of hundred dollars. The man seemed obsessed with fear that they were worthless since Hawkins refused to take a note or I.O.U. or even a definite promise of repayment. But Hawkins couldn’t go into details, and was very glad when a stranger arrived from Central.

“Tinny-Peete, from Algeciras,” the stranger told him swiftly as the two of them met at the door. “Psychist for Poprob. Polasigned special overtake Barlow.”

“Thank Heaven,” said Hawkins. “Barlow,” he told the man from the past, “this is Tinny-Peete. He’s going to take care of you and help you make lots of money.”

The psychist stayed for a cup of the coffee whose preparation had delighted Barlow, and then conducted the real estate man down the corduroy road to his car, leaving the potter to speculate on whether he could at last crack his kilns.

Hawkins, abruptly dismissing Barlow and the Problem, happily picked the chinking from around the door of the number two kiln, prying it open a trifle. A blast of heat and the heady, smoky scent of the reduction fire delighted him. He peered and saw a corner of a shelf glowing cherry-red, becoming obscured by wavering black areas as it lost heat through the opened door. He slipped a charred wood paddle under a mug on the shelf and pulled it out as a sample, the hairs on the back of his hand curling and scorching. The mug crackled and pinged and Hawkins sighed happily.

The bismuth resinate luster had fired to perfection, a haunting film of silvery-black metal with strange bluish lights in it as it turned before the eyes, and the Problem of Population seemed very far away to Hawkins then.


Barlow and Tinny-Peete arrived at the concrete highway where the psychist’s car was parked in a safety bay.

“What—a—boat!” gasped the man from the past.

“Boat? No, that’s my car.”

Barlow surveyed it with awe. Swept-back lines, deep-drawn compound curves, kilograms of chrome. He ran his hands futilely over the door—or was it the door?—in a futile search for a handle, and asked respectfully, “How fast does if go?”

The psychist gave him a keen look and said slowly, “Two hundred and fifty. You can tell by the speedometer.”

“Wow! My old Chevvy could hit a hundred on a straightaway, but you’re out of my class, mister!”

Tinny-Peete somehow got a huge, low door open and Barlow descended three steps into immense cushions, floundering over to the right. He was too fascinated to pay serious attention to his flayed dermis. The dashboard was a lovely wilderness of dials, plugs, indicators, lights, scales and switches.

The psychist climbed down into the driver’s seat and did something with his feet. The motor started like lighting a blowtorch as big as a silo. Wallowing around in the cushions, Barlow saw through a rear-view mirror a tremendous exhaust filled with brilliant white sparkles.

“Do you like it?” yelled the psychist.

“It’s terrific!” Barlow yelled back. “It’s—”

He was shut up as the car pulled out from the bay into the road with a great voo-ooo-ooom! A gale roared past Barlow’s head, though the windows seemed to be closed; the impression of speed was terrific. He located the speedometer on the dashboard and saw it climb past 90, 100, 150, 200.

“Fast enough for me,” yelled the psychist, noting that Barlow’s face fell in response. “Radio?”

He passed over a surprisingly light object like a football helmet, with no trailing wires, and pointed to a row of buttons. Barlow put on the helmet, glad to have the roar of air stilled, and pushed a push- button. It lit up satisfyingly and Barlow settled back even farther for a sample of the brave new world’s super-modern taste in ingenious entertainment.

“TAKE IT AND STICK IT!” a voice roared in his ears.

He snatched off the helmet and gave the psychist an injured look. Tinny-Peete grinned and turned a dial associated with the pushbutton layout. The man from the past donned the helmet again and found the voice had lowered to normal.

“The show of shows! The super-show! The super-duper show! The quiz of quizzes! Take it and stick it!”

There were shrieks of laughter in the background.

“Here we got the contestants all ready to go. You know how we work it. I hand a contestant a triangle-shaped cutout and like that down the line. Now we got these here boards, they got cut-out places the same shape as the triangles and things, only they’re all different shapes, and the first contestant that sticks the cutouts into the board, he wins.

“Now I’m gonna innaview the first contestant. Right here, honey. What’s your name?’’

“Name? Uh—”

“Hoddaya like that, folks? She don’t remember her name! Hah? Would you buy that for a quarter?” The question was spoken with arch significance, and the audience shrieked, howled and whistled its appreciation.

It was dull listening when you didn’t know the punch lines and catch lines. Barlow pushed another button, with his free hand ready at the volume control.

” — latest from Washington. It’s about Senator Hull-Mendoza. He is still attacking the Bureau of Fisheries. The North California Syndicalist says he got affidavits that John Kingsley-Schultz is a bluenose from way back. He didn’t publistat the affydavits, but he says they say that Kingsley-Schultz was saw at bluenose meetings in Oregon State College and later at Florida University. Kingsley-Schultz says he gotta confess he did major in fly-casting at Oregon and got his Ph.D. in game-fish at Florida.

“And here is a quote from Kingsley-Schultz: ‘Hull-Mendoza don’t know what he’s talking about. He should drop dead.’ Unquote. Hull-Mendoza says he won’t publistat the affydavits to pertect his sources. He says they was sworn by three former employes of the Bureau which was fired for in-com-petence and in-com-pat-ibility by Kingsley-Schultz.

“Elsewhere they was the usual run of traffic accidents. A three-way pileup of cars on Route 66 going outta Chicago took twelve lives. The Chicago-Los Angeles morning rocket crashed and exploded in the Mo-have—Mo-jawy—what-ever-you-call-it Desert. All the 94 people aboard got killed. A Civil Aeronautics Authority investigator on the scene says that the pilot was buzzing herds of sheep and didn’t pull out in time.

“Hey! Here’s a hot one from New York! A Diesel tug run wild in the harbor while the crew was below and shoved in the port bow of the luck-shury liner S. S. Placentia. It says the ship filled and sank taking the lives of an es-ti-mated 180 passengers and 50 crew members. Six divers was sent down to study the wreckage, but they died, too, when their suits turned out to be fulla little holes.

“And here is a bulletin I just got from Denver. It seems—”

Barlow took off the headset uncomprehendingly. “He seemed so callous,” he yelled at the driver. “I was listening to a newscast — ”

Tinny-Peete shook his head and pointed at his ears. The roar of air was deafening. Barlow frowned baffledly and stared out of the window.

A glowing sign said:

MOOGS!
WOULD YOU BUY IT
FOR A QUARTER?

He didn’t know what Moogs was or were; the illustration showed an incredibly proportioned girl, 99.9 per cent naked, writhing passionately in animated full color.

The roadside jingle was still with him, but with a new feature. Radar or something spotted the car and alerted the lines of the jingle. Each in turn sped along a roadside track, even with the car, so it could be read before the next line was alerted.

IF THERE’S A GIRL
YOU WANT TO GET
DEFLOCCULIZE
UNROMANTIC SWEAT.
“A*R*M*P*I*T*T*O*”

Another animated job, in two panels, the familiar “Before and After.” The first said, “Just Any Cigar?” and was illustrated with a two-person domestic tragedy of a wife holding her nose while her coarse and red-faced husband puffed a slimy-looking rope. The second panel glowed, “Or a VUELTA ABAJO?” and was illustrated with—

Barlow blushed and looked at his feet until they had passed the sign.

“Coming into Chicago!” bawled Tinny-Peete.

Other cars were showing up, all of them dreamboats.

Watching them, Barlow began to wonder if he knew what a kilometer was, exactly. They seemed to be traveling so slowly, if you ignored the roaring air past your ears and didn’t let the speedy lines of the dreamboats fool you. He would have sworn they were really crawling along at twenty-five, with occasional spurts up to thirty. How much was a kilometer, anyway?

The city loomed ahead, and it was just what it ought to be: towering skyscrapers, overhead ramps, landing platforms for helicopters—

He clutched at the cushions. Those two ‘copters. They were going to—they were going to—they—

He didn’t see what happened because their apparent collision courses took them behind a giant building.

Screamingly sweet blasts of sound surrounded them as they stopped for a red light. “What the hell is going on here?” said Barlow in a shrill, frightened voice, because the braking time was just about zero, he wasn’t hurled against the dashboard. “Who’s kidding who?”

“Why, what’s the matter?” demanded the driver.

The light changed to green and he started the pickup. Barlow stiffened as he realized that the rush of air past his ears began just a brief, unreal split-second before the car was actually moving. He grabbed for the door handle on his side.

The city grew on them slowly: scattered buildings, denser buildings, taller buildings, and a red light ahead. The car rolled to a stop in zero braking time, the rush of air cut off an instant after it stopped, and Barlow was out of the car and running frenziedly down a sidewalk one instant after that.

They’ll track me down, he thought, panting. It’s a secret police thing. They’ll get you— mind-reading machines, television eyes everywhere, afraid you’ll tell their slaves about freedom and stuff. They don’t let anybody cross them, like that story I once read.

Winded, he slowed to a walk and congratulated himself that he had guts enough not to turn around. That was what they always watched for. Walking, he was just another business-suited back among hundreds. He would be safe, he would be safe—

A hand tumbled from a large, coarse, handsome face thrust close to his: “Wassamatta bumpinninna people likeya owna sidewalk gotta miner slamya inna mushya bassar!” It was neither the mad potter nor the mad driver.

“Excuse me,” said Barlow. “What did you say?”

“Oh, yeah?” yelled the stranger dangerously, and waited for an answer.

Barlow, with the feeling that he had somehow been suckered into the short end of an intricate land- title deal, heard himself reply belligerently, “Yeah!”

The stranger let go of his shoulder and snarled, “Oh, yeah?” “Yeah!” said Barlow, yanking his jacket back into shape.

“Aaah!” snarled the stranger with more contempt and disgust than ferocity. He added an obscenity current in Barlow’s time, a standard but physiologically impossible directive, and strutted off hulking his shoulders and balling his fists.

Barlow walked on, trembling. Evidently he had handled it well enough. He stopped at a red light while the long, low dream-boats roared before him and pedestrians in the sidewalk flow with him threaded their ways through the stream of cars. Brakes screamed, fenders clanged and dented, hoarse cries flew back and forth between drivers and walkers. He leaped backward frantically as one car swerved over an arc of sidewalk to miss another.

The signal changed to green, the cars kept on coming for about thirty seconds and then dwindled to an occasional light-runner. Barlow crossed warily and leaned against a vending machine, blowing big breaths.

Look natural, he told himself. Do something normal. Buy something from the machine.

He fumbled out some change, got a newspaper for a dime, a handkerchief for a quarter and a candy bar for another quarter.

The faint chocolate smell made him ravenous suddenly. He clawed at the glassy wrapper printed “CRIGGLIES” quite futilely for a few seconds, and then it divided neatly by itself. The bar made three good bites, and he bought two more and gobbled them down.

Thirsty, he drew a carbonated orange drink in another one of the glassy wrappers from the machine for another dime. When he fumbled with it, it divided neatly and spilled all over his knees. Barlow decided he had been there long enough and walked on.

The shop windows were—shop windows. People still wore and bought clothes, still smoked and bought tobacco, still ate and bought food. And they still went to the movies, he saw with pleased surprise as he passed and then returned to a glittering place whose sign said it was THE BIJOU.

The place seemed to be showing a quintuple feature, Babies Are Terrible, Don’t Have Children, and The Canali Kid.

It was irresistible; he paid a dol- lar and went in.

He caught the tail-end of The Canali Kid in three-dimensional, full-color, full-scent production. It appeared to be an interplanetary saga winding up with a chase scene and a reconciliation between estranged hero and heroine. Babies Are Terrible and Don’t Have Children were fantastic arguments against parenthood—the grotesquely exaggerated dangers of painfully graphic childbirth, vicious children, old parents beaten and starved by their sadistic offspring. The audience, Barlow astoundedly noted, was placidly champing sweets and showing no particular signs of revulsion.

The Coming Attractions drove him into the lobby. The fanfares were shattering, the blazing colors blinding, and the added scents stomach-heaving.

When his eyes again became accustomed to the moderate lighting of the lobby, he groped his way to a bench and opened the newspaper he had bought. It turned out to be The Racing Sheet, which afflicted him with a crushing sense of loss. The familiar boxed index in the lower left hand corner of the front page showed almost unbearably that Churchill Downs and Empire City were still in business—

Blinking back tears, he turned to -the Past Performances at Churchill. They weren’t using abbreviations any more, and the pages because of that were single-column instead of double. But it was all the same—or was it?

He squinted at the first race, a three-quarter-mile maiden claimer for thirteen hundred dollars. Incredibly, the track record was two minutes, ten and three-fifths seconds. Any beetle in his time could have knocked off the three-quarter in one-fifteen. It was the same for the other distances, much worse for route events.

What the hell had happened to everything?

He studied the form of a five-year-old brown mare in the second and couldn’t make head or tail of it. She’d won and lost and placed and showed and lost and placed without rhyme or reason. She looked like a front-runner for a couple of races and then she looked like a no-good pig and then she looked like a mudder but the next time it rained she wasn’t and then she was a stayer and then she was a pig again. In a good five-thousand-dollar allowances event, too!

Barlow looked at the other entries and it slowly dawned on him that they were all like the five-year-old brown mare. Not a single damned horse running had the slightest trace of class.

Somebody sat down beside him and said, “That’s the story.”

Barlow whirled to his feet and saw it was Tinny-Peete, his driver.

“I was in doubts about telling you,” said the psychist, “but I see you have some growing suspicions of the truth. Please don’t get excited. It’s all right, I tell you.”

“So you’ve got me,” said Barlow.

“Got you?”

“Don’t pretend. I can put two and two together. You’re the secret police. You and the rest of the aristocrats live in luxury on the sweat of these oppressed slaves. You’re afraid of me because you have to keep them ignorant.”

There was a bellow of bright laughter from the psychist that got them blank looks from other patrons of the lobby. The laughter didn’t sound at all sinister.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Tinny-Peete, still chuckling. “You couldn’t possibly have it more wrong.” He engaged Barlow’s arm and led him to the street. “The actual truth is that the millions of workers live in luxury on the sweat of the handful of aristocrats. I shall probably die before my time of overwork unless—” He gave Barlow a speculative look. “You may be able to help us.”

“I know that gag,” sneered Bar- low. “I made money in my time and to make money you have to get people on your side. Go ahead and shoot me if you want, but you’re not going to make a fool out of me.”

“You nasty little ingrate!” snapped the psychist, with a kaleidoscopic change of mood. “This damned mess is all your fault and the fault of people like you! Now come along and no more of your nonsense.”
He yanked Barlow into an office building lobby and an elevator that, disconcertingly, went whoosh loudly as it rose. The real estate man’s knees were wobbly as the psychist pushed him from the elevator, down a corridor and into an office.

A hawk-faced man rose from a plain chair as the door closed behind them. After an angry look at Barlow, he asked the psychist, “Was I called from the Pole to inspect this—this—?’’

“Unget updandered. I’ve dee-probed etfind quasichance exhim Poprobattackline,” said the psychist soothingly.

“Doubt,” grunted the hawk-faced man.

“Try,” suggested Tinny-Peete.

“Very well. Mr. Barlow, I understand you and your lamented had no children.”

“What of it?”

“This of it. You were a blind, selfish stupid ass to tolerate economic and social conditions which penalized child-bearing by the prudent and foresighted. You made us what we are today, and I want you to know that we are far from satisfied. Damn-fool rockets! Damn-fool automobiles! Damn-fool cities with overhead ramps!”

“As far as I can see,” said Barlow, “you’re running down the best features of time. Are you crazy?”

“The rockets aren’t rockets. They’re turbo-jets — good turbo-jets, but the fancy shell around them makes for a bad drag. The automobiles have a top speed of one hundred kilometers per hour—a kilo- meter is, if I recall my paleolinguistics, three-fifths of a mile—and the speedometers are all rigged accordingly so the drivers will think they’re going two hundred and fifty. The cities are ridiculous, expensive, unsanitary, wasteful conglomerations of people who’d be better off and more productive if they were spread over the countryside.

“We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!”

“Wait a minute,” objected Barlow. “There were lots of people in our crowd who had two or three children.”

“The attrition of accidents, illness, wars and such took care of that. Your intelligence was bred out. It is gone. Children that should have been born never were. The just-average, they’ll-get-along majority took over the population. The average IQ now is 45.”

“But that’s far in the future—” “So are you,” grunted the hawk-faced man sourly.

“But who are you people?”

“Just people—real people. Some generations ago, the geneticists realized at last that nobody was going to pay any attention to what they said, so they abandoned words for deeds. Specifically, they formed and recruited for a closed corporation intended to maintain and improve the breed. We are their descendants, about three million of us. There are five billion of the others, so we are their slaves.

“During the past couple of years I’ve designed a skyscraper, kept Billings Memorial Hospital here in Chicago running, headed off war with Mexico and directed traffic at LaGuardia Field in New York.”

“I don’t understand! Why don’t you let them go to hell in their own way?”

The man grimaced. “We tried it once for three months. We holed up at the South Pole and waited. They didn’t notice it. Some drafting-room people were missing, some chief nurses didn’t show up, minor government people on the non-policy level couldn’t be located. It didn’t seem to matter.

“In a week there was hunger. In two weeks there were famine and plague, in three weeks war and anarchy. We called off the experiment; it took us most of the next generation to get things squared away again.”

“But why didn’t you let them kill each other off?”

“Five billion corpses mean about five hundred million tons of rotting flesh.”

Barlow had another idea. “Why don’t you sterilize them?”

“Two and one-half billion operations is a lot of operations. Because they breed continuously, the job would never be done.”

“I see. Like the marching Chinese!”

“Who the devil are they?”

“It was a—uh—paradox of my time. Somebody figured out that if all the Chinese in the world were to line up four abreast, I think it was, and start marching past a given point, they’d never stop because of the babies that would be born and grow up before they passed the point.”

“That’s right. Only instead of ‘a given point,’ make it ‘the largest conceivable number of operating rooms that we could build and staff. There could never be enough.”

“Say!” said Barlow. “Those movies about babies—was that your propaganda?”

“It was. It doesn’t seem to mean a thing to them. We have abandoned the idea of attempting propaganda contrary to a biological drive.”

“So if you work with a biological drive—?”

“I know of none which is consistent with inhibition of fertility.”

Barlow’s face went poker-blank, the result of years of careful discipline. “You don’t, huh? You’re the great brains and you can’t think of any?”

“Why, no,” said the psychist innocently. “Can you?”

“That depends. I sold ten thousand acres of Siberian tundra—through a dummy firm, of course—after the partition of Russia. The buyers thought they were getting improved building lots on the outskirts of Kiev. I’d say that was a lot tougher than this job.”

“How so?” asked the hawk- faced man.

“Those were normal, suspicious customers and these are morons, born suckers. You just figure out a con they’ll fall for; they won’t know enough to do any smart checking.”

The psychist and the hawk-faced man had also had training; they kept themselves from looking with sudden hope at each other.

“You seem to have something in mind,” said the psychist.

Barlow’s poker face went blanker still. “Maybe I have. I haven’t heard any offer yet.”

“There’s the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve prevented Earth’s resources from being so plundered,” the hawk-faced man pointed out, “that the race will soon become extinct.”

“I don’t know that,” Barlow said bluntly. “All I have is your word.”

“If you really have a method, I don’t think any price would be too great,” the psychist offered.

“Money,” said Barlow.

“All you want.”

“More than you want,” the hawk-faced man corrected.

“Prestige,” added Barlow. “Plenty of publicity. My picture and my name in the papers and over TV every day, statues to me, parks and cities and streets and other things named after me. A whole chapter in the history books.”

The psychist made a- facial sign to the hawk-faced man that meant, “Oh, brother!”

The hawk-faced man signaled back, “Steady, boy!”

“It’s not too much to ask,” the psychist agreed.

Barlow, sensing a seller’s market, said, “Power!”

“Power?” the hawk-faced man repeated puzzledly. “Your own hydro station or nuclear pile?”

“I mean a world dictatorship with me as dictator!”

“Well, now —” said the psychist, but the hawk-faced man interrupted, “It would take a special emergency act of Congress but the situation warrants it. I think that can be guaranteed.”

“Could you give us some indication of your plan?” the psychist asked.

“Ever hear of lemmings?”

“No.”

“They are—were, I guess, since you haven’t heard of them—little animals in Norway, and every few years they’d swarm to the coast and swim out to sea until they drowned. I figure on putting some lemming urge into the population.”

“How?”

“I’ll save that till I get the right signatures on the deal.”

The hawk-faced man said, “I’d like to work with you on it, Barlow. My name’s Ryan-Ngana.” He put out his hand.

Barlow looked closely at the hand, then at the man’s face. “Ryan what?”

“Ngana.”

“That sounds like an African name.”

“It is. My mother’s father was a Watusi.”

Barlow didn’t take the hand. “I thought you looked pretty dark. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I don’t think I’d be at my best working with you. There must be somebody else just as well qualified, I’m sure.”

The psychist made a facial sign to Ryan-Ngana that meant, “Steady yourself, boy!”

“Very well,” Ryan-Ngana told Barlow. “We’ll see what arrangement can be made.”

“It’s not that I’m prejudiced, you understand. Some of my best friends—”

“Mr. Barlow, don’t give it another thought. Anybody who could pick on the lemming analogy is going to be useful to us.”

And so he would, thought Ryan- Ngana, alone in the office after Tinny-Peete had taken Barlow up to the helicopter stage. So he would. Poprob had exhausted every rational attempt and the new Poprobattacklines would have to be irrational or sub-rational. This creature from the past with his lemming legends and his improved building lots would be a fountain of precious vicious self-interest.

Ryan-Ngana sighed and stretched. He had to go and run the San Francisco subway. Summoned early from the Pole to study Barlow, he’d left unfinished a nice little theorem. Between interruptions, he was slowly constructing an n-dimensional geometry whose foundations and superstructure owed no debt whatsoever to intuition.

Upstairs, waiting for a helicopter, Barlow was explaining to Tinny-Peete that he had nothing against Negroes, and Tinny-Peete wished he had some of Ryan-Ngana’s imperturbability and humor for the ordeal.

The helicopter took them to International Airport where, Tinny-Peete explained, Barlow would leave for the Pole.

The man from the past wasn’t sure he’d like a dreary waste of ice and cold.

“It’s all right,” said the psyehist. “A civilized layout. Warm, pleasant. You’ll be able to work more efficiently there. All the facts at your fingertips, a good secretary—”

“I’ll need a pretty big staff,” said Barlow, who had learned from thousands of deals never to take the first offer.

”I meant a private, confidential one,” said Tinny-Peete readily, “but you can have as many as you want. You’ll naturally have top-primary-top priority if you really have a workable plan.”

“Let’s not forget this dictatorship angle,” said Barlow.

He didn’t know that the psychist would just as readily have promised him deification to get him happily on the “rocket” for the Pole. Tinny-Peete had no wish to be torn limb from limb; he knew very well that it would end that way if the population learned from this anachronism that there was a small elite which considered itself head, shoulders, trunk and groin above the rest. The fact that this assumption was perfectly true and the fact that the elite was condemned by its superiority to a life of the most grinding toil would not be considered; the difference would.

The psychist finally put Barlow aboard the “rocket” with some thirty people—real people—headed for the Pole.

Barlow was airsick all the way because of a post-hypnotic suggestion Tinny-Peete had planted in him. One idea was to make him as averse as possible to a return trip, and another idea was to spare the other passengers from his aggressive, talkative company.

Barlow during the first day at the pole was reminded of his first day in the Army. It was the same now-where-the-hell-are-we-going-to-put-you? business until he took a firm line with them. Then instead of acting like supply sergeants they acted like hotel clerks.

It was a wonderful, wonderfully calculated buildup, and one that he failed to suspect. After all, in his time a visitor from the past would have been lionized.

At day’s end he reclined in a snug underground billet with the 60-mile gales roaring yards over-head, and tried to put two and two together.

It was like old times, he thought—like a coup in real estate where you had the competition by the throat, like a 50-per cent rent boost when you knew damned well there was no place for the tenants to move, like smiling when you read over the breakfast orange juice that the city council had decided to build a school on the ground you had acquired by a deal with the city council. And it was simple. He would just sell tundra building lots to eagerly suicidal lemmings, and that was absolutely all there was to solving the Problem that had these double-domes spinning.

They’d have to work out most of the details, naturally, but what the hell, that was what subordinates were for. He’d need specialists in advertising, engineering, communications—did they know anything about hypnotism? That might be helpful. If not, there’d have to be a lot of bribery done, but he’d make sure—damned sure—there were unlimited funds.

Just selling building lots to lemmings…

He wished, as he fell asleep, that poor Verna could have been in on this. It was his biggest, most stupendous deal. Verna—that sharp shyster Sam Immerman must have swindled her…

It began the next day with people coming to visit him. He knew the approach. They merely wanted to be helpful to their illustrious visitor from the past and would he help fill them in about his era, which unfortunately was somewhat obscure historically, and what did he think could be done about the Problem? He told them he was too old to be roped any more, and they wouldn’t get any information out of him until he got a letter of intent from at least the Polar President, and a session of the Polar Congress empowered to make him dictator.

He got the letter and the session. He presented his program, was asked whether his conscience didn’t revolt at its callousness, explained succinctly that a deal was a deal and anybody who wasn’t smart enough to protect himself didn’t deserve protection—”Caveat emp- tor,” he threw in for scholarship, and had to translate it to “Let the buyer beware.’’ He didn’t, he stated, give a damn about either the morons or their intelligent slaves; he’d told them his price and that was all he was interested in.

Would they meet it or wouldn’t they?

The Polar President offered to resign in his favor, with certain temporary emergency powers that the

Polar Congress would vote him if he thought them necessary. Barlow demanded the title of World Dictator, complete control of world finances, salary to be decided by himself, and the publicity campaign and historical writeup to begin at once.

“As for the emergency powers,” he added, “they are neither to be temporary nor limited.”

Somebody wanted the floor to discuss the matter, with the declared hope that perhaps Barlow would modify his demands.

“You’ve got the proposition,” Barlow said. “I’m not knocking off even ten per cent.”

“But what if the Congress refuses, sir?” the President asked.

“Then you can stay up here at the Pole and try to work it out yourselves. I’ll get what I want from the morons. A shrewd operator like me doesn’t have to compromise; I haven’t got a single competitor in this whole cockeyed moronic era.”

Congress waived debate and voted by show of hands. Barlow won unanimously.

“You don’t know how close you came to losing me,” he said in his first official address to the joint Houses. “I’m not the boy to haggle; either I get what I ask or I go elsewhere. The first thing I want is to see designs for a new palace for me—nothing unostentatious, either—and your best painters and sculptors to start working on my portraits and statues. Meanwhile, I’ll get my staff together.”

He dismissed the Polar President and the Polar Congress, telling them that he’d let them know when the next meeting would be.

A week later, the program started with North America the first target.

Mrs. Garvy was resting after dinner before the ordeal of turning on the dishwasher. The TV, of course, was on and it said: “Oooh!”—long, shuddery and ecstatic, the cue for the Parfum Assault Criminale spot commercial. “Girls,” said the announcer hoarsely, “do you want your man? It’s easy to get him—easy as a trip to Venus.”

“Huh?” said Mrs. Garvy.

“Wassamatter?” snorted her husband, starting out of a doze.

“Ja hear that?”

“Wha’?”

“He said ’easy like a trip to Venus.’”

“So?”

“Well, I thought ya couldn’t get to Venus. I thought they just had that one rocket thing that crashed on the Moon.”

“Aah, women don’t keep up with the news,” said Garvy righteously, subsiding again.

“Oh,” said his wife uncertainly.

And the next day, on Henry’s Other Mistress, there was a new character who had just breezed in: Buzz Rentshaw, Master Rocket Pilot of the Venus run. On Henry’s Other Mistress, “the broadcast drama about you and your neighbors, folksy people, ordinary people, real people!”

Mrs. Garvy listened with amazement over a cooling cup of coffee as Buzz made hay of her hazy convictions.

MONA: Darling, it’s so good to see you again!

BUZZ: You don’t know how I’ve missed you on that dreary Venus run.

SOUND: Venetian blind run down, key turned in door lock.

MONA: Was it very dull, dearest?

BUZZ: Let’s not talk about my humdrum job, darling. Let’s talk about us.

SOUND: Creaking bed.

Well, the program was back to normal at last. That evening Mrs. Garvy tried to ask again whether her husband was sure about those rockets, but he was dozing right through Take It and Stick It, so she watched the screen and forgot the puzzle.

She was still rocking with laughter at the gag line, “Would you buy it for a quarter?” when the commercial went on for the detergent powder she always faithfully loaded her dishwasher with on the first of every month.

The announcer displayed mountains of suds from a tiny piece of the stuff and coyly added: “Of course, Cleano don’t lay around for you to pick up like the soap root on Venus, but it’s pretty’ cheap and it’s almost pretty near just as good. So for us plain folks who ain’t lucky enough to live up there on Venus, Cleano is the real cleaning stuff!”

Then the chorus went into their “Cleano-is-the-stuff” jingle, but Mrs. Garvy didn’t hear it. She was a stubborn woman, but it occurred to her that she was very sick indeed. She didn’t want to worry her husband. The next day she quietly made an appointment with her family freud.

In the waiting room she picked up a fresh new copy of Readers Pablum and put it down with a faint palpitation. The lead article, according to the table of contents on the cover, was titled “The Most Memorable Venusian I Ever Met.”

“The freud will see you now,” said the nurse, and Mrs. Garvy tottered into his office.

His traditional glasses and whiskers were reassuring. She choked out the ritual: “Freud, forgive me, for I have neuroses.”

He chanted the antiphonal: “Tut, my dear girl, what seems to be the trouble?”

“I got like a hole in the head,” she quavered. “I seem to forget all kinds of things. Things like everybody seems to know and I don’t.”

“Well, that happens to everybody occasionally, my dear. I suggest a vacation on Venus.”

The freud stared, open-mouthed, at the empty chair. His nurse came in and demanded, “Hey, you see how she scrammed? What was the matter with her?”

He took off his glasses and whiskers meditatively. “You can search me. I told her she should maybe try a vacation on Venus.” A momentary bafflement came into his face and he dug through his desk drawers until he found a copy of the four-color, profusely illustrated journal of his profession. It had come that morning and he had lip-read it, though looking mostly at the pictures. He leafed through to the article Advantages of the Planet Venus in Rest Cures.

“It’s right there,” he said.

The nurse looked. “It sure is,” she agreed. “Why shouldn’t it be?” “The trouble with these here neurotics,” decided ‘the freud, “is that they all the time got to fight reality. Show in the next twitch.”

He put on his glasses and whiskers again and forgot Mrs. Garvy and her strange behavior.

“Freud, forgive me, for I have neuroses.”

“Tut, my dear girl, what seems to be the trouble?”

Like many cures of mental disorders, Mrs. Garvy’s was achieved largely by self-treatment. She disciplined herself sternly out of the crazy notion that there had been only one rocket ship and that one a failure. She could join without wincing, eventually, in any conversation on the desirability of Venus as a place to retire, on its fabulous floral profusion. Finally she went to Venus.

All her friends were trying to book passage with the Evening Star Travel and Real Estate Corporation, but naturally the demand was crushing. She considered herself lucky to get a seat at last for the two-week summer cruise. The space ship took off from a place called Los Alamos, New Mexico. It looked just like all the spaceships on television and in the picture magazines, but was more comfortable than you would expect.

Mrs. Garvy was delighted with the fifty or so fellow-passengers assembled before takeoff. They were from all over the country and she had a distinct impression that they were on the brainy side. The captain, a tall, hawk-faced, impressive fellow named Ryan-Something or other, welcomed them aboard and trusted that their trip would be a memorable one. He regretted that there would be nothing to see because, “due to the meteorite season,” the ports would be dogged down. It was disappointing, yet re- assuring that the line was taking no chances.

There was the expected momentary discomfort at takeoff and then two monotonous days of droning travel through space to be whiled away in the lounge at cards or craps. The landing was a routine bump and the voyagers were Issued tablets to swallow to immunize them against any minor ailments.

When the tablets took effect, the lock was opened and Venus was theirs.

It looked much like a tropical island on Earth, except for a blanket of cloud overhead. But it had a heady, other-worldly quality that was intoxicating and glamorous.

The ten days of the vacation were suffused with a hazy magic. The soap root, as advertised, was free and sudsy. The fruits, mostly tropical varieties transplanted from Earth, were delightful. The simple shelters provided by the travel company were more than adequate for the balmy days and nights.

It was with sincere regret that the voyagers filed again into the ship, and swallowed more tablets doled out to counteract and sterilize any Venus illnesses they might unwittingly communicate to Earth.

Vacationing was one thing. Power politics was another.

At the Pole, a small man was in a soundproof room, his face deathly pale and his body limp in a straight chair.

In the American Senate Chamber, Senator Hull-Mendoza (Synd., N. Cal.) was saying: “Mr. President and gentlemen, I would be remiss in my duty as a legislature if’n I didn’t bring to the attention of the au-gust body I see here a perilous situation which is fraught with peril. As is well known to members of this au-gust body, the perfection of space flight has brought with it a situation I can only describe as fraught with peril. Mr. President and gentlemen, now that swift American rockets now traverse the trackless void of space between this planet and our nearest planetarial neighbor in space—and, gentlemen, I refer to Venus, the star of dawn, the brightest jewel in fair Vulcan’s diadome—now, I say, I want to inquire what steps are being taken to colonize Venus with a vanguard of patriotic citizens like those minutemen of yore.

“Mr. President and gentlemen! There are in this world nations, envious nations—I do not name Mexico—who by fair means or foul may seek to wrest from Columbia’s grasp the torch of freedom of space; nations whose low living standards and innate depravity give them an unfair advantage over the citizens of our fair republic.

“This is my program: I suggest that a city of more than 100,000 population be selected by lot. The citizens of the fortunate city are to be awarded choice lands on Venus free and dear, to have and to hold and convey to their descendants. And the national government shall provide free transportation to Venus for these citizens. And this program shall continue, city by city, until there has been deposited on Venus a sufficient vanguard of citizens to protect our manifest rights in that planet.

“Objections will be raised, for carping critics we have always with us. They will say there isn’t enough steel. They will call it a cheap give-away. I say there is enough steel for one city’s population to be transferred to Venus, and that is all that is needed. For when the time comes for the second city to be transferred, the first, emptied city can be wrecked for the needed steel! And is it a giveaway? Yes! It is the most glorious giveaway in the history of mankind! Mr. President and gentlemen, there is no time to waste—Venus must be American!”

Black-Kupperman, at the Pole, opened his eyes and said feebly, “The style was a little uneven. Do you think anybody’ll notice?’’

“You did fine, boy; just fine,” Barlow reassured him.

Hull-Mendoza’s bill became law. Drafting machines at the South Pole were busy around the clock and the Pittsburgh steel mills spewed millions of plates into the Los Alamos spaceport of the Evening Star Travel and Real Estate Corporation. It was going to be Los Angeles, for logistic reasons, and the three most accomplished psycho-kineticists went to Washington and mingled in the crowd at the drawing to make certain that the Los Angeles capsule slithered into the fingers of the blind-folded Senator.

Los Angeles loved the idea and a forest of spaceships began to blossom in the desert. They weren’t very good space ships, but they didn’t have to be.

A team at the Pole worked at Barlow’s direction on a mail setup. There would have to be letters to and from Venus to keep the slightest taint of suspicion from arising. Luckily Barlow remembered that the problem had been solved once before—by Hitler. Relatives of persons incinerated in the furnaces of Lublin or Majdanek continued to get cheery postal cards.

The Los Angeles flight went off on schedule, under tremendous press, newsreel and television coverage. The world cheered the gallant Angelenos who were setting off on their patriotic voyage to the land of milk and honey. The forest of spaceships thundered up, and up, and out of sight without untoward incident. Billions envied the Angelenos, cramped and on short rations though they were.

Wreckers from San Francisco, whose capsule came up second, moved immediately into the city of the angels for the scrap steel their own flight would require. Senator Hull-Mendoza’s constituents could do no less.

The president of Mexico, hypnotically alarmed at this extension of yanqui imperialismo beyond the stratosphere, launched his own Venus-colony program.

Across the water it was England versus Ireland, France versus Germany, China versus Russia, India versus Indonesia. Ancient hatreds grew into the flames that were rocket ships assailing the air by hundreds daily.

Dear Ed, how are you? Sam and I are fine and hope you are fine. Is it nice up there like they say with food and close grone on trees? I drove by Springfield yesterday and it sure looked funny all the buildings down but of coarse it is worth it we have to keep the greasers in their place. Do you have any truble with them on Venus? Drop me a line some time. Your loving sister, Alma.

Dear Alma, I am fine and hope you are fine. It is a fine place here fine climate and easy living. The doctor told me today that I seem to be ten years younger. He thinks there is something in the air here keeps people young. We do not have much trouble with the greasers here they keep to theirselves it is just a question of us outnumbering them and staking out the best places for the Americans. In South Bay I know a nice little island that I have been saving for you and Sam with lots of blanket trees and ham bushes. Hoping to see you and Sam soon, your loving brother, Ed.

Sam and Alma were on their way shortly.

Poprob got a dividend in every nation after the emigration had passed the halfway mark. The lonesome stay-at-homes were unable to bear the melancholy of a low population density; their conditioning had been to swarms of their kin. After that point it was possible to foist off the crudest stripped-down accommodations on would-be emigrants; they didn’t care.

Black-Kupperman did a final job on President Hull-Mendoza, the last job that genius of hypnotics would ever do on any moron, important or otherwise.

Hull-Mendoza, panic-stricken by his presidency over an emptying nation, joined his constituents. The Independence, aboard which traveled the national government of America, was the most elaborate of all the spaceships—bigger, more comfortable, with a lounge that was handsome, though cramped, and cloakrooms for Senators and Representatives. It went, however, to the same place as the others and Black-Kupperman killed himself, leaving a note that stated he “couldn’t live with my conscience.”

The day after the American President departed, Barlow flew into a rage. Across his specially built desk were supposed to flow all Poprob high-level documents and this thing—this outrageous thing—called Poprobterm apparently had got into the executive stage before he had even had a glimpse of it!

He buzzed for Rogge-Smith, his statistician. Rogge-Smith seemed to be at the bottom of it. Poprobterm seemed to be about first and second and third derivatives, whatever they were. Barlow had a deep distrust of anything more complex than what he called an “average.”

While Rogge-Smith was still at the door, Barlow snapped, “What’s the meaning of this? Why haven’t I been consulted? How far have you people got and why have you been working on something I haven’t authorized?”

“Didn’t want to bother you, Chief,” said Rogge-Smith. “It was really a technical matter, kind of a final cleanup. Want to come and see the work?”

Mollified, Barlow followed his statistician down the corridor.

“You still shouldn’t have gone ahead without my okay,” he grumbled. “Where the hell would you people have been without me?”

“That’s right, Chief. We couldn’t have swung it ourselves; our minds just don’t work that way. And all that stuff you knew from Hitler—it wouldn’t have occurred to us. Like poor Black-Kupperman.”
They were in a fair-sized machine shop at the end of a slight upward incline. It was cold. Rogge-Smith pushed a button that started a motor, and a flood of arctic light poured in as the roof parted slowly. It showed a small spaceship with the door open.

Barlow gaped as Rogge-Smith took him by the elbow and his other boys appeared: Swenson-Swenson, the engineer; Tsutsugimushi-Duncan, his propellants man; Kalb-French, advertising.

“In you go, Chief,” said Tsutsugimushi-Duncan. “This is Poprobterm.”

“But I’m the world Dictator!”

“You bet, Chief. You’ll be in history, all right—but this is necessary, I’m afraid.”

The door was closed. Acceleration slammed Barlow cruelly to the metal floor. Something broke and warm, wet stuff, salty-tasting, ran from his mouth to his chin. Arctic sunlight through a port suddenly became a fierce lancet stabbing at his eyes; he was out of the atmosphere.

Lying twisted and broken under the acceleration, Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner however many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily.

The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain.

Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923-1958) was an American writer who shot to fame by publishing his stories in various science fiction magazines. He was associated with the Futurians. His stories are often dystopic warnings of what is to come in the future.

Ancient Greek Mathematics: An Unrivalled Western Achievement

“In the history of civilization the Greeks are preeminent, and in the history of mathematics the Greeks are the supreme event. Though they did borrow from the surrounding civilizations, the Greeks built a civilization of their own which is the most impressive of all civilizations, the most influential in the development of modern Western culture, and decisive in founding mathematics as we understand the subject today. One of the great problems of the history of civilization is how to account for the brilliance and creativity of the ancient Greeks” [Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972)].

“Of all the manifestations of the Greek genius, none is more impressive and even awe-inspiring than that which is revealed by the history of Greek mathematics” [Sir Thomas Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics (1921)].

In this article, I argue that the contribution the ancient Greeks made to mathematics is superior to the combined contribution ALL the higher civilizations of the non-Western world made. Mathematics is usually left unmentioned in liberal arts accounts of the “Greek Miracle,” even though it had a direct, indispensable role in the rise of modern industrial civilization. We know that mathematics is characterized by rigorous reasoning and precise quantitative calculation; and that it has real-world applications in physics, biology, epidemiology, engineering, chemistry, technologies, computer science, social sciences, and finance. But mathematics is not a mere adjunct to the sciences and technology. Mathematicians have conceived many ideas decades before anyone foresaw their possible applications to science. Without the geometry of Bernhard Riemann, invented in 1854, and other mathematical ideas, the general theory of relativity could not have been articulated. “The revolution in modern physics which began with the work of W. Heisenberg and P. Dirac in 1925,” Eric Temple Bell explains in Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1931), “could never have started without the necessary mathematics of matrices invented by Cayley in 1858, and elaborated by a small army of mathematicians from then to the present time.”

The Greeks constructed an entire geometrical system known as Euclidean, the study of plane and solid figures, about the nature of reality, on the basis of axioms and theorems in a purely deductive manner, without physical evidence, which subsequently found verification and application in the development of modern physics. They were the first people to realize that the universe expresses itself naturally in the language of mathematics, and that mathematical truths have a validity that transcends the limits of time and space. It was this realization about the power of mathematics that persuaded Plato that mathematics comprehends a reality that exists independently of human beings and that mathematicians can apprehend this eternal reality through the sheer power of their deductive reasoning. One does not have to be a Platonist who believes that mathematical truths exist eternally and independently of reality, however, to agree with Adam Smith that mathematical terms express “the most abstract ideas which the human mind is capable of forming,” and that it was the Greeks who first conceived a mathematics based on rigorous proofs, which subsequently found experimental applications in Galilean and Newtonian science.

Since prehistoric times, humans have formulated conceptions of number and geometrical forms in creative art. But while there is evidence for the invention of the abstract concept of number, that is, the realization that three sheep, three fingers, and three days, share a common property of “threeness,” as well as for the idea of a one-to-one correspondence between the objects of one collection and those of another, including counting an ordered sequence of symbols, such as knots on a cord, basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—most of the cultures of the world made 0 contributions to mathematics defined as a specific field of knowledge, entailing a system of numeration, with a variety of arithmetical calculations with whole numbers and fractions, the solution of linear equations and the mensuration of simple areas and volumes. We only have the Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese, Indians, and Islamic peoples to compare.

When we compare the Greeks to everyone else, two conclusions are inescapably supported by the best scholarly literature:

  1. The Greeks were the first to derive mathematical concepts from pure reasoning alone with little reference to the external world, that is, the first to think about numbers and operations abstractly, as products of the rational powers of man, and to realize that geometry is concerned not with physical objects but with points, lines, triangles, squares, as objects of pure reason. The Greeks invented deductive reasoning, a method wherein reason proposes self-evident premises or axioms from which it deduces theorems in a rigorously consistent manner. The Greeks thus provided proofs for their mathematical derivations, which not even the Indians, the Chinese, and the Muslims, who came after, accomplished at the same level.
  2. Although ancient Greek mathematics (600 BC-600 AD) came before Indian (200-1200 AD) and Islamic mathematics (700-1400 AD), with the latter allegedly “picking up the best from Greek and Indian mathematics and developing it further”—in truth the modern European development of analytic geometry, infinitesimal calculus, and the theory of functions, was substantially based on ancient Greek mathematics. Isaac Newton acknowledged the importance of Euclidean geometry in his articulation of his presentation of his laws of motion in the form of two mathematical theorems: “it’s the glory of geometry that from so few principles it can accomplish so much.”

“Multicultural Mathematics”

The mathematical achievements of the Greeks, and of modern Europeans who grounded themselves on these achievements, is deeply unsettling to the current effort of the West to become a multicultural place where the diverse races, cultures, and religions of the world are made to feel co-equals in the making of this civilization. The current zeitgeist is that mathematics has been a “global effort…spanning…multiple cultures,” or that the achievements of modern Europeans “involved an extensive exchange of ideas among individuals around the world.” “Multicultural mathematics” is now a major educational staple of the West. The book, Multicultural Mathematics: Teaching Mathematics From A Global Perspective, published in 1991, explicitly states that the “customs, heritage, history, and other aesthetic aspects” of non-European immigrants must be incorporated as “essential components” of “an effective educational program.” The key academic text is The Crest Of The Peacock: Non-European Roots Of Mathematics, by George Gheverghese Joseph, professor at University of Manchester. First published in 1991, reprinted 3 times by Penguin, republished by Princeton Press in 2000, with a third edition released in 2011, this book has been cited about a thousand times, with great reviews in prestigious journals. It claims that Europeans scholars have distorted and devalued non-European contributions as “part of the rationale for subjugation and dominance.”

Only two sources are referenced to back this claim: a book published in 1908 by Rouse Ball, and a book by Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (1953). The latter book in particular is faulted for ignoring “a considerable body of research pointing to development of mathematics in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, pre-Columbian America, India, and the Arab world that had come to light [by the time Kline wrote his book].” Gheverghese proposes a “new model” of the history of mathematics, in which multiple cultures are shown to have played equally significant roles with “cross-fertilization between different mathematical traditions” happening at various times. He flaunts his model as complex, cosmopolitan, and nuanced—superior to the simplistic, linear, one sided, parochial Eurocentric model. Both the old and the new research contradict and invalidate these claims. First, most of the books Gheverghese relies upon to construct his new model are authored by Europeans themselves.

Second, the book by Rouse Ball is actually very cognizant of the contribution of non-Europeans. The title is, A Short Account of The History of Mathematics, and it begins with four sections on “Knowledge of the science of numbers possessed by Egyptians and Phoenicians,” and “Greek indebtedness to Egyptians and Phoenicians.” Ball’s point is that theoretical-deductive mathematics originated with the Greeks.

Third, Gheverghese complains about the “neglect of Arab contribution to… mathematics” without telling his readers that Rouse Ball’s book has two long chapters with the titles: “The Mathematics of the Arabs” and “Introduction of Arabian Works into Europe, 1150-1450,” in which he affirms original contributions: “From this rapid sketch it will be seen that the work of the Arabs… in arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry was of a high order of excellence.”

Why would Gheverghese, in what is otherwise a solid book in its effort to bring out the best in non-western mathematics, distort the scholarly contribution of Rouse Ball in this manner? Because academics are committed to multiculturalism, and this ideology allows one to distort the truth, for the sake of fighting “white racism”.

Fourth, regarding Kline’s book, Gheverghese leaves out the fact that Kline’s book is specifically about Western mathematics: “The object of this book is to advance the thesis that mathematics has been a major cultural force in Western civilization.”

Fifth, why did Gheverghese ignore so many books published after the 1950s, such as Carl Boyer’s A History of Mathematics (1968)? This book has chapters dedicated to “Egypt,” “Mesopotamia,” “China and India,” and a chapter with the title, “The Arabic Hegemony.” Why did he ignore Kline’s subsequent book, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), possibly the most authoritative historical survey published so far, which opens with chapters on Mesopotamian and Egyptian mathematics, with an additional chapter on “the Hindus and Arabs?” Every book I have read has chapters on non-Europeans. We can go back to D.E. Smith’s two volume work, History of Mathematics, published in 1923, to find two opening chapters on non-European contributions, and one chapter plus half of another on “Oriental” mathematics, along with separate sections on Oriental contributions inside all the chapters about European contributions. Smith actually co-authored a book on Japanese mathematics.

The basic arguments that Smith presented in History of Mathematics are still valid. He offered an opening chapter on Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and India, as “pioneers in mathematical development before 1000 BC.” Then chapters on the contributions of the Classical and the Hellenistic Greeks, from 600 BC to 400 AD. We are informed that during the “five centuries from 500 to 1000 AD… Europe was intellectually dormant,” while “there were four or five mathematicians of prominence in India” (p. 152); and, furthermore, that China saw the greatest accomplishments during the five centuries from 1000 to 1500 AD. While Smith may have neglected Muslim contributors, believing that they were “transmitters of learning rather than creators,” he did offer sections on the “greatest mathematicians” during the Islamic ascendancy from the eight to the fourteenth century. After 1200-1400, Smith’s focus shifted back to the Europeans because from this point on all the original ideas came from them alone.

Greeks Compared to Egyptians, Babylonians, and Chinese

The indubitable reality is that, if you look past politicized books on “multicultural mathematics,” the scholarly consensus coming from the best books on the history of mathematics for over a century now, and to this day, is that the Greeks, as Kline says in History of Western Mathematics, initiated a mathematics that “differed radically from that which preceded them” (p. 24). Dirk Struik’s A Concise History of Mathematics, in the 1948 edition that I am using, acknowledges Babylonian math “rose to a far higher level than Egyptian… in its computational technique” (p. 23), while arguing that “nowhere” in Babylonian mathematics “do we find any attempt at what we call a demonstration. No argumentation was presented, but only the prescription of certain rules” (p. 31). William Berlinghoff and Fernando Gouvêa follow a similarly developmental interpretation in Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers (2015). This book, keep in mind, was published by The Mathematical Association of America, which is attuned to the multicultural sensitivities of teachers and students. They point out that, while the Egyptians “could solve simple linear equations… [and] knew how to compute or approximate the areas and volumes of several geometric shapes,” Babylonians “made use of extensive tables of products, reciprocals, conversion coefficients, and other constants,” and “they could also solve a wide range of problems that we would describe as leading to quadratic equations” (pp. 9-11). However, with the Babylonians, “the ideas behind the methods for solving quadratic equations were probably based on ‘cut-and-paste geometry’ [and] Babylonian geometry was devoted mainly to measurement…. The Greek mathematicians were unique in putting logical reasoning and proof at the center of the subject” (pp. 11-15).

Stuart Hollingdale, in his biographical book, Makers of Mathematics (1989) agrees that “the concept of proof [in Babylonia] is conspicuous by its absence; and there is no clear distinction between exact and approximate results” (p. 11). Carl Boyer’s text, A History of Mathematics, the revised version co-authored by Uta Merzbach (1989), is unequivocal in its assessment that “pre-Hellenic peoples had no concept of proof, nor any feeling of the need for proof… there are no explicit statements from the pre-Hellenic period that would indicate a felt need for proofs or a concern for questions of logical principles” (p. 47). In contrast, as Reviel Netz tells us in The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History (1999), Greek mathematics produced knowledge of general validity; not only about the particular right triangle ABC of the diagram, for example, but about all right triangles. In the polemical culture that Greeks inhabited, where intellectuals sought to outdo each other, where no one could claim control over what constituted the truth on mere utilitarian grounds, or reliance on their official capacities, sage-like status, or adherence to norms sanctified by kinship, making the most persuasive arguments was very important, and in deductive mathematics the Greeks saw the possibility of expressing incontrovertible truths.

But what about the Chinese with their long history, past ancient times, and their “greatest” mathematicians who lived during the Sung Era (960–1279)? “Chinese mathematical works… are in the spirit of the Babylonians rather than the Greeks. They consist of collections of specific problems and present a curious mixture of the primitive and the sophisticated.” In the course of their long history, the Chinese became “more advanced than the Babylonians in that they gave general rules, often with formal proofs” (Hollingdale: p. 93), and excellent mathematicians “flourished during the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries” (p. 94), when the Europeans were experiencing their “long interlude” in the Middle Ages merely rediscovering the Greek works. Nevertheless, as Joseph Needham admitted, despite his enormous admiration for the overall accomplishments of the Chinese, “Greek mathematics was on a higher level, if only on account of its more abstract and systematic character.” In Chinese math, “there was an absence of the idea of rigorous proof.” In fact, the Chinese never developed a formal logic. “Mathematics in China was therefore utilitarian… Of mathematics for the sake of mathematics there was very little” (1995: pp. 62-64).

Boyer and Merzbach agree that the ancient Chinese were “repeating the old custom of the Babylonians and Egyptians of compiling sets of specific problems,” in contrast to the Greeks of this period who were “composing logically ordered and systematically expository treatises” (p. 222). Zhu Shijie (1249–1314) was “the last and greatest of the Sung mathematicians” but he was a lone, wandering scholar about whom little is known, author of two treatises, of which the first, Introduction to Mathematical Studies (Suanxue qimeng), was a “relatively elementary work” which was “lost until it reappeared in the nineteenth century.” His greater work, Jade Mirror of the Four Origins (Siyuan yujian), which also “disappeared in the eighteenth century, only to be rediscovered in the next century,” represents “the peak in the development of Chinese algebra, for it deals with simultaneous equations and with equations of degrees as high as fourteenth” (pp. 229-30). We will see below, however, that symbolic algebra was a product of early modern Europe, and that Greek mathematics was directly responsible for the development of modern mathematics. This is the reason Morris Kline’s text, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, ignores Chinese mathematics in preference for the contributions of Hindu and Arabic mathematics to modern Europe.

The Greeks Were the Forerunners of Modern Mathematics

While reasonable people will have no problems agreeing that Greek mathematics stood far above Egyptian and Babylonian accomplishments, many will find the additional claim that in ancient times the Greeks were already more accomplished than the combined civilizations of China, India, and Islam to be an exaggeration bordering on historical falsification. How could a small population in ancient Greece accomplish more than civilizations that lasted thousands of years, with China and India practicing mathematics after ancient Greece was gone, and Islam standing on the shoulders of Greek achievements? This makes no sense. The most popular argument taught to students today, which prevails online, even though it is not supported by serious scholarly research, is that Hindu-Islamic mathematicians, standing above the Greek legacy, nurtured the rise of modern European mathematics. Here’s the World’s #1 Online Encyclopedia: “Through contact with other cultures, and especially the absorption of Arab ideas and innovations, European learning in fields such as mathematics was able to go beyond the work of ancient scholars. New fields of study unknown to the Greeks were opened, leading to such developments as the calculus of Newton (1642-1727) and Leibniz (1646-1716), which would revolutionize both mathematics and science.”

The impression they want to convey seems reasonable enough: ancient Greek mathematics came before Indian (200-1200 AD) and Islamic mathematics (700-1400 AD), with the latter “picking up the best from Greek and Indian mathematics and developing it further.” The best historical scholarship shows, however, that the modern development of analytic geometry, infinitesimal calculus, and the theory of functions, was substantially based on ancient Greek mathematics. This same scholarship acknowledges that the modern West owes a debt to i) “Islamic scholars who collected, preserved, and translated the Greek mathematical texts” (Hollingdale: p. 101), and ii) the Hindu “creation of the decimal positional number system that is universally used today,” that is, separate symbols for the numbers 1 to 9, negative numbers, and the notation for a missing position, that is, a zero symbol (Hollingdale: p. 101; Kline, 1972: pp. 183-197).

What about the argument that, while the Greeks originated deductive geometry, the Hindus and Muslims added substantially new ideas to arithmetic leading to the rise of modern symbolic algebra and to trigonometry? Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (780–850) is thus eulogized as the “father of algebra”, offering “the first” systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. Wikipedia informs impressionable students that he is “the first to treat algebra as an independent discipline.” Furthermore, Al-Biruni (973–1050), we are told, was among those “who laid the foundation for modern trigonometry,” which allowed Muslims to take Greek geometry to higher heights, since trigonometry studies relationships between side lengths and angles of triangles.

First, in response, we need to be aware that ancient Greek mathematics extended from 600 BC to 500 AD, which equals about 1100 years of history. It is commonly assumed that Greece’s greatness was restricted to the “Classical” period of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, the age of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Hippocrates, Herodotus, Thucydides, the defeat of the Persians, the rise of Athens, the birth of democratic citizenship, and so on. They forget the “Hellenistic” period between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the rise of Augustus in Rome in 31 BC, and the fact that Greek high culture remained dominant through Roman times. The Classical Period is known as the “Golden Age”—but not in mathematics. The golden age of Greek science was during the Hellenistic era, and, within this era, the golden age of mathematics was from about 300 BC to 200 BC, the time of the three greatest mathematicians: Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius. There were many other great mathematicians before and after this age. The birth of mathematics in Greece is generally identified with Thales (623 –545 BC), about whom Aristotle said: “To Thales… the primary question was not What do we know, but How do we know it.” Among the things he is said to have proven is that “the pairs of vertical angles formed by two intersecting lines are equal.” The next great figure is Pythagoras (580-500 BC) who founded a very influential school, the first to classify numbers: real numbers, rational and irrational, integers, rational fractions, algebraic irrational numbers and transcendental numbers.

The list of mathematicians and their achievements is too long: Archytas (b. 428 BC), Hippasus (400 BC), Hippias (b. 460), Hippocrates of Chios (430, not to be confused with the “father of medicine”), Zeno of Elea (450), Anaxagoras (428), Democritus (460), and the greatest of the Classical Period, Eudoxus (b. 408 BC), known as the father of mathematical astronomy, and the first to formulate the method of exhaustion, which some see as a precursor to the methods of calculus. Menaechmus (380–320 BC) is known for his discovery of conic sections and his solution to the long-standing problem of doubling the cube using the parabola and hyperbola. These men wrote books, some of which have been lost, though we have commentaries on them and some of the titles; for example, Democritus wrote: On Numbers, On Geometry, On Tangencies, On Mappings and On Irrationals.

After the “golden age” of Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius, we have more greats: Aristarchus (310-230 BC), who wrote On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon; Eratosthenes, remembered for his almost accurate measurement of the Earth; Hipparchus (b. 180 BC), the father of trigonometry; Menelaus (100 AD); Ptolemy (100 –170 AD), the founder of Cartography and Geography, and author of the famous Almagest. Heron (62 AD) is best known for this formula: If a, b, and c are the lengths of the sides: Area = Square root of √s(s – a)(s – b)(s – c) where s is half the perimeter, or (a + b + c)/2. We could go on with Diophantus (b. 200AD), author of a series of books called Arithmetica, which is seen as the “highest point of Alexandrian algebra,” with its “most striking feature” being the solution of indeterminate algebraic equations (Kline, 1972: pp. 138-43). The last of the greats is Pappus (b. 290 AD), known for his Collection (c.  340), and his hexagon theorem in projective geometry, the full significance of which “was not realized until the seventeenth century” (Hollingdale: p. 90).

Archimedes (b. 287 BC) is consistently “ranked with Newton and Gauss as one of the supreme mathematical geniuses of all time” (Hollingdale: p. 64). Suffice it to list his writings that are preserved in full: On the Equilibrium of Plane Figures, Quadrature of the Parabola, On the Sphere of the Cylinder, On Spirals, On Conoids and Spheroid, On Floating Bodies, The Measurement of the Circle, The Sandreckoner and The Method. The Conics by Apollonius is known as a “masterpiece” containing 487 propositions proven by the “rigorous deductive methods characteristic of the Greek masters” (Hollingdale: p. 57). Before I address the role of Hindu-Muslim algebra, I will close with a few words about Euclid. His book, The Elements, has been “by far the most influential work ever written,” matched only by the Bible. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton all built their theories on the basis of Euclidean geometry. The Elements, which Bertrand Russell said was “one of the best books ever written,” compiles, organizes, and reworks many of the mathematical concepts of Euclid’s predecessors into a consistent whole. Its deductive method has been the most important procedure used by Westerners for demonstrating scientific certitude (“truth”) until the seventeenth century. No book in the non-west provided such a self-conscious presentation of what it means for a statement to be “known to be true.” It states that there must be some set of statements, called axioms, that are assumed to be true intuitively, from which point one can derive other basic statements or theorems. Some have said that a book entitled, Aryabhatiya, written in 499 AD by the Indian mathematician Aryabhata, is “somewhat akin to that of Euclid’s Elements” in that both are “summaries of earlier developments, compiled by a single author.” But as Boyer and Merbach point out: “There are, however, more striking differences than similarities, between the two works. The Elements is a well ordered synthesis of pure mathematics with a high degree of abstraction, a clear logical structure, and an obvious pedagogical inclination; the Aryabhatiya is a brief descriptive work” (p. 237).

Now, it is true, it was in the field of geometry, not arithmetic, that the Greeks constructed their Euclidean deductive method. In Greek arithmetic operations, which did include algebra, there is no “explicit deductive structure.” These are the words of Morris Kline, who goes on to say: “The work of Heron, Nichomachus, and Diophantus, and of Archimedes as far as his arithmetic is concerned, reads like the procedural texts of Egyptians and Babylonians, which tell us how to do things. The deductive, orderly proof of Euclid, Apollonius, and of Archimedes’ geometry is gone. The problems are inductive in spirit, in that they show methods for concrete problems that presumably apply to general classes whose extent is not specified” (1972: p. 144).

Kline, however, is less impressed by the achievements of Indians and Muslims in Arithmetic: “The high period [of Indian mathematics] may be roughly dated from about AD 200 to 1200.” “Hindu mathematics became significant only after it was influenced by Greek achievements…. The geometry of the Hindus was certainly Greek…. Geometry during this period showed no notable advances…. They did have a special gift for arithmetic.” They gave “rules for the multiplication, division, and square roots of irrational expressions…. They used abbreviations of words and a few symbols to describe operations…, The Hindus recognized that quadratic equations have two roots and included negative roots as well as irrational roots…. In indeterminate equations the Hindus advanced beyond Diophantus…. In trigonometry the Hindus made a few advances.” However, “the Hindus were less sophisticated than the Greeks in that they failed to see the logical difficulties involved in the concept of irrational numbers. Their interest in calculation caused them to overlook philosophical distinctions, or distinctions based on principles that in Greek thought were fundamental” (1972: 183-90). Moreover, by about 1200, “scientific activity in India declined and progress in mathematics ceased…. It is fairly certain that the Hindus did not appreciate the significance of their own contributions. The few good ideas they had, such as separate symbols for numbers 1 to 9, the conversion to base 10, and negative numbers, were introduced casually with no realization that they were valuable innovations.”

Regarding Islamic mathematics, Kline has this to say: “The cultural resources available to the Arabs were considerable. They invited Hindu scientists to settle in Baghdad.” Fundamentally, what “the Arabs possessed was Greek knowledge…. In arithmetic the Arabs took one step backward… they rejected negative numbers…. To algebra the Arabs contributed first of all the name. The word ‘algebra’ comes from a book written in 830.” They did not invent algebra: their algebra is “founded on Hindu and also Babylonian and Greek influences…. Arabic geometry was influenced mainly by Euclid, Archimedes, and Heron.” In conclusion: “The Arabs made no significant advance in mathematics. What they did was absorb Greek and Hindu mathematics, preserve it, and, ultimately, transmit it to Europe/”

This view is corroborated by the authors I have cited thus far. For example, Berlinghoff and Gouvêa say of Indian mathematics that “the main thing that is mostly missing from their texts is any explanation of how their methods and results were found. They did not give proofs or derivations” (p. 28). Boyer and Merzbach highlight the accomplishments of Brahmagupta (598–668 CE) for being the first to “give a general solution of the linear Diophantine equation ax + by = c, where a, b, and c are integers,” and they add that “the trigonometry of the sine function came presumably from India.” though Kline thinks that in trigonometry the Hindus made only “a few minor advances” (1972: p. 189). Overall, in the estimation of Boyer and Merzbach, there was a “lack of nice distinction on the part of Hindu mathematicians between exact and inexact results.” In their view, indeed, “analytic geometry and calculus had Greek rather than Indian roots, and European algebra came from Islamic countries rather than India” (245-50). According to Hollingdale, the period of Arab pre-eminence between the 9th-11th centuries, only “saw many useful—but not outstanding—advances in algebra, number theory, trigonometry, optics, and, to a lesser extent, geometry” (p. 101).

When all is said, for all the contributions made by Indians and Muslims, it would be Europeans in the modern era, on the direct strength of what the Greeks had accomplished, who would transform arithmetic/algebra into proper sciences by introducing symbolism and making “extensive and impressive contributions to the theory of numbers,” and thus learning to justify algebraic reasoning, by viewing algebra as an extension of logic in treating quantity, and by reversing the dependence of algebra on geometry, and indeed using algebra to help solve geometric constructions problems. When the Greco-Roman world ended in the sixth century, and Islam took the Mediterranean world, only a small part of the Greek mathematical corpus was known in Europe—until the 11th when scholars from Europe went to Islamic Spain to translate into Latin the works that Muslim scholars had preserved and commented upon. For some time, until about 1400, European mathematics benefitted from this Islamic legacy with its adoption of Hindu numerals. Through the 12th and 13th, Kline writes, Europeans “energetically sought out copies of the Greek works, their Arabic versions, and texts written by Arabs,” while contributing their own translations of Greek works into Latin rather than relying on translations that had passed through Arabic translations.

We should not forget, however, that this absorption of Islamic mathematics occurred within an emerging rationalist Christian framework, the “Renaissance of the 12th Century,” which included the invention of universities with a “rational” curriculum and a continuous sequence of scholastic philosophers. I will mention only a few names: Roger (not Francis) Bacon (1220–1292) is identified as beginning experimental science and for writing about the importance of mathematics to all science; and Jean Buridan and Nicholas Oresme are both acknowledged for their demonstration that “the effective velocity in uniformly difform motion was the average of the initial and final velocities.” It is even said that Oresme anticipated Descartes’ coordinate geometry, with “contributions towards the development of the concept of graphing functions and approaches to investigating infinite series.”

This broader rationalist atmosphere, together with the rise of universities, was absent in the Islamic world, despite its admiration for Aristotle. Only Christians would seek to provide logical proofs for the existence of God. Spectacles and mechanical clocks were both invented in 13th century Europe. Romanesque and Gothic architecture required more practical geometry than the architecture of other civilizations. For the sake of modesty, however, let us say that, up until about 1500, European mathematicians, “with their algebraic emphasis, derived more inspiration from Arabic and medieval mathematics than from the much richer inheritance of Classical Greece” (Hollingdale: p. 107). It still remains the case that the European breakthrough into modern mathematics that came in the 1600s was primarily grounded in Greek mathematics.

Before this breakthrough there was Leonardo Pisa, also known as Fibonacci (1175-1250), identified as “the most creative mathematician of the medieval Christian world,” who followed Islamic mathematicians “in using words rather than symbols and in basing the algebra on arithmetical methods/” His work, De practica geometrie (1225), however, was based on Euclid’s book. Nicolas Chuquet’s Le Triparty en la science des nombres (1484) explained the Hindu-Arabic number system and how to perform arithmetic with this system. This treatise was novel, however, in devising an exponential notation where the power of the unknown was indicated by an exponent; and in presenting an algebraic notation with an isolated negative number, though he viewed negative numbers as absurd. Girolamo Cardono “astonished” the mathematical world by giving algebraic solutions to both cubic and quartic equations in his book, Ars magna (1545).

After other prominent names, the most significant transition to modern mathematics came with the introduction of a fully symbolic algebra by François Viète [Franciscus Vieta] (1540-1603). Because Hindus and Muslims had placed their practical arithmetical calculations in the forefront of their mathematics, and had elevated algebra on an arithmetic rather than a geometric basis; and because the European transition to modern mathematics took place in arithmetic and algebra, it is commonly believed that Hindu and Islamic mathematics laid the groundwork for Vieta’s transition to algebraic symbolism, and subsequent developments in analytic geometry, calculus, and functions. Not true. Vieta’s book, In artem analyticem isagoge [Introduction to the Art of Analysis] (1591), was part of his “program of rediscovering the method of analysis used by the ancient Greek mathematicians,” as The Britannica Guide to the History of Mathematics recognizes (2011: p. 96). His algebra had a firm Greek geometrical foundation. “His aim was to uncover and restore the algebraic relationships that were, he believed, hidden behind the geometrical presentations of the Greek masters” (Hollingdale: p. 120). Vieta saw his new symbolic algebraic method “as an advancement over the ancient method, a view he arrived at by comparing the geometric analysis contained in Book VII of Pappus’s Collection, with the arithmetic analysis of Diophantus’s Arithmetica.” (The Britannica Guide: p. 96). Despite the attempt of this Guide to portray mathematics as a “global effort…spanning…multiple cultures,” it can’t hide the actual truth. Once this Guide hits the modern era, not a single non-European is mentioned since none participated in modern mathematics.

Vieta was the first to use algebraic symbols or letters deliberately and systematically, not only to represent unknown quantities but also as general coefficients. “The Arabs had not advanced one iota in symbolic notation.” The “turning point in the history of algebra” came with Vieta (Dantzig, [1930] 1954: 85-7). Before him, in Europe, letters had been used for the unknown, and the first abbreviations used from the 1400s on were p for plus and m for minus; the = was introduced in 1557 by Robert Recorde. These changes in notation, the use of special words and number symbols, were essentially abbreviations of normal words. In fact, prior to Vieta, it was only Diophantus (AD 200) who had consciously introduced symbolism to make algebraic writing more compact and efficient. Vieta’s education was overwhelmingly based on the writings of the ancient Greeks—Apollonius, Archimedes, Pappus, Diophantus; and the works of European mathematicians such as Cardano, Tartaglia, and Stevin. After Vieta, his analytic algebra was applied to the study of curves by his French countrymen Fermat and Descartes, who were also motivated by the same goal of applying new algebraic techniques to Greek geometry, leading to the development of analytic geometry. Vieta actually drew a conceptual line between his new symbolic algebra and arithmetic, calling the former a true algebra, with the potential to become a universal science. In other words, the arithmetic algebra of the Hindus and Muslims was not, in his estimation, truly algebraic.

The Mathematics of Perspective

This transition to modern mathematics was founded primarily on the Greek achievement, not as a mere intellectual exercise, but in response to the newly emerging scientific world of the Renaissance era, the age of exploration and the rise of Copernican astronomy. Copernicus’s heliocentric system, and Kepler’s (1571-1630) three planetary laws, were based on the Platonic belief that the universe was ordered according to a mathematical plan and that the truths of nature could be revealed in mathematical laws and geometrical terms—ideas that were absent in both the Islamic and the Hindu world. Renaissance perspective painting, the realistic depiction of scenes on canvas by incorporating three-dimensions, relative distances, size, and positions of objects, was likewise based on a thorough study of Euclidean geometry. The European cartographic revolution, the mapping of the world, was intimately connected to Greek mathematics; Gerard Mercator’s (1512-94) map solved the problem of projecting figures from a sphere onto a flat surface.

The advantage deductive geometry had over practical arithmetic, trial and error, or reasoning by induction and analogy, is that its validity came from the logical derivation of conclusions from self-evident premises, rather than from approximate inferences based on observations of empirical facts restricted to a time and place. Even if we were to argue that deductive mathematics is merely a conventional language that Westerners imposed upon the world, rather than an accurate revelation of the structure of the universe, the success of Euclidean mathematical models lay precisely in mimicking or predicting the behavior of physical bodies. In the ideal world of abstraction that Galileo created, without resistance or friction, in which physical bodies were reduced to geometrical forms, perfectly smooth bodies moving on a perfect plane, the principles of Euclidean geometry held. As Galileo declared, “the grand book of the universe…cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and to read the alphabet in which it is composed…the language of mathematics.” It was the Greeks who discovered the language of nature.

Ricardo Duchesne has written a number of articles on Western uniqueness. He the author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians.

Featured: A folio from Synagogue (Collection) by Pappus, ca. 10th century AD.

Russian Cosmism: A Union of Spirit and Science?

The term “Russian cosmism” does not designate a school of thought that structured by theses, institutions or a precise program. Rather, the cosmists constitute a nebulous group of Russian authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, who have in common the idea of a union of the spirit and science, through utopian and grandiose visions. Two of them have particularly marked Russian history, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Nikolai Fyodorov.

On October 4, 1957, radio amateurs all over the world, for the first time, received a signal from space. It wasn’t aliens on the loose, but Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in history, put into orbit by the Russians. This undeniable success of Soviet technoscience was of course also presented as a triumph of dialectical materialism. It was however forgetting in passing all that the Soviet aerospace owed to a man with conceptions very far from Marxism-Leninism— Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) spent most of his life in Russia, in the remote region of Kaluga (he was nicknamed “the eccentric of Kaluga”). It is there, in a small and modest wooden house, that he laid the theoretical and technical foundations of aerospace. Today, all historians of science (even American) recognize Tsiolkovsky as the one who laid the scientific foundations of space travel. He also wrote several science-fiction novels, with the avowed aim of making the new generations desire to go into space. Among his readers were Valentin Glouchko (who, along with Sergei Korolev, became a pillar of the Soviet space program), as well as Yuri Gagarin, the first man to go into space.

In order to make Tsiolkovsky a hero as a “brilliant scientist from the people” (a monument to his glory was erected in Moscow), Soviet propaganda had to make many aspects of his thought totally taboo—especially since for Tsiolkovsky space travel was not a goal in itself, but a means to the service of a project even more disproportionate—the perfection of humanity.

A Universe Full of Angels

Tsiolkovsky thought that God had created a universe in which all matter is also spirit (to be exact, Tsiolkovsky affirmed that he did not believe in God, but in a perfectly good, omniscient and omnipotent supreme being, who had created the world; which makes one think of the well-known joke of the Hellenists: it was not Homer who wrote the Iliad, but someone who had the same name as him). This conception (which he qualifies as panpsychist) means that the matter present everywhere in the universe is endowed in itself with a spiritual force, with a form of consciousness which makes it evolve towards higher and higher forms: mineral, vegetable, animal, human, then…

Tsiolkovsky believed that to spread in space was the only way for humanity to ensure in a certain way its survival, to avoid an extinction of the human species in the event of terrestrial catastrophe (a position that certain very media-oriented scientists today share). But he added that man could only spread in space if he took in hand his own evolution and radically modified his own body, in order to adapt to extraterrestrial conditions (a concept that contemporary science fiction calls panthropy). To emancipate oneself from the Earth, implied for Tsiolkovsky, to emancipate oneself also from our animality (sexuality, mortality, need to eat and drink). Eventually, human beings would spread in the whole universe, and become “etheric” beings, magnificent and immortal (this transformation implying moreover the elimination of all the terrestrial life forms not reaching these standards of perfection).

In the eyes of the “eccentric of Kaluga,” this transformation into “etheric” beings had already been accomplished by extraterrestrials. By exploring space, humanity would end up meeting these extraterrestrial “angels,” living on heavenly planets. While waiting for this day, these “angelic” beings maintain the Earth, a planet that is not very evolved at the moment, in a sort of galactic quarantine. But they try nevertheless to communicate with us, to guide us, despite the gap that separates us. Tsiolkovsky himself said that he had communicated with these “space angels” (in the 1970s, some people reused Tsiolkovsky’s theories to imagine a Russian version of the “ancient astronauts theory,” according to which the ancient religions were inspired by visits from extraterrestrials).

Tsiolkovsky never really received an academic education. He was in all respects a self-taught man. This made his scientific work all the more impressive. But when he arrived in Moscow at the age of 16, he took advantage of the reading advice of an obscure librarian, and then quickly joined the group of young students that this librarian gathered around him. This man, who took the young Tsiolkovsky under his wing, was named Nicolai Fedorov.

The Resurrection of the Dead

If Tsiolkovski is the most recognized cosmist on the scientific level, Nicolas Fedorov (1829-1903) is the first of them. Totally unknown during his lifetime, he generally shared his thoughts only with a selected circle of companions. Two of his disciples published his writings after his death in a single book: The Philosophy of the Common Work. Unlike Tsiolkovsky, Fedorov always saw himself as a faithful member of the Orthodox Church. In his eyes, humanity had an important and active eschatological role to play in the completion of the creation initiated by God. He thus conceived his thinking as Christianity, but Christianity in a radically reinterpreted sense. Christ had shown the way by resurrecting at Easter: Christianity was thus to be the religion of the resurrection of the dead, of the resurrection of the dead by properly human, scientific and technical means.

Nicolai Fedorov

For Fedorov, death is either a disintegration, i.e., a dissolution in multiplicity, or a fusion, i.e., a dissolution in unity (he considered the Holy Trinity, the unique God at the same time one and multiple, as the archetype of immortality). However, he also considered that disintegration and fusion are natural forces. Wherever he looked, he saw in the natural world only the reign of death. Fedorov insisted on the national and typically Russian character of this way of looking at nature. The romantic conception of nature was a fantasy of the urban bourgeois and “soil-less.” The muzhik, on the other hand, knew that the taiga does not offer any gifts, and that survival is always conquered over murderous nature. By taking control of natural forces through scientific and technical means, humanity would be able to defeat death itself and resurrect all its ancestors. At this point, all human beings who have ever lived must be resurrected. For Fedorov, this is an absolute moral duty, a matter of filial piety towards those who have gone before us, and thanks to whom we exist. We must give life back to those who gave it to us. Reproduction, sexuality, death, suffering, eating, drinking, all these natural things will disappear when the living and the dead are regenerated in new and immortal bodies, having little to do with our present animal body (this rejection of the “animal body” of man is common to many cosmists). This regenerated and invulnerable mankind, and also very numerous, will be able to spread into space, to settle on other planets, and to make the universe a paradise (Fedorov envisaged that the planet Earth itself could become an immense spaceship, thanks to the control of cosmic forces). Such was the communal work envisaged by Fedorov.

The philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) noted, with a certain irony, that Fedorov’s project was not a plan for the next thousand years, but rather a plan for the next ten thousand years. But if Fedorov suspected that his contemporaries would never take his ideas seriously, he had no doubt about their long-term feasibility. He believed that many peoples were dispersing and wasting their creative energies on war, democracy and capitalism. The realization of the common work required that mankind channel its forces and unite under an autocratic regime. This was, for Fedorov, the messianic vocation of the imperial throne of Holy Russia. The tsar, God’s chosen monarch, was to unite all countries and peoples under his rule for the eschatological fulfillment of the common work.

The Desert will Become a Garden Again

A few years before his death, Fedorov was invited by one of his disciples to visit the Pamir Mountains. This extremely desolate region made a strong impression on him. He saw in the Pamir a symbol of both Mount Meru (the sacred center of the world in Hinduism) and the Garden of Eden (for Fedorov, all religions derived from the same sophia perennis—the cult of the ancestors), a land of origin of the Indo-Europeans, transformed into a desert by the ignorance and barbarism of men. The first task of the common work was therefore to turn the Pamir into a garden, to make life blossom again where death reigned, just as, by dispersing into space, regenerated humanity would fill a universe, hitherto filled with death, with life. This revived Pamir, the triumph of life and science over death and ignorance, was to become the center of a united world dedicated to the realization of the common work under the leadership of the tsar.

After having reviewed the thought of the two most important cosmists in history, a question naturally arises—what to make of this improbable muddle of ideas that are at least astonishing, if not frankly bizarre, and sometimes even a little unhealthy? Tsiolkovsky and Fedorov were certainly “sweet dreamers,” but they were certainly not “lunatics.” As an aerospace pioneer, Tsiolkovsky is undoubtedly one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. Fedorov, on the other hand, impressed some of the greatest minds of the Russian Silver Age: Tsiolkovsky, of course, but also Dostoyevsky, Soloviev, Tolstoy, Florensky, Vernadsky, Bulgakov, Berdiaev. However, among all these eminent scientists, philosophers and novelists, none of them really took up the strange philosophy of Fedorov’s common work.

As we have already said, “cosmism” is not a school of thought, and there is no such thing as “Fedorovism.” What these brilliant minds admired in Fedorov was not a system of thought or specific theses, but rather this will to rethink human progress in general, and scientific progress in particular, in a spiritual framework. Fedorov believed that science without spirituality and spirituality without science would both lead humanity to catastrophe. His philosophy of the common work, once brought back to its fundamental intuition, can thus be understood as a utopian vision aiming at avoiding the announced catastrophe. This is what, in Fedorov (as well as in the other cosmists), struck his contemporaries, and continues to be striking today—this vision of a union of spirit and science, in a creative and utopian act of synthesis, giving its legitimacy and its place to human activity, genius and progress, in the eschatological realization of the divine transfiguration of the cosmos. The cosmists were certainly very strange thinkers, but they have undoubtedly more to say to us than the transhumanists and the fundamentalists who swarm us today.

Grégoire Quevreux currently teaches philosophy at the Institut Protestant de Théologie de Paris, and is completing a doctoral thesis on process theology under the direction of Professor Cyrille Michon. This article appears through the kind courtesy of PHILITT.

Featured: “Captured asteroid,” by Andrey Sokolov; postcard, 1965.

Climate Change: The Wrong Focus

First things first: The question of whether climate change is a man-made phenomenon whose sole cause is carbon dioxide particles in the atmosphere is not going to be addressed here. That is the official narrative; and it is from this perspective that the inadequacy of the solutions offered is here demonstrated. Indeed, this perspective should also make everyone doubt the promises of salvation that are made to us, to save the planet.

After a period of silence, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, released a new report this year. The panel, which brings together scientists from around the world to share their findings on climate change, concluded that carbon dioxide emissions would have to be reduced by about 50 percent by 2030, if we still want to avert the great catastrophe that has been announced.

Several years ago, the IPCC concluded that the 1.5-degree Celsius target set by the nations of this world in the Paris Agreement was actually no longer achievable, and that it would prove difficult to limit warming to 2 degrees. Nevertheless, the governments of many countries are spouting an optimism that cannot be understood with common sense.

This is probably fed by the fact that they believe they have found the solution to all this. And the solution is, of course, quite simple: renewable energies and sustainable technologies. Everyone now knows what this means: if we simply generate our electricity from wind turbines, photovoltaics and hydroelectric power, and drive electric cars instead of the dirty gasoline and diesel vehicles, then everything will be fine—or so we are regularly told. But is that really the case?

Dirty Technologies

The problem with renewable energies is that they are not renewable. Of course, wind is always blowing somewhere in the world, and the sun will continue to shine for several billion years. Yes, and even water flows incessantly. The energy sources are therefore not the problem. The situation is quite different, however, with power plants. Wind turbines have to be built first, as do solar cells and hydroelectric power plants.

In the process, the most toxic processes that industry has to offer are used. This begins right with the mining of the required resources. Here, aluminum, copper, gold and the so-called “rare earths” are needed in large quantities. In other regions of the world, the mining of these raw materials destroys entire regions.

Wind turbines, for example, require more metal than any other type of power plant. Rare earths, such as neodymium, are also used here. When this material is mined, large areas of whole regions become radioactively contaminated. This is because the mining process releases uranium and thorium, which are released unhindered into the environment. The same applies to metals and rare earths in general. In addition, wind turbines contain large quantities of plastic resins as well as glass fibers.

This poses a huge problem of disposal. After all, the average life of a wind turbine is 20 years. After that, it has to be dismantled—but recycling plastic resin and glass fibers is not possible. Composite materials, such as those used on the turbines, cannot be separated again and are therefore simply disposed of somewhere. This creates a huge disposal problem with disastrous consequences.

But wind turbines also pose an ecological problem during their lifetime and even before. This is exemplified in the documentary film, Headwind 21, by Marijn Poels. The filmmaker accompanies an activist in Sweden who fights against the deforestation of the pristine forests in the north of the country. The deforestation is being done to make way for a wind farm. For this, entire forests are cleared over a huge area. Often the ground must also be prepared by blasting, before even wind turbines can be placed at all. Large areas of land are completely destroyed in this way just for a few wind turbines.

And this wind-farm will not even serve the country of Sweden, but is being built to supply a newly developing technology park in Finland. Thus, energy that was previously obtained from fossil fuels is not simply obtained in an ostensibly renewable way, but an additional energy demand is covered. This is simply added on top of the previous energy demand. Thus, nothing is gained by the wind turbines—but more of nature is destroyed to gain additional energy—when nature is an important carbon sink that absorbs our emissions.

In addition, wind turbines promote climate change! This is because the wind-farms extract moisture from the soil and additionally warm the ground, which leads to droughts. The wind turbines erected in Germany through 2018 alone have given the country an additional 0.27 degrees Celsius temperature increase as a result—and that’s in just five years. Erecting even more of them, and clearing forests to do so, is absurd—if the fight against climate change were really the issue.

Wind turbines also endanger birds and bats. These are often killed by the rotor blades, as they cannot anticipate this danger. In addition, people and nature are exposed to noise or infrasound, which can lead to illnesses, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. In close proximity to residential areas, cast shadows also pose a problem. The constant change from light to dark and back again, the so-called “strobe-effect,” is a strain on every organism, be it human, animal or even plants in the field.

Photovoltaic plants or hydroelectric power plants also rely on substances that are highly toxic and whose degradation entails great destruction of nature.

There is also the problem that when demand fluctuates, utilities shut down wind turbines first because it is much more profitable to run nuclear power plants, which can also cover the base-load of the grid. In the documentary Planet of the Humans produced by Michael Moore, all the madness associated with renewable energy is illustrated. Moore shows how power plants have to be started with the help of fossil fuels; how solar plants are built in the desert and then deteriorate—and most importantly, all the destruction associated with mining the materials needed for so-called renewable energy.

Hydroelectric plants also create another problem that wind turbines and solar plants do not. This is because entire rivers are often dammed for such a hydroelectric plant. This interrupts the natural course of rivers, and animals such as salmon can no longer swim up and down the river unhindered. But they have to, because they usually live on the lower course of the river or in the ocean and only return to the upper course of the river to spawn.

This spectacle, called migration, can be witnessed every year unless the rivers are dammed. The dams present insurmountable obstacles for the salmon. After spawning, they often die and are then dispersed by the current in the floodplains and in the course of the river. This makes them an important food source for other animals, bringing nutrients from the ocean up the river. The natural flow of these nutrients is also interrupted by the dams, causing sediments to pile up on them that were supposed to reach the lower part of the river. In this way, dams kill the water body as well as the life around them.

Mobility

Another aspect that is always mentioned in connection with climate change is electromobility. This has been increasingly promoted in recent years. Tesla built a plant specifically for this purpose in Grünheide near Berlin.

But electromobility is not as clean as it might seem. A lot of plastics and metals are also used here. These vehicles are virtually bursting with electronics, the effects of which on the environment have actually been known for a long time.

Then there are the highly toxic batteries needed for these vehicles, because they contain, among other things, lithium, the mining of which is highly damaging to the environment.

For example, there are large lithium deposits in South America, especially in Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. There, the light metal is extracted from salt water by pumping it to the surface from great depths in salt lakes and evaporating it. Chemicals are then used to separate the lithium from the salt and other substances. What remains is a chemical-salty solution that contaminates the surrounding groundwater.

Many people have already lost access to drinkable groundwater in this way, and the regions are becoming increasingly desolate. The chemicals, especially heavy metals, are also spreading in the area, causing livestock to die. In addition, since the water from the rivers is used for drinking and to irrigate the fields, agriculture is no longer possible in these regions. However, the increasing demand for lithium means that more and more new deposits are being developed in previously untouched regions.

The residents of the plant in Grünheide are currently experiencing what the production process of the vehicles means in itself. This region, which has already been struggling with a shortage of drinking water for some time, is now experiencing a further worsening of the situation. Large quantities of water are also needed to assemble the vehicles.

For this reason, the local authorities have already set an upper limit for water consumption. If this is exceeded, fines are imposed. However, Tesla is probably not affected by this, otherwise the company would not have settled there. The company is allowed to use vast amounts of water for the construction of environmentally harmful vehicles and batteries, while local residents have to think twice about every shower.

There was also a recent accident there in which toxic paint leaked out. According to Tesla, this could allegedly be completely removed and did not reach the environment. However, it should be common knowledge as to what to make of such statements on the part of the manufacturer. It also shows that there is a potential for environmental catastrophes here, should the accident or leak ever turn out to be somewhat larger. In addition, the use of toxic paint shows how far off the environmental friendliness of the vehicles really is.

Finally, the disposal of the vehicles causes considerable difficulties. Once again, the batteries are a major factor here, as they are pure poison for nature. In addition, as with all supposedly renewable technologies, there is the energy-cost of production. For example, the emissions backpack of every electric car ex-works is already twice as large as that of a conventional car. In addition, it has to be charged with energy again and again. If the proportion of electric cars increases, the energy requirement also rises automatically.

This energy, however, is usually obtained from fossil fuels or nuclear power plants. Thus, for the feeling of clean driving, whole swaths of land are polluted elsewhere and fossil fuels are extracted and burned. Electric cars are thus not one bit clean or environmentally friendly. Quite the opposite.

The fact that governing politicians cling to the so-called renewable or green technologies—despite all this destruction—has a simple reason: It’s a business.

Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, is now one of the richest people on earth for a reason. Thus, under the guise of saving the world, a market is being created that promises big sales but destroys nature on a large scale. There is also the reason why this meets with so little opposition—the focus on climate change and thus on carbon dioxide as the only factor.

For a long time now, the issue of climate change has been decoupled from that of environmental protection. Supposedly, climate change is the biggest threat of all—the contamination and destruction of nature plays no role in the discussion. The slogan is—carbon dioxide fuels climate change, it will destroy us all, therefore we must avoid every gram of carbon dioxide. The complex issue of nature destruction and environmental protection is thus reduced to a simplistic factor.

Through this narrow focus, people lose sight of the insane destruction that is being wrought. Yet even in the prevailing discourse, it is noted, albeit rather rarely, that the climate is a complex system—if we destroy nature, if we cut down forests as carbon sinks, if we poison the oceans or dry up the swamps, or if we persist in monoculture agriculture, then this has a negative impact on the climate.

Nevertheless, “carbon neutrality” is put forward as the only goal, and now also serves as a label for all kinds of products, so that consumers can get elude their complicity in the destructive system—at least in the way they feel—in a cheaply bought cleansing of conscience, a kind of “indulgence trade.”

At the same time, the blame for everything in this way is actually shifted solely onto the individual consumer, who through his or her choices would have the opportunity to influence the system in such a way that it would promote environmentally friendly alternatives, which of course is not the case. This is because the individual is always faced with a fait accompli in the supermarket or wherever, and has no way of influencing the manner of production, nor any control over the quantity produced. But by means of eco-labels and product descriptions as “climate neutral,” the impression is created that the consumer is contributing to saving the world with his choice.

Distraction

But the real question is quite different: Why do we fixate on a single substance and strive to reduce its emissions at all costs, only to avert something that, according to all the IPCC reports, can already no longer be averted?

Why are people encouraged to buy an electric car or reduce their electricity consumption, but not being prepared to live in a world where climate change is happening right now? Why are we not preparing for floods, for droughts? Why are we not adapting agriculture to these conditions, our cities, our work? Now, some would suggest that this adaptation is not happening because climate change either does not exist or is not man-made. And yes, it is also very striking that while the individual is to be educated with a moral finger to save energy, industry and industrialized agriculture blithely continue to consume energy.

But the explanation is probably quite simple:

A transformation of our society, an adaptation to a changed world, which perhaps really switches off the destruction of nature and uses drastically less energy, is simply not economical. Because capitalism would then actually have to be abolished, and supply would have to be ensured locally again.

But that doesn’t suit those who, in the current system, make very large profits from destroying nature, producing useless goods and shipping them all over the world. Focusing on carbon dioxide and its removal, on the other hand, makes a veritable business out of wind turbines, solar panels and electric mobility. As a result, the debate focuses on these, rather than addressing the real causes of nature’s destruction.

And of course: many of the arguments put forward here also apply to fossil energies or nuclear power. For these, too, nature is destroyed, air, land and water are polluted, and what is to be done with the nuclear waste is still not clear after 70 years of nuclear power. But instead of causing more destruction for a technology that does not solve the problems of our time, we should turn to the causes. Only a society that gets by with a minimum of energy consumption, that focuses on what is really necessary for life instead of constantly throwing new, useless products onto the market, is truly acting sustainably.

To do this, we also have to say goodbye to something that so many still believe in: the idea of eternal progress that would improve our lives. Progress, that is technical innovation, new products and developments. But it is precisely this progress that has led to the problems of the destruction of nature, the extinction of species, plastic waste and sewage and waste in the first place.

The example of so-called renewable technologies shows where all this leads to, where wanting to eliminate the destruction caused by this progress is only through further progress. Moreover, it is a false idea of progress that is being marketed here. Because progress is also reduced to marketable products. Progress is therefore only what can be sold. Social developments, up to a frugality that makes all these goods superfluous, do not appear in this belief in progress.

The history of this progress has shown, however, that it knows no end. It only brings us more and more new problems, new devices and products that have to be consumed and then end up as waste in nature to keep a capitalist machinery going, which leads us to ruin and hardly improves our lives.

Which is not to say, of course, that every discovery and development is exclusively negative. But we should separate ourselves from this unconditional dogma of eternal progress. After all, has the eleventh smartphone, the latest tablet or car really brought us any further or made us happier? Do we live better because we can consume coffee to go, while walking or on the subway? Are we better off because technology corporations and governments can monitor us everywhere, that we are increasingly digitized in order to live?

True progress would be a social weighing, combined with a penchant for less, a frugality that is at peace with itself and the world. However, this should not be a frugality decreed from above, a “Great Reset” that drives this society with momentum against the wall and claims countless victims in the process. On the contrary, a truly human change can only come from below, from the people who are affected by it themselves, who are fed up with a life on the hamster wheel, as a cog in the wheel.

Felix Feistel writes about the idiocy of this world and also against it. In a world reduced to numbers and data, which has always been alien to him, he searches for humanity and the meaning of life. He tries to use his powers and talents to create a world worth living in by opposing injustice and destruction. Despite the madness that is rampant everywhere, he is not ready to give up his belief in the goodness of man and his potential to transform the planet into a paradise. This article comes through the kind courtesy of Rubikon.

Featured: “Castor et Pollution,” by Max Ernst; painted in 1923.

How “Creation” Implies God

Background to the “Creation” Dispute

There is nothing very new about the thesis of this article—for many proofs that God is Creator of all finite things have already been attempted—often with great success. Moreover, we know as an article of Catholic faith that the existence of God can be known with certainty by the light of natural human reason (Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum, 1806). Yet, what may be somewhat novel about this article is that I will attempt to prove God’s existence by means of a series of diverse considerations about the very meaning of the term, “creation.” Moreover, I will examine certain presumptions about creation which have been made by atheists, i.e., by those who deny the very conclusion which is presently being sought.

Any self-respecting atheist must deny that the world is created by God. And yet, this very fact, namely, that the atheist feels called upon to deny the reality of creation, is itself significant—so much so, that this universal reaction of atheism will itself serve as the point of departure for our investigation.

Astronomer Robert Jastrow has commented upon the strange situation now confronting his fellow astronomers (many of whom appear to be scientific materialists). Jastrow observes, “…I am fascinated by some strange developments going on in astronomy—partly because of their religious implications and partly because of the peculiar reactions of my colleagues” (Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers,1978, 11).

Jastrow proceeds to explain the enigma confronted by modem scientists:

”The essence of the strange developments is that the Universe had, in some sense, a beginning—that it began at a certain moment in time, and under circumstances that seem to make it impossible—not just now—but ever—to find out what force or forces brought the world into being at that moment…. the astronomical evidence proves that the Universe was created twenty billion years ago in a fiery explosion, and in the searing heat of that first moment, all the evidence needed for a scientific study of the cause of the great explosion was melted down and destroyed” (God and the Astronomers, 11-12).

More recent estimates of the time of the universe’s birth now place it some 13.7 billion years ago.

Scientists today pursue the vision of Grand Unified Theories which attempt to unify the fundamental forces of nature as different aspects of the same force. Senior physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory’s High Energy Physics Division, David S. Ayres, remarks that the “Grand Unified Theories offer detailed insight into the processes which occurred at the instant of creation ….” (Argonne News, 1984, 8-9).

For centuries, atheistic materialists had blandly assumed the eternity of the world while denigrating the peculiarly Judeo-Christian belief of creation in time as a vestige of religious mythology. Science seemed squarely in the atheist’s corner until the recent advent of the Big Bang theory—a theory whose scientific underpinnings have come to be regarded by most scientists today to be quite secure. The 1965 discovery of the apparently vestigial fireball radiation of the Big Bang by Amo Penzias and Robert Wilson of the Bell Laboratories has left the theory, at the present time, with “no competitors” according to Jastrow (God and the Astronomers, 14-16).

Small wonder, then, the “peculiar reactions” of many astronomers, as noted’ by Jastrow! What he refers to are the efforts made by many of his fellow scientists to ignore and refute the mounting evidence in favor of the Big Bang.

Jastrow describes the situation thus:

“Theologians generally are delighted with the proof that the Universe had a beginning, but astronomers are curiously upset. Their reactions provide an interesting demonstration of the response of the scientific mind—supposedly a very objective mind—when evidence uncovered by science itself leads to a conflict with the articles of faith in our profession. It turns out that the scientist behaves the way the rest of us do when our beliefs are in conflict with the evidence. We become irritated, we pretend the conflict does not exist, or we paper it over with meaningless phrases” (God and the Astronomers, 16).

The reactions to the possibility of a Big Bang began shortly after World War I—and from a rather surprising quarter:

“Around this time, signs of irritation began to appear among the scientists. Einstein was the first to complain. He was disturbed by the idea of a Universe that blows up, because it implied that the world had a beginning” (God and the Astronomers, 27).

It is not here suggested that Einstein and all others who opposed the Big Bang theory were atheists. Certainly, Einstein himself appears to have embraced the conception of God propounded by Spinoza (God and the Astronomers, 28).

And yet, conversely, it is manifestly evident that scientific materialists would be in the forefront of those astronomers who would feel uncomfortable in the face of a new theory which seemed to challenge their most fundamental convictions. While it is not suggested that the physical theory of the Big Bang necessarily implies the theological doctrine of creation, nonetheless it is quite understandable that even the appearance of such an implication should cause more than a ripple of resistance among those both philosophically and scientifically indisposed to the notion of creation in time. Yet, we shall see that our concern in this paper will extend to a much broader notion of creation—a notion not restricted merely to that of “having a beginning in time.”

In point of fact, just when most of the scientific community has gotten comfortable supporting the relatively recent Big Bang theory, we are suddenly reminded by new evidence that the history of science is littered with the intellectual corpses of bygone universal beliefs. True science is never dogmatic. What actually happens is that a generally accepted scientific hypothesis is sometimes greeted by new sets of data that contradict its basic premises and soon a new, and quite different, scientific hypothesis replaces the formerly reigning one.

We now learn that findings from the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appear to contradict the “standard model” for galactic expansion, which has accompanied the Big Bang hypothesis. It turns out that distant celestial objects, now being seen for the first time through the use of the JWST, do not conform to Big Bang expansion model expectations. Instead of distant galaxies being huge and having a certain amount of “red shift” in their light, the Webb telescope is showing us the exact opposite! The number of disc galaxies is some ten times that of standard galaxy expansion models. Moreover, distant galaxies are being found to be unexpectedly smooth, small, and old. In fact, more and more data seems to contradict what had been predicted based on the massive galactic expansion model assumed to follow from the Big Bang.

This has led some astronomers to actually reject the Big Bang hypothesis altogether!

Still, two points must be made clear:

  1. While frequently associated theses, the fact remains that the Big Bang hypothesis is separate from the cosmic expansion model. Moreover, the Webb telescope data does not in itself address the cosmic microwave background radiation which has long been taken as evidence for the Big Bang.
  2. For purposes of this article, much more important is the fact that the Big Bang hypothesis belongs to the subject matter of natural science, not philosophy. Contending physical hypotheses concerning the origin and development of the universe must be evaluated by astronomers and other physical scientists. That is not my task. Philosophically, I will show that, whether the universe began in time or not is entirely irrelevant to the philosophical question of whether it is created by God.

I need to determine the proper philosophical meaning of “creation” as well as whether the universe was created in that properly philosophical meaning.

The Eternal Enigma

The central question which this article seeks to address is simply the age old puzzle: “Why does anything exist at all?” The believer immediately responds with a simple affirmation of his faith: “Things exist because God exists to make them.” But the atheist is driven to the logical alternative of insisting on the aseity of the Universe: “Things simply explain their own existence; their very fact of existing is its own explanation. Moreover, the Universe has always existed in some form or other, and hence, needs no God to have created it.” Some atheists and agnostics attack the principle of explanation itself, suggesting that not everything may need a sufficient reason or that, perhaps, the principle is limited in scope to the observable phenomena.

In one of human intellectual history’s less ingenuous moments, Karl Marx simply refuses to grant intellectual legitimacy to any question put to the very existence of the world. He labels such inquiry “…perverse…” since it implies “…the inessentiality of nature and of man …. ” Marx insists that for socialism “…the real existence of man and nature has become practical, sensuous and perceptible…” and, hence, such a question “…has become impossible in practice” (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 1961, 112-114).

Still, examples of those willing to address directly the central issue are not difficult to find. The problem as to why things exist at all is clearly posed by Kai Nielsen (who was himself an atheist):

“Indeed, ‘Why is there anything at all?’ is an odd question, but in certain philosophical and perhaps even religious moods it is natural to ask: Why is it that any of the things that make up the universe actually exist? They do, of course, but why is this so? There might have been nothing at all!” (Kai Nielsen, Reason and Practice: A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, 1971, 180).

Or again, as F.E. Copleston put it in his famous 1948 British Broadcasting Corporation debate on the existence of God with Bertrand Russell:

“Well, I can’t see how you can rule out the legitimacy of asking the question how the total, or anything at all comes to be there. Why something rather than nothing, that is the question?” (The Existence of God, ed. John Hick, 1964, 175).

John Hospers puts succinctly the theistic response to the given existence of the world (not that he holds it himself):

“Why, indeed, does any universe at all exist—why is there a universe at all rather than simply nothing? For this you have no explanation at all. But I do. I hold that there is a necessary being, God, and that since he exists necessarily all contingent existents (and that includes everything in the universe) owe their existence to this necessary being and are explained by the fact that this necessary being exists” (John Hospers, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, 2nd edition, 1967), 440.

But in a contrary response to this same most basic question, as Roy Wood Sellars puts it,”…the modem materialist stresses the aseity as against the contingence notion of creationalism” (A History of Philosophical Systems, ed. Vergilius Ferm, 1950, 425).

The meaning for the materialist of this “aseity” is put with clarity by Nielsen: “…all other realities, if such there be, depend for their existence on these physical realities, but these physical realities do not depend on any other realities for their own existence” (Reason and Practice, 334).

Hospers elucidates in his own manner the claim that the universe simply explains itself and needs no further explanation:

“…this is just a “brute fact”—the universe has such-and-such laws, and if those are ultimate (underived), we can’t derive them from any other ones….If we have once arrived at a basic or underived law (not that we ever know that we have), then it is self-contradictory to ask for an explanation of it” (An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, 442).

What Hospers means here is that the ultimate laws of the universe, by definition as ultimate, require no further explanation. They are self-explanatory.

Again, Anthony Flew challenges the position that God is any greater an intelligible explanation of the universe that is the universe itself:

“No reason whatever has yet been given for considering that God would be an inherently more intelligible ultimate that—say—the most fundamental laws of energy and stuff; much less for postulating the actual existence of such a further and extraordinary entity, instead of somehow contenting yourself with the alternative idea that the world we know is—in the vertical dimension-not dependent on anything else, and that it is also, in some state or other, probably eternal and without beginning” (Anthony Flew, God: A Critical Enquiry, 96).

The atheistic alternative explanation to claiming that the universe is its own explanation is the claim that not everything needs an explanation. That is to say, the principle of sufficient reason itself is attacked. Again Nielsen puts the case succinctly:

“It would only follow that there is a necessary being if it were true that there is a complete explanation that would give us an adequate explanation of why anything exists at all. Why should we assume or even believe that we actually have such an explanation?”

“It is certainly very natural to reject the principle of sufficient reason and to say that it has not been established that there must be or even that there is (if only we could discover it) an explanation for everything. Some events or states of affairs may never be explained. There may even be some things that are inexplicable” (Reason and Practice, 181).

I do not intend here to reiterate and refute the monumental errors of idealism and process philosophy which provide the most substantive attacks on the principles of sufficient reason and causality. Those who sincerely seek the most exhaustive and convincing defense of these principles are referred to Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s classical treatment in the latter part of the first volume of God: His Existence and Nature (1934, 181-194). I have offered my own defense of these transcendental first principles on the Strange Notions website.

It suffices to point out that it seems a bit hypocritical that scientific materialists should ultimately retreat behind a denial of rational principles when it is they who dare to mock all others as being “irrational” and “unscientific.” It is indeed curious that those who demand a scientific explanation for everything should, in this singular instance, fail to see the need for any explanation whatever! One cannot but compare such selective abandonment of rational principles to the curious biological doctrine that spontaneous generation never occurs except, of course, when the evolutionist has need of it in order to initiate the process of evolution itself!

In the end, the consensus of atheists and theists who address the basic question of existence, as well as the dictates of right reason, present the following stark alternatives: Either God (the Infinite Being) exists, or else, the world (all finite being) explains itself, or else, not all things have full explanations. It is our contention that the latter two alternatives are not only absurd, but impossible.

“Creation” as Expression of Infinite Power

For those scientific materialists who refuse to follow the intellectually suicidal denial that there must be reasons for things, the universe must be conceived as self-existent, that is, it somehow explains itself. Moreover, these atheistic materialists clearly accept the metaphysical principle that “…from nothing, nothing comes to be….” (St. Thomas Aquinas, in I Physics, 14, n. 2), since they universally deny that the cosmos had an absolute beginning in time. Thereby they implicitly acknowledge that a universe which just “pops into” existence (out of no pre-existent state) is not only absurd, but impossible.

While it is evident that the natural intuition of the laws of being would require every intellect to affirm that being (the world) can only come from pre-existent being (a prior state of the world, or God), why is it the case that the reason of virtually every man, theist and atheist alike, sees in the notion of instantaneous creation of the world (out of nothing and using nothing) the exclusive mark of divinity itself? With but a modicum of metaphysical reflection, the human mind—theist and atheist alike—grasps that the act of creation is intelligible only as an expression of power—infinite power. And it is precisely this manifestation of power without measure which commands intellectual assent to the existence of God (in the traditional meaning of the term) as the sole adequate explanation or foundation for such power.

The average person who considers the matter will express the insight as follows: “To make something out of nothing can only be the act of an infinitely powerful being, God.” The professional theologian or philosopher will render this insight with greater precision by saying: “That something should come to be while presupposing no pre-existent matter or subject requires the infinite power of God.”

In each case what is affirmed is the absolute need for unlimited power as the only adequate explanation for the universe beginning to be in time. Yet the question remains, “How can we be so certain that the ‘popping into existence’ of the world requires the existence of an all-powerful God?” Is this inference simply the product of a primordial insight or intuition which is, at root, rationally indefensible? Are we ultimately reduced to a form of fideism here?

Still, if this be fideism, then the atheist must suffer it as well — given the firm tradition of atomistic materialism, tracing all the way back to Democritus in the fifth century B.C., which assumes that the universe has always existed, never having a beginning in time. That is why so many scientists held out long for the Steady State theory, which holds that the universe is eternal and largely unchanging.

Why Creation Requires Infinite Power

While there appears to exist a nearly universal intuitive recognition that the act of creating requires the infinite power of a Supreme Being, the attempt to give intellectual justification to this primordial insight is fraught with difficulty. For, even if one grants that the existence of the world had an absolute beginning in time and that this beginning must have an adequate explanation, it is not at once clear precisely why this phenomenon requires an infinitely powerful cause.

Is it because being infinitely transcends non-being? But then, the being of the world is itself only finite (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 7, aa. 2-4). Perhaps, alternatively, one should focus upon the fact that between non-being and being there is no middle ground. Hence the act which transcends this “gap” between non-being and being must be considered as literally immeasurable. Yet, no reputable thinker would dare to refer to a real relation between non-being and being—since a real relation always requires two real terms, and non-being is not real. In Summa Theologiae, I, q. 13, a. 7, c, St. Thomas refers to the merely logical character of the “… relations which are between being and non-being, which reason forms, insofar as it apprehends non-being as a certain extreme.” Hence, the metaphors about “transcending an infinite gap” from non-being to being begin to sound suspiciously poetic or mystical.

It is necessary to turn to the Common Doctor of the Church for illumination of a precise, scientific conception of exactly why creation requires infinite power. The following is neither poetry nor mysticism:

“It must be said that the power of the maker is measured not only from the substance of the thing made but also from the way of its making; for a greater heat not only heats more, but also heats more swiftly. Thus, although to create some finite effect does not demonstrate infinite power, nevertheless to create it from nothing does demonstrate infinite power…. For if a greater power is required in the agent insofar as the potency is more remote from the act, it must be that the power of an agent (which produces) from no presupposed potency, such as a creating agent does, would be infinite; because there is no proportion of no potency to some potency, as is presupposed by the power of a natural agent, just as there is no proportion of non-being to being” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 45, a. 5, ad 3).

The principle which St. Thomas employs here is laid down when he says, “…a greater power is required in the agent insofar as the potency is more remote from the act…” For, as power means the ability to produce being or to act, its measure is taken not merely from the effect produced but also from the proportion between what is presupposed by the agent in order to produce the effect and the effect produced.

Thus, to make a chicken from pre-existing chickens requires a certain measure of power. But to produce a chicken from merely vegetative life would require even greater power; and to produce a chicken from non-living matter yet greater power. But to produce a chicken while presupposing no pre-existent matter at all clearly would require immeasurably greater power. It is immeasurable, as St. Thomas points out, precisely because “…there is no proportion of non-being to being.”

Note that this argument does not rest upon an attempt to measure any supposed infinite relation between non-being and being. Rather, it is precisely the absolute lack of any relation whatever between non-being and being which demands an infinite power to create. For it is precisely the proportion of the potency to act which is measurable. The greater the distance (not physical distance, but remoteness or distinction in existence) between the potentiality and its act, the greater the power needed to actualize that potency. But such a proportion between some presupposed potentiality and its act is always measurable (in some sense), and therefore, is finite—since it is of the essence of the measurable to be finite and since a thing is measured only by its limits. But where there is no proportion, as between non-being and being, there can be no measure, and thus, no limit. The power required in that case knows no measure and no limit. It is therefore infinite.

Note well that St. Thomas does not argue from the remoteness of the potency from the act in the case of creation. Rather, he considers the “… proportion of no potency to some potency…”—for a creating agent presupposes no potency whereas a natural agent always presupposes some potency. He observes that there exists no such proportion just as “… there is no proportion of non-being to being.” A fortiori, the remoteness of no potency to the act of already created being becomes even more immeasurable (if that were possible).

Thus we have the rational explanation for the universal metaphysical intuition that it would require infinite power to create ex nihilo.

The True Meaning of “Creation”

If it were necessary to prove creation of the world in time in order to demonstrate the existence of God, it appears that such a task could never be accomplished by unaided natural reason. For even the most famous Christian apologist for God’s existence, St. Thomas Aquinas, concedes that reason alone cannot prove creation in time: it is simply an article of Catholic faith which is neither contrary to, nor demonstrable by, natural reason (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 46, aa. I-3; De Potentia Dei, q. 3, aa. 14 and 17; On the Eternity of the World, 1964, 2-73).

In fact, according to St. Thomas, the world could well have existed from all eternity—and yet it would still be a creature of God (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 46, a. 2, ad. I; Etienne Gilson, Elements of Christian Philosophy, 1963, 214).

One of his famous Five Ways to prove God’s existence, the Third Way, presupposes this very possibility in the logic of its argumentation. In fact, in Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 13, St. Thomas insists “… that the most efficacious way to prove God to exist is not on the supposition of the newness of the world, but rather on the supposition of the eternity of the world.” Thus, our belief in creation in time is just that—a matter of reasonable Christian belief.

The point of all this is simply to observe that, for St. Thomas, the notion of creation is quite distinct from the notion of beginning in time. After all, on the very supposition of an eternally existent God, could one deny the possibility that such a Being may have been creating the world from all eternity? And would not such a world be a creature in virtue of its being an effect of God despite its beginningless duration? In such a case, creation would be an ongoing production of the being of the world by God—with absolutely no reference to a beginning in time.

Moreover, grant that God did create the world in time. What then would be the relationship of the world to God in the next instant after the moment of creation? Or, the next day, or year, or twenty billion years? Could God cease causing the world and yet the world continue to exist? Certainly not. For, as St. Thomas observes, “With the cause ceasing, the effect ceases” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 96, a. 3, ob 3. Also, “Removing the cause removes the effect,” Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3, c). Creation must not be conceived as a once and for all time act. God must continue to create, or else, the cosmos would at once fall back into the nothingness from which it came (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 104, a. 1). St. Thomas refers to this continued act of creation as “conservation.”

“It must be said that the conservation of things by God is not through some new action, but through a continuation of that action by which He gives existence, which action is indeed without motion and time” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 104, a. I, ad 4).

In other words, a proper understanding of the term “creation” is conceptually distinct from the notion of “beginning in time.” For St. Thomas, the world is created, not because it began in time, but because of its radical dependence on the Supreme Being during every moment of its existence—past, present, or future.

We are thus left with three alternatives regarding the existence of the world: Either it came to be in time—thereby requiring an infinitely powerful Creator, or else, it has existed from all eternity as the created effect of that Creator, or else, it has existed from all eternity without the causation of such a Creator.

On the first two suppositions, the existence of an infinitely powerful God is at once granted and this investigation is ended. But it is the third alternative which now requires closer scrutiny.

For the existence of the world is itself an act whose being demands some explanation. Existence is an act. It is the very first act of any substance (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 104, a. 1, ad 3). And no substance is explained unless and until its substantial existence has been accounted for. Thus we may properly inquire as to the explanation of the existence of this finite world in which we find ourselves.

When we inquire as to the explanation or sufficient reason for a supposedly uncaused finite universe, it becomes at once clear that the need for some foundation in an infinitely powerful being is not escaped. For, just as there is no pre-existing potency for such a world which is created in time, so too, there is no pre-existing potency against which to measure the actually existing universe even if it has always existed (as atheists insist). Hence, its existential foundation, even if this is not conceived as a cause outside its own being, must manifest a power which knows no measure, i.e., it is infinite.

To put the matter in other terms, the power required to explain a being (or beings) is not dependent on whether that being is an effect (whether or not such effect happens to be produced in time). Rather, such power must be measured in terms of its being the reason why there is being rather than non-being. And, as St. Thomas points out, “…there is no proportion of non-being to being” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 45, a. 5, ad 3). Hence, the power requisite to explain the existence of the cosmos knows no measure — whether it began in time or not. Immeasurable or infinite power is needed to explain any existence at all — of anything.

But the world is clearly finite—since space and time are the limiting modes of material existence. Since the finite clearly cannot contain the infinite power needed to explain its own existence, it is evident that an infinite Being must exist.

Some Final Reflections

It may well be suspected that the foregoing demonstration of God’s existence is simply a variation of St. Thomas’s Third Way of the Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3, c., or else, perhaps, the argument which many have abstracted from his proof for God’s eternity which is presented in the Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 15. Yet it should at once be evident that neither of these demonstrations proceed from the same starting point as the present analysis. For, both of the aforementioned texts of St. Thomas take as their initial data the existence of things which are possible to be or not to be. But the present argument proceeds neither from the possibility nor from the necessity of the world—merely from its existence and from the need for a sufficient reason for said existence.

If it were possible for the world to be its own reason for existing, then there would be no need to posit the existence of a transcendent God. It is only when it is shown that the existence of anything at all requires infinite power that it becomes evident that the finite cosmos necessarily requires an Infinitely Powerful Being as the only adequate explanation of its existence.

Hence, the present argument proceeds, not from the possible, as such, but from an analysis of the creative power implicit in any being whatever—whether it be possible or necessary, finite or infinite. It is the factual existence of things which is at issue here, not their indifference to existence.

But it is precisely that indifference to existence manifested by the possibles which St. Thomas uses to prove their causal dependence. As he puts it in the context of the Contra Gentiles:

“Everything however which is possible to exist has a cause, since it is from itself equally [related] to two [contraries], namely, existence and non-existence. [Therefore,] it must be, if it appropriates to itself existence, that this is from some cause” (Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 15).

Again, the same point is made in the Third Way when St. Thomas insists “…that which is not does not begin to be, except through something which exists” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3, c).

In both these cases, again, St. Thomas reveals the causal dependence of the possibles. But the present proof seeks not to reveal causal dependence except as incidental to the need for infinite power as the sole adequate foundation for all existents. Perhaps this point could be more adequately expressed by saying that God Himself, who is absolutely uncaused, nonetheless requires infinite power in order to render His own existence intelligible. That is why St. Thomas’s task in the aforementioned contexts differs from that of the present article.

In conclusion, the intellectual exploration completed in this article entails the following central points:

First, it was established that there exists, either explicitly or implicitly, among theists and atheists alike, a universal intellectual recognition that the theological notion of an absolute beginning in time of the world entails a creation ex nihilo whose sole adequate explanation would be an Infinitely Powerful Being, or God in the traditional sense of the term.

Second, the concept of “creation” itself was scrutinized so as to reveal that it may be properly distinguished from any notion of “beginning in time”—thereby demonstrating that the mere existence of any being whatsoever entails the presence of an act (esse) which requires infinite power to be posited “outside of nothingness.” (The central metaphysical task of this article has been to establish the philosophically scientific validity of this second step.)

Third and last, it was seen that such infinite power clearly cannot reside in any finite being and, that, therefore, it is absolutely necessary to admit the existence of an Infinitely Powerful Creator as the sole adequate explanation of the finite world.

The notion of “explanation” does not necessarily denote extrinsic causality in every case. While every being requires a sufficient reason, only those beings whose sufficient reason for existing is not totally within itself would require an extrinsic sufficient reason or what is called a “cause.” This means that, while an infinitely powerful God is required to cause the existence of all the finite beings in this finite world, yet God can still be said to be his own explanation, and yet not his own cause, since he is his own intrinsic sufficient reason for being.

Dr. Dennis Bonnette retired as a Full Professor of Philosophy in 2003 from Niagara University in Lewiston, New York, where he also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department from 1992 to 2002. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 1970. He is the author of two books, Aquinas’ Proofs for God’s Existence, and Origin of the Human Species, as well as many scholarly articles. [A, earlier version of this article appeared in Faith & Reason, 11:3-4 (1985), 250-63. Permission to print kindly granted by Christendom Educational Corporation, Christendom College, Front Royal, Virginia, 22630.]

Featured: “The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise,” by Giovanni di Paolo; painted in 1445.

The Diversity of Science: A Personal View of the Search for God

In one of his most famous works, Contact, the American astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) speculates in the guise of a novel on what would be the possible social, economic, political, philosophical, scientific and theological repercussions of receiving an interstellar message from a civilization more advanced than ours and one that could be within reach of our terrestrial radio telescopes; with the subsequent plausibility of being decoded and translated. The protagonist of these events is astronomer Eleanor Arroway (inspired by astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter, who worked for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence for more than 30 years), who in the novel directs the Argos project of SETI (a U.S. government project that still operates to this day).

The decoding and translation of the message, coming from the vicinity of the star Vega, in the constellation Lyra, shows it to be instructions for the construction of a Machine, a mechanism for the production of Einstein-Rosen bridges; that is to say, of wormholes or shortcuts through space-time, by means of which it is possible to displace matter and that would allow, for now only at a theoretical level, interstellar travel, by allowing us to travel the long distances of hundreds or thousands of light years in a matter of seconds, minutes or hours.

In Chapter 18, of the second part of the book, Eleanor (Ellie), along with four other scientists (Xi Qiaomu, Devi Sujavati, Abonneba Eda and Vasily Lunacharsky—in the film adaptation Ellie travels alone) is chosen for the preparations taking place at Hokkaido, Japan, where the Machine is located. In this context, Ellie and Eda have a spirited conversation on the subject that the Message and the manufacture of the Machine itself were bringing about a theological revolution in the whole world, since the atmosphere of a universal brotherhood was being experienced. In the meantime, Ellie (who throughout the novel makes clear her skeptical stance regarding the narrative of human religions) asks Eda if he has had any religious experience that led to an existential transformation, to which he replies that he has; and Ellie asks him to elaborate and explain when this happened. Eda replies as follows:

“When I first picked up Euclid. Also when I first understood Newtonian gravitation. And Maxwell’s equations, and general relativity. And during my work on superunification. I have been fortunate enough to have had many religious experiences” (Sagan, 386).

Ellie replies to Eda negatively that by religious experience she was not referring to the awe and amazement that can be experienced in any field, but to the strictly religious; that is, to something alien to the plane of science, to which Eda replies, never; and that his religious experiences had always taken place in science. In all of Sagan’s work, the limits between religion and science are blurred, awe and amazement that is common to both branches of human knowledge. This is the starting point of another of his works, which is actually posthumous and the product of a compilation of his lectures at the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology by Ann Druyan.

Regarding the relationship between religion and science, Sagan’s opinion is that their goals are identical or almost so, and that in reality the disruptive issue has more to do with the reliability of the truths proclaimed by both fields and the respective methods of approaching them (Sagan, 2007: 24). And that one of the best ways he knows of experiencing the religious feeling, that is, the feeling of awe, is to look up on a clear night; and that this can be reflected in both science and religion, endorsing in turn Einstein’s approach in his book, The World as I See It (1934), which is homologous in that sense: “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” Along that line, it would seem that religious sentiment would be clearly inevitable (Sagan, 2007: 50), similar to the position of the 18th century astronomer Edward Young who said: “An undevout astronomer is mad.” But devotion to what, Sagan asks himself; and the answer cannot be other than to the Cosmos and its terrible and unfathomable immensity; it is a love informed by the truth (Sagan, 2007: 53). And if there is a Creator God of the traditional type, Sagan says, our curiosity and intelligence come from him, because it is his creation which is the source of such admiration, and if he does not exist, that curiosity and intelligence are essential tools to manage our survival in an extremely dangerous era (Sagan, 2007: 53). Without prejudice to this, he concludes in this part:

“In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species” (Sagan, 2007: 37).

Now, this part precisely connects with another chapter of the book entitled, “The God Hypothesis,” within the framework of natural theology, which Sagan understands as theological knowledge that can be acquired only through reason, experience and experiment; not through revelation or mystical experience, but only through reason (Sagan, 2007: 167).

An interesting idea derived from the treatment of this hypothesis is related to the concept of God, and it is important in this regard to provide some ideas on our part prior to this, since there are those who claim that scientific praxis has nothing to do with the faith of the scientist; that they are separate issues. Now, some theoretical physicists give us another vision and interesting ideas in this regard, showing us the close relationship between scientific praxis as a way to the constant search for the big questions that undoubtedly have a profound impact on the scientist’s faith. And the problem lies in the way of asking and approaching the question, i.e., the question, “Does God exist” can only be approached after having answered a previous question: What do you understand by the idea of God? A position known as ignosticism. And this question is not confined to the Christian experience alone, and not even to that of all theistic religions, but is also proper to philosophy.

On the other hand, the efforts of many who consider themselves atheists, in focusing on delegitimizing aspects of the mythology of many religions (understanding the term “myth” in its positive sociological and theological sense as sacred traditional history, and not in its negative or pejorative sense as farce, invented history or deception), in order to delegitimize aspects of the mythology of many religions (understanding the term “myth” in its positive sociological and theological sense as sacred traditional history, and not in its negative or pejorative sense as farce, invented story or hoax), especially Christian mythology (Christian mythology or true Christian myth, i.e., traditional narratives as realities whose historical correlates and empirical-archaeological references that gave rise to them are susceptible—contingently—to be traced, to a greater or lesser extent), when it is not a sincere attitude of methodical doubt, it becomes an exercise of intellectual dishonesty or a lack of objectivity typical of arguments ad ignorantiam, by the simple fact of invisibilizing with the narrative of the anti-religious discourse, the question about which concept of God is compatible with scientific knowledge, and therefore the approach to a more complex reality that transcends even theoretical physics itself and that ends up delegitimizing any atheistic narrative (especially of the most radical sectors that cannot conceive the idea of God outside traditional religions), and in the following sense:

“Physicists who believe in this God, believe that the universe is very beautiful, that its absolute laws could not be an accident. The universe could have been totally random or composed of lifeless electrons and neutrinos, incapable of creating any kind of life, let alone intelligent life” (Kaku, 2008: 358).

It should be noted that the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, when referring to the idea of God, does so in allusion to a creator God or a universal superior intelligence of order and design (2008: 87). In this regard, Sagan has something to say about the hypothesis of God as we have commented; he specifies that regarding the word “God” there is a series of hypotheses that is immense, from the one he considers naive, where God is presented to us as an immense man, light-skinned, with a long white beard, who sits on a big throne and keeps track of every dead sparrow, to the one he makes his own:

“Contrast this with a quite different vision of God, one proposed by Baruch Spinoza and by Albert Einstein. And this second kind of god they called God in a very straightforward way. Einstein was constantly interpreting the world in terms of what God would or wouldn’t do. But by God they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature, as I have said earlier, that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow, Peking, Mars, Alpha Centauri, the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quasars known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us. It represents an unexpected regularity to the universe. It
need not have been. It could have been that every province of the cosmos had its own laws of nature. It’s not apparent from the start that the same laws have to apply everywhere.
Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nature are inapplicable.
I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God” (Sagan: 109).

About God, as Sagan rightly says, there are hypotheses; each religion has its hypothesis and its vision of God, from anthropomorphic and zoomorphic approaches to God, to their replacement by the current monotheism, that which envisions God as omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. Now, I consider that the concept of God as Sagan puts it, should not be understood as something that aims to make science a new religion in the Comtian way or to scientify the current religions, but on the contrary, it is simply one more concept, within the wide range of possibilities that this idea generates, to be highly speculative (and as such the idea of God is expressed in its multiplicity of manifestations); a more materialistic conceptualization of God (which could be identified as pantheistic. However, if you read carefully, it is not saying that God and the material reality are the same; God and the existing totality, the Cosmos, are not said to be one and the same thing. But God is spoken of as a sum of very concrete questions, of the physical laws of the universe; a position closer to the deism that has been very characteristic of many scientists since the Copernican revolution), which can be in communion or not, be inclusive or not, be complementary or not, with the main dogmas of the institutional religions; its applicability to the gnoseological framework of each religion or vision of God being contingent. But what this materialistic conception of God is useful for us is to reaffirm the fact that there is no disruption between scientific praxis and the faith of the scientist (whether Christian or of any other religion, or receptive to the possibility as a hypothesis within a process of contingent conversion), that rather instead rather than being disjunct issues, they are binding and feed back on each other.

It is worth concluding this paper with Sagan’s impressions of traditions and institutional religions. On tradition Sagan spared no effort in affirming that tradition is something precious, a kind of synthesis of tens or hundreds of thousands of generations of humans. It is a gift from our ancestors; it being essential to remember that tradition is a human social construction whose objectives are perfectly pragmatic (Sagan, 2007: 209). But he also did not hesitate to affirm that while some traditions are maintained over time, others change and must change at the same speed as conditions do (Sagan, loc. cit.). Likewise, and regarding religions, although he does not hesitate to point out that religions have often served as a means for political authorities to maintain themselves in power, that is, as a means of social control, this does not mean that this is the only form of manifestation of religion in human history; there is a spurious component as well as a virtuous one; and his conclusion in this regard is clear:

“By no means does it follow that religions thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without any mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do not provide” (Sagan, 2007: 129).

Regarding this last quotation, our final comments are that religion as a social phenomenon—regardless of its gnoseological value—is a universal fact worthy of study; inasmuch as far from disappearing with the advent of scientific thought, it has been maintained and has merged with the culture of various peoples, forming part of their heritage and traditions. It is true that religion has had many forms of instrumentalization through human history (as has science), from a benevolent sense as the basis of a moral normative and an eschatology whose vision has had an impact on art, architecture and music (which in science is the improvement of the quality of life of all mankind), to a negative sense, (science was and is no stranger to it either, the victims of progress in experimentation with human beings, weapons technology with the capacity for the extermination of humanity, and new methods of digital slavery and social control through uncritical technophilias, such as transhumanism). However, to reduce the religious phenomenon to the exclusively negative (as well as the scientific), would be nothing more than a full reductionism and a sign of a very serious ignorance, which wrongly denies the role and social function that religion fulfilled in the past and today; facts that are evident when we approach the subject from the History of Religion, the Philosophy of Religion and the Sociology of Religion. Whoever calls himself a humanist and belittles the religious phenomenon as a whole, reduces himself to an anti-humanist, because the origin and development of humanity (to varying degrees), has always been linked to metaphysical speculation (and science is no stranger to metaphysics either; but unlike religion, whose base is a spiritualist metaphysics, science has a base in a materialist metaphysics) and likewise its evolution is also presumed, along with the religious expression within it, part of the hermeneutic and cultural creativity of the peoples of the world.

Awe, astonishment and creativity are the common stromata between religion and science.

Israel Rene Lira is Member of the Peruvian Society of Philosophy and part of its Board of Directors as Secretary for the period 2020-2022 and is Deputy Director of the Center for Crisolist Studies and Head of its Department of Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economy. He also serves as the Legal Advisor in Contracts with the State, Dispute Resolution and Arbitration Boards. He is a Columnist for the newspaper The Truth of Lambayeque, and has authored over 240 articles on philosophy, science and politics.

Featured: Folio from the Bible Historiale: Genesis 1, creation; God, creating heaven and earth, ca, 1411.