Another Attempt to be Fair

Obviously a great many powerful people have an interest in preventing a rise in the tax rate for the very wealthy, but interest doesn't explain all the opposition. It’s important to recognize that much of the passion on the right reflects principled belief. Opposition to tax reform, indeed opposition to the very idea of a graduated income tax, follows inevitably from an absolutist view of property rights. By the lights of that way of thinking, taking 38% of income over $250,000 a year instead of 36% is just as bad as stealing somebody's horse. What makes the right wing even more strident about all this is the meta belief that the validity of their way of thinking is self evident so that anybody who disagrees is either feeble minded or evil—a whiff of John Calvin hangs in the air around many a conservative, especially the Southern ones.

The idea that property is a social construction, that what's mine is mine because the rest of you agree to recognize that it's mine, is worse than newfangled rubbish or recycled Marxism. For many conservatives, it's utterly alien, the ideology of Cthulhu. I think you can complain that the outlook of the right is both ahistorical and unrealistic—capitalism just doesn't work without some mechanism of redistribution—but it's neither fair nor useful to chalk up all the opposition to self-interest.  

By the way, if I’m right about all this, it follows that the Republicans we can do business with are most likely to be those for whom opposition to changing the tax code is simply an exercise of greed. You can reason with the insincere.

The Futility of Voting?

Before the elections, various people, mostly disgruntled left-liberals, wrote Internet pieces suggesting that voting was pointless since a single vote meant nothing and, anyhow, Obama wasn’t all that different than Romney.  Now I appreciate the arithmetic. As a proportion of the population, I should have a right to 0.000000003333% of a say in national affairs; but even if you make a correction for the enormous number of people who read this blog—almost 5,000 over ten years—I don’t have a claim for much more than 0.0000083333% of the available political juice.  But I disagree with the counsels of despair, because there are people whose vote did matter and mattered a very great deal.

The fundamental reason that Republican-leaning pundits got the election wrong, bias and sheer innumeracy aside, was their considerable underestimation of the political participation rate of blacks, Hispanics, and young voters.  I’ve been involved in many political campaigns over the years and know how difficult it is to get a college student to even remember that it’s election day, let alone to vote; but, the fact is, this year, college students did vote and so did members of supposedly apolitical America’s minorities.  I expect they are going to notice the consequences as even the crustiest Republicans recognize electoral facts and your relatives don’t get deported and you get a break on your student loans and your grandmother doesn’t have to eat dog food. The rules are changing. It’s a different country if the whole population votes.  As the Chinese say, the journey of a thousand Li begins with a single step. Yep, and the rectification of national politics begins with a single yank of a lever.

CEOs and Pigeons

Anybody who has met a fair number of extremely wealthy people knows that they are a motley crew. They certainly aren’t all especially intelligent, stunningly attractive, or obviously charismatic, which is hardly surprising considering that the various ways that people find themselves on top of the world. Obviously having specific talents or personal characteristics, such as a knack for marketing, relentless drive, or utter ruthlessness, account for some great fortunes; but the great game of the world is largely a lottery. The economic system is set up to separate out a very small fraction of the population and reward it willy-nilly with absurdly great prizes. The victors in this rule-less contest do not see it that way, of course, in part because there is a large industry devoted to coming up with some moral or philosophical justification for the outcome as if anybody could be good enough at anything to deserve $46 billion.

What occurs naturally in our system is not so different from the process by which landed estates grew larger and larger in pre-capitalist societies. If you run computer simulations of the evolution of land distribution under the circumstances of the Roman Empire or the Ancien Regime, you’ll see the number of properties shrink as their size increases. Economies of scale and the automatic political power that go along with owning huge pieces of property lead to more and more accumulation of property. Whose crest adorns the castle wall may be a matter of chance or talent, but it’s as sure that somebody will rule the thousands of acres as that the poets will write caressing prefaces to these honey lords. By the same token, it was pretty much written in the stars that somebody would end up with their name on emerging natural monopolies in telecommunications, computer retailing, or hypermarkets. What the goddess Fortuna once gifted the Hapsburgs or the Hohenzollerns she now bestows on new princes, some of whom, inevitably, are idiot princes.

Maybe the gormlessness so many of our moguls showed during the recent political season can be explained by the natural response of animals to random rewards. If you drop food pellets into a pigeon cage at irregular intervals, the pigeons will come to the conclusion that whatever they happen to have been doing at the time was the cause of their good fortune. They caper or coo or bounce up and down on one foot. That’s how you create superstitious pigeons. You make billionaires superstitious by encouraging them to think that their personal characteristics are the reason/explanation of their standing in the world. That’s how you create Donald Trumps.

The Other Antisemitism

Conservative cheerleading for Israel makes a peculiar impression on those of us with a historical memory because antisemitism was a hallmark of American conservativism until Hitler made it odious. The solution of the puzzle is not that difficult, however. The right is still largely antisemetic, but the antisemitism it has embraced reflects the hatred that Israeli Zionists display towards non-Zionist Jews, those faithless internationalists who put universal human values above blood and nation. Neocons could save themselves some time and bother by simply translating the relevant passages of Mein Kampf and adapting them for use in their denunciations of “liberal Jews.”

By the way, to anticipate an obvious criticism, the emergence of Zionist antisemitism certainly doesn’t mean that the old fashion, garden variety antisemitism has disappeared from the world as anybody who has ever seen Hamas propaganda knows very well. It’s also important to note that criticizing Israel doesn’t imply you admire Israel’s local adversaries or endorse their policies, anymore than recognizing that current Israeli policy is gradually putting that state in an untenable position means that you want to see the Israelis driven into the sea. In politics, it is very important to realize that the enemy of your enemy is probably also a dick.

These thoughts were inspired from some remarks of Slavoj Zizek's. 

Argumentum Ad

Conservatives insist that welfare programs sap initiative and corrupt society: the dole (to use the old word for it) is poison. If so, the poor can be thankful that these days the drug is only distributed in homeopathic doses. But that’s the government’s welfare program. There is another form of welfare, a private system that really does create a dependency problem and its administered on a mass basis for many hours every day.  I refer, of course, to advertising. In exchange for purportedly free entertainment and news, business interests get the right to marinate the public in propaganda. For some reason, the Conservatives never denounce the bad effects of this kind of welfare, though it has obviously created a culture of dependency with far reaching consequences, especially for public health.

I suppose I could be taxed with hypocrisy for suggesting that there might be something problematic about advertising. I’ve written hundreds of ads and never lost a moment’s sleep worrying about the morality of doing so. In my defense, the ads I wrote were attempts to get customers to buy the product of my company rather than that of another. The consumers of scientific software are going to use some program or other to do linear programming, and you sell to such knowledgeable folks by efficiently informing them what your product actually does. Even in the pages of technical journals, sex and sizzle help—hence my long and unavailing campaign to get Scientific American to put out a swimsuit issue—but it’s the specs that close the deal. Most of the ads that pay for freebee television shows aren’t like that. They don’t inform people about a product that will satisfy a need; they seek to create a demand. You don’t sell Camels; you sell smoking. Too bad the Seven Deadly Sins don’t pay for the ads directly. It would make things clearer.

Now a case can certainly be made for the private welfare system called advertising, just as a case can be made for public welfare. Like most features of the real world, both of these institutions are sometimes beneficial and sometimes not. Long before Keynes, advertising was stimulating economic growth by the creation of artificial demand; and absent advertising, it is hard to believe that a system built on gluttony, lust, and vanity could endure. The economic historians point out that it was the desire for a host of unnecessary luxuries that set off what they call the Industrious Revolution that preceded and made possible the subsequent Industrial Revolution. Eighteenth Century ad execs were responsible for much of that, even paying poets to insert puffs for various commercial products into their epics.

O! she was perfect past all parallel
Of any modern female saint's comparison;
So far above the cunning powers of hell,       
Her guardian angel had given up his garrison

Even her minutest motions went as well

As those of the best time-piece made by Harrison:

In virtues nothing earthly could surpass her,     

Save thine 'incomparable oil,' Macassar!

I confess that I’m not puritan enough to want to live in a world without fripperies.  Nevertheless, although I’m spoiled by the free candy of the commercial welfare system myself, I’d like to think that I’m a rational enough hedonist not to reach for that last little wafer. I wish we were more aware of the downsides of the system. We used to be more aware of the problems. You can laugh the quaintness of the world of the 50s and 60s, but at least they had Mad in the era of Mad Men. A sustained critique of advertising now is hard to image. Who would sponsor it?

 

M₈₁₄

With the election coming up Tuesday, I thought it would be a good time to write down some thoughts I’ve had for a long time about mythology—actually, heavy drinking seems even more appropriate, but I’ve been advised to lay off the hard stuff.

Most explanations of mythology that I’ve encountered treat it as a form of allegory as if the Gods, heroes, talking animals, and all the rest were simply animated hieroglyphics that convey a moral or theological message in pictures instead of concepts.  Why it is necessary to spin tales of sneaky serpents or thunder gods to get us to eat our spinach or understand the weather is not clear. There’s another problem with the allegory theory: there are, after all, literary works that are clearly allegories in an unambiguous sense. The Fairy Queen, Piers Plowman, and Pilgrim’s Progress come to mind.  These works have their charm, but the pleasure and fascination of myth is rather different.

What beguiles us in myths is precisely the fact that they can’t really be explicated in literal terms the way that a pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins boils down to Aristotelian ethics. As Levi-Strauss insisted sixty years ago, the only interpretation of a myth is another myth. Unlike philosophical, scientific, and even theological discourse, myth operates on a single surface, albeit a surface with a twisted topology.  Since there is only a single sheet, it is impossible to ever nail things down. The this world and the other world of modern religions, the reality and appearance of the idealists, the words and the things of the linguists, and the other contrasting dimensions of various non-mythic forms of thought make possible a kind of dual-entry bookkeeping because they provide two separate registers that can be correlated. Myth doesn’t do that. Dreamtime is always just another part of the forest.

Everyone has been denouncing the indeterminacy and pluralism of myth for millennia, presumably in the name of avoiding irrationality. Personally, I agree with William James that it is mostly a matter of taste whether you like your irrationality spread out through the world or you’d rather gather it together in one tight bouquet in the form of God, the labor theory of value, or the definitive symmetry break of the Big Bang. It isn’t obviously right to opt for either methodological or metaphysical monism over theoretical or practical polytheism. After all, the determination to get to the bottom of things not only makes the assumption that things have a bottom, but implies that fundaments are fundamental. The war on mythology invokes its own myth, the very potent myth I used to call the myth of mythology, namely the presumption that things are explained by their origins.*

The bias in favor of a single explanation is not merely personal, of course. It defines a big swatch of civilization. I remember the bemused look I got back in the eighth grade when I asked Mr. Masters why, in its account of Ikhnaton, our world history textbook obviously presumed that monotheism was progress. After all, if it turned out there weren’t any gods at all, why did it make a difference how many gods there weren’t? The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend raised a similar point about how traditional histories of philosophy lionize the rationalism of Xenophanes, a poet who made fun of poetry with its tales of the battles fought with titans and giants and promoted an austere theology in which God “alone is the greatest, the greatest of gods and of men, not resembling the mortals, neither in shape nor in insight.”  This is an advance, why? If a god, even the God, is going to have purposes, which is something that only makes sense for animals to have, why shouldn’t he have girl friends that turn into trees or at least a belly button? (I admit that last bit isn’t exactly Feyerabend’s way of putting things.)

Christianity has always had a special relationship with philosophy since Greek philosophy is one of the basic ingredients that went into its original recipe, the other three being Jewish prophesy, Roman political organization, and the marketing methods of Near Eastern religious entrepreneurship. Because it does have an essential link to philosophy, it is quite possible to interpret Christianity as an anti-mythological or even anti-religious or atheistic religion and many of its critics and some of its friends have been making this point from the time of Celsus to that of Slavoj Zizek. Nevertheless, Christianity does have a real mythology, and making your peace with mythology has the advantage of making it possible to dispense with incredibly boring arguments about natural theology in favor of perceiving the power of the stories that underlie it. Hegel’s version of Christianity, with its emphasis on the theme of mediation, provides a mythological gloss on the religion’s mythology. So does the Marxist tradition, which is why I sometimes think of it as the fourth great Abraham religion. What I really want, however, is something a bit more anthropological. I’d like to raise Levi-Strauss from the dead and compel the resulting zombie to produce a fifth volume of the Introduction to the Science of Mythology.

The very first myth in the Raw and the Cooked, M₁, is the tale of the Bird Nester, which tells of the rape of a woman by her son. The father detects the crime and, after a long series of attempts at revenge, apparently succeeds. During what is supposed to be a hunt for macaws, he manages to strand the boy half way up a cliff where he clings suspended by a rod and is eventually assailed by vultures that devour his buttocks. Though apparently hors de combat, the bird nester recovers by molding himself an artificial behind from pounded tubers; and eventually returns to his people where he kills his father and throws the body into a lake where carnivorous fish devour most of it. The lungs float to the surface where they become aquatic plants.

The attentive reader will perhaps note the parallels with a myth from another, rather distant tribe, though there are differences that obscure the similarity of the armature of the tales. Instead of the son raping the mother, for example, in M₈₁₄^** it is a spirit father that impregnates the mother and engenders the son, though, since the son turns out to be co-substantial with the father, it could be argued that he also had sex with his mother. In both myths, the son is suspended between heaven and earth, undergoes a long ordeal, and apparently dies only to return after an interval. In M₁, the son returns to revenge himself and establish justice. In M₈₁₄ he returns to grant mercy. In the M₁, the son kills the father and turns him into aquatic vegetation. In the M₈₁₄, the father allows the son to die and, as a result, to transform into a persistent spirit. To fully explicate the nexus between these stories, it would be necessary to bring in other myths and explore, in particular, the contrasts, parallels, and echoes between them and the tale of the Garden of Eden and the saga of Prometheus. One would also need somebody with more patience and erudition than me. That’s why we need an angel to roll away the stone at Claude’s tomb.

_________

*Hence the many arguments that are formally similar to the Cosmological argument for the existence of God and do not manage to get beyond myth but merely present its generating contradiction in a concentrated form. Which is to say that such arguments all turn out to be instances of the Asparagus fallacy. Note the parallel between

Everything has a cause, but that would lead to an infinite regress. Therefore at least one thing doesn’t have a cause.

And

I’m glad I don’t like asparagus because if I liked it, I’d eat it and I can’t stand it.

What we have here is begging the question played backwards. The conclusion is not a more or less disguised version of the premise, but its denial.

** The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Compare and Contrast?

I’ve been trying to get my mind off America’s ideological wars by reading Maurice Godellier’s highly technical anthropological treatise the Metamorphosis of Kinship.  Unfortunately, everything is implicated in everything else. As I pointed out a long time ago, reality isn’t consistent; but it is stringy. Godelier’s expose of the ideas and practices of the Baruya, the New Guinea tribe he studied as a young ethnographer, turn out to be highly relevant to understanding the right-to-life debate in the United States. There is no escape.

The Baruya theory of human reproduction serves as the justification if not the inspiration of their social system. It holds that the child is produced by the semen of the male with the help of the Sun god, who contributes a spiritual element.  Women, on the other hand, have a strictly supporting role, as befits creatures regarded with scorn and sometimes fear. The Baruya place an enormously high value on semen. It not only creates life, but also has other uses. Baruya boys leave their family hut at nine or ten and live together in a communal dwelling with other boys until they are initiated into adulthood and marry. During that period, they younger males are made to drink the semen of the older boys in order to imbibe the masculinity they need to deal with the dangerous business of interacting with females—the crucial factor is that the semen donors must have never come in contact with women themselves. After marriage, men do not have intercourse with their wives until the walls of their shared dwelling get covered with soot. Instead, in lieu of vaginal sex, the wives fellate the husbands and drink their semen in order to build up a store of mother’s milk. (Godelier does not mention whether it was permissible for a twelve-year old boy or a woman to spit under certain circumstances or what the Sun god’s role was in such cases.)

The Baruya sexual ideology may seem extreme, but their sacred biology is really no crazier than the ideas of the right-to-lifers. For that matter, a worshipful attitude towards semen is not really foreign to the West and not just because for the Catholic Church every sperm is sacred. The Aristotelian theory of reproduction comes pretty close to the Baruya version; and the Koran is full of language that suggest that although Allah introduces the soul into the embryo, the body is formed from a drop of semen.  Of course the right-to-lifers don’t believe that the semen does the whole job—they have a different fetish—but their developmental biology is every bit as ideological. Although most of them avoid using the word “soul,” their assertion that “personhood” arrives with the formation of zygote amounts to essentially the same thing. “Personhood” is undetectable in a fertilized egg as the body of Christ is in a consecrated wafer. It is, in their usage, a theological idea; and the demand to outlaw abortion that it justifies is simply an attempt to end the separation of church and state and establish a religion by government action.

I am now going to violate one of the cardinal rules of the age and point out something that everybody knows: Contemporary developmental biology is roughly true, and theological biology is merely false.  Treating an early-stage embryo as a person is not a great deal different from asserting that the Earth is 6,000 years old and requires an equivalent sacrifice of the intellect. Educated people know that human development is a process, and that there is no absolute point of demarcation on the continuum that separates the zygote, which is obviously not a person in any way and a six-month old baby, which just as obviously is. I admit that there is something uncanny about this fact, this scandal of epigenesis; and it makes us very uncomfortable much as it is difficult to watch dying person slowly cease to be a human being. Since the facts are the facts, however, the best thing we can do is come up with reasonable laws that recognize that ending a pregnancy in ten weeks is a simply different act than infanticide or the late-term abortion of a viable fetus. 

I don’t know how the Baruya came to have their ideas about conception. According to Godelier, neighboring tribes, even tribes that speak much the same language, have very different concepts and practices; and the Baruya tribe itself is only a couple of hundred years old.  What does seem clear is that sacrality of semen goes along with an extreme version of male domination, also a specialty of the Baruya. Thus, to mention only one telling example, in Baruya country there are, or were before the outside world began to interfere, two trails to every destination, a higher trail for the men and a lower trail for the women. One can imagine that the reproductive theories of the Baruya are super structural reflexes of an underlying infrastructural reality, but it seems more likely to me that the theory of the magic power of sperm was actually one of the means by which the sociological reality of Baruya society was created. By the same token, the fantasy biology of the right-to-lifers is not just a part of an ancient and impressively consistent moral tradition but a way of subjugating women in the here and now. Like most Fundamentalist notions, it is in fact an innovation. In the traditional view of Jews, Catholics, and Muslims, the soul enters the fetus at quickening. Until then, to use an expression of the rabbis, it is merely a limb of the woman. Like the idea that it is obligatory to go down on your older brother, the idea that abortion is always a sin is the bright idea of some guys who want to change the status quo in their favor.    

I’m Tired—The Madeline Kahn School of Hermeneutics

A second Federal appeals court, this one in New York, has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and probably thereby set off another argument about interpreting the Constitution in the subterranean darkness of various Internet comment threads. I don’t propose to go there, literally or figuratively; but maybe this is a good time to dust off a meta thought I’ve had for some time that it is more or less apropos.

While the lawyers are not going to give up debating every social and political issue of the day in terms of its relationship to the Constitution—that’s what they do for a living, after all—the rest of us may be finally giving up the game of assuming the special wisdom, if not sacrality, of that document.

Any tradition based on a text has the same problem. Whether you’re a Mormon, a psychoanalyst, or a votary of Ayn Rand, you always have a choice. Even people of the most cadaver-like loyalty to the cause inevitably end up expressing their own ideas about modern problems if only because the Book didn’t cover that or because the obvious literal meaning of the Book has intolerable implications.  To defend your version of truth, you can either resort to more or less heroic exercises of interpretation and claim that you simply are returning to the true meaning of scripture or you can simply admit that the Book is, after all, a book. 

It isn’t necessarily a bad idea to opt for the first choice and reduce all legitimate thought to commentary. As the history of religion and philosophy amply demonstrate, such a strategy does not preclude creativity of the highest order. In fact, some of the most original, not to say loopy, thinking has been promoted under the slogan of back to the sources—Lacan is just Freud properly understood; Althusser is merely a close reading of Marx; the humane religion of the rabbis really is the truth of bloodthirsty Torah; the first Amendment to the Constitution doesn’t rule out punishing people for blasphemy; of course the New Testament provides a basis for infant baptism, etc.  The game gets stale at times, however; and even if its obvious fictiveness doesn’t bother you, it becomes simply exhausting. You have to give it up.* In the current political instance, you stop regarding the Constitution with absurd reverence or, at a minimum, admit that torturing it into permitting decent political institutions is a merely formal exercise.

One last note: there is an inverse to the issue of how to deal with sacred texts, for there are a class of texts that are canonically diabolical or anti-sacred. Thus the way that most academics refer to Marx’s writings is the mirror image of how the sages approached the Torah. One does not agree with other books and authors—who agrees with anybody about much, after all—but it is somehow necessary to endlessly assure everybody that you are aware of how wrong Marx is. By contrast, though I certainly don’t agree with Locke’s ideas on substance or religious toleration, I don’t find a need to cross myself when I cite him. Marx is wrong in a way that is different from ordinary wrongness, much as for a Muslim, the Koran is right in a way that is different from ordinary rightness. Maybe if we dispense with the worship of Bibles and Constitutions, we can dispense with the ritual denunciation of dangerous tomes and just read them (or not) as they turn out to be relevant or irrelevant.

*An alternative is to make fun of it. Free thinkers can make fun of tradition by producing their own commentary literature on sacred texts and lampooning the absurdities of interpretation. This was a common approach in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. Pierre Bayle, the Stephen Colbert of his times, discussed all the embarrassing parts of the Bible with deadly seriousness. The pages of his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695) are even laid out like a Talmud with tiny sections of text crowded out by commentaries and subcommentaries.

Last Man Standing Turn Out the Lights

I don’t know if it counts as an instance of the wisdom of crowds, but some trends in popular culture do seem to amount to a general conclusion about our situation, almost as if the fads and crazes amount to an act of perception on the part of the hive mind. What set off this thought is a quick trip through the television listing wherein one finds, for the umpteenth year in a row, a host of televised contests, reality shows, and movies that all have the same general format. Whether they involve survival on an island or cooking or modeling or set design or makeup or dancing or singing or getting married, the format of nearly every show is the same as the plot of the Hunger Games. One by one, the contestants are winnowed down until only one individual or team remains. The contest is far less about winning than about avoiding loss. The lingering camera shots are on the losers. The winner is merely a formal necessity of the grammar of the contest and only appears for a few minutes at the end of the hour or even the season. Sometimes the credits are already rolling over the happy faces as they take their brief bow at the end. Obviously, the winners aren’t as interesting as the losers. The moment of triumph is the anticlimax: the disappointment and degradation of the losers is the substance.

Framing contests in this way is not a given, and television contest shows of older vintage do not.  The contestants on Jeopardy or Iron Chief or even Wheel of Fortune try to win. There are losers on these shows; but the focus is not on them; and they are treated very differently. Of course, cross-culturally, not even an emphasis on victory is a given. David Pace, a historian of anthropology, tells me that in many societies contests are played until the score is tied and wonders why this seems odd to us. Even if it does seem odd to us as heirs to the old Greek imperative that one must strive to out do the others, it remains true that our attitudes about victory are a matter of culture. In any case, the recent framing of competition that we see on the tube, goes a long way beyond a general obsession with competition. I think it reflects a specific and quite recent economic and, one might even say, spiritual situation.

Although the top prizes in the economic game are absurdly great, very few of us are even entered in that lottery. For most of us, the prize pool has shrunk over the last 40 years or, and this is what matters as far as the mood of country is concerned, it is perceived to be shrinking, hence, the compulsion to stage and restage simulacra of what is apparently a nation-wide game of musical chairs. Americans know that they have to make alliances with one another in order to survive; but they also believe, perhaps falsely, in the necessity of eventual treachery in a world without enough for everybody. Complicated debates about health policy aside, much of the opposition to universal health care is based on the simple thought that anything the other guys get will be at my cost. Ergo, get your hands off my Medicare!

There’s a deeper mechanisms at work as well. Winning or at least not losing is a value that survives the bankruptcy of other values. To put things crudely, the contest is a way of changing the subject in the absence of a sense of what your life is for. As a people, we could declare peace, after all, and build a society in which the goal was not a level playing field for an endless protracted conflict but the general health and welfare of the inhabitants of North America. Apparently this outcome is too terrible to contemplate. People not only chose to watch Chopped! They chose to live it.

Where is Fancy Bred?

You don’t have to be some sort of postmodernist to recognize that we frequently mistake linguistic conventions for objective facts about the universe. For example, we normally speak of facing the future; but it would be more sensible to claim, as some peoples do, that we are backing into the future. After all, everything we can know or perceive, as opposed to make guesses about, is in the past; and our constant stumbling would be more understandable if we adopted the metaphor of walking backwards to tomorrow. Whichever way we imagine our orientation in time, however, the choice is linguistic, not a matter of adopting a different physics. Nevertheless, such choices can have existential consequences.

Consider how we speak about sexual desire. When I say I desire a woman, the normal interpretation, at least among my kind of people, is that the desire, though inspired by her, is something that belongs to me, something I’m responsible for. There is nothing inevitable about this way of putting it. Old poems sometimes personify desire and treat it as one of the properties of the desired person, a fact about them. “Desire glowed in her lovely face.” On this view, one can no more choose not to perceive and feel this desire than one can choose not to see that an apple is red; and if the lover makes a fool of himself over the beloved or even acts in some seriously wrong way, the fault is not his, any more than it’s the nail’s fault to be attracted to a magnet.  In speaking in this fashion, the troubadour is merely working a variation on the eternal complaint of the misogynists. After all, priests and philosophers have been blaming women for being desirable for several thousand years now as if women had a singular responsibility for the bridle their attractiveness puts on masculine freedom. This rationale, which I suspect underlies the resentment of women by traditionalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims, continues to be widely in evidence in the modern world and, if it sometimes seems ridiculous, causes a tremendous amount of hurt. Of course it is possible to construe this attack on women as an instance of projection; but the matter can’t be settled scientifically because the location of desire is not a natural fact but an ethical choice, albeit one that the culture we are born into usually makes for us. Taking responsibility for your own behavior isn’t a recognition of a truth, it’s a matter of doing the right thing, which is something different. 

Separating Out

Before the great realignment of the 60s and 70s, the two worst segments of American society, the Southerners and the plutocrats, were in opposite parties. Now the racism and ignorance of the former has joined with the egotism and relentless greed of the latter to produce today’s GOP.  This bad outcome has been clear for some time, but perhaps it is less obvious that something similar has taken place in the area of religion. In the past, both the Protestant and Catholic denominations were a mixed bag of progressive and retrogressive tendencies, but the current religious scene features two dueling ecumenical groups. The religious split that matters in contemporary America is no longer between denominations but between right wing and liberal religiosity. We were far better off when the Southern Baptists were still denouncing the Jews and the Papists. Now that the authoritarian and obscurantist strains of all faiths have drained into the lowest swamp of the American spiritual landscape, rational believers and unbelievers alike have to confront a monster holy army.

Road Limericks

On a long drive to Los Angeles I got bored enough to compose some limericks in my head. I suppose this exercise in free association reveals something about me; but since it was random things I saw out the windshield that inspired these stinkers, maybe I was actually psychoanalyzing I-5.  Hegel claimed that the sciences and other human institutions constituted what he called Objective Reason. This is my contribution to Objective Nonsense.  

Said an auto mechanic in Texas

As he sexually assaulted a Lexus,

“I don’t mean to hurt her

Catalytic converter;

But, damn! That’s the gadget that checks us.

I confess I’m nonplussed for the nonce.

I’ve forgotten the meaning of sconce.

I believe that “soigné’”

Means “billboard” in L.A.

And guess that a “prelate’s” a ponce.

“My dreams have evolved, “ he said jovially,

“In lieu of evening with Bovary,

I’d bugger Gumby

In the back of a Humvee

While whistling Donna e mobile.

The governing rules are cuckoo

From Peoria down to Peru.

It makes scarcely a ripple

When a man bares a nipple,

But the feminine tit is taboo.

There’s a winsome young lady in Dallas

Who’s the cure for a flexible phallus.

I don’t mean to nag you,

But you won’t need Viagra

If ever you chance to see Alice.

I disdain ordinary disease.

It’s recherché ailments for me:

Coccidioides,

Polyploidy,

Or a prurient interest in bees.

“You gals should be grateful,” said Fritz,

Repeating one of his favorite bits,

“As I’ve told you all oft,

Your bras would fall off

If God hadn’t given you tits. “

Though it’s proving a difficult sell,

Reagan’s trying to privatize Hell.

Each bankrupt corporation

Once found in our nation

Is lobbying Satan as well.

No one’s happy about senility

With its various over-the-Hillites,

Yet I find that Alzheimer’s

Much worse for us rhymers

Who are stumped at the end of the verse.

You’ve Heard It (and not Heard It) a Million Times Before

While surfing the net, I came upon a site called The Universes of Max Tegmark with a long expose of Tegmark’s ideas about multiple universes, including a thought experiment he refers to as quantum suicide, which he apparently cooked up back in 1998, though Wikipedia claims that the same notion was discussed by Hans Moravec in 1987 and Bruno Marchal in 1988. Suppose you set up an experiment in which a gun fires or does not fire depending on whether it turns out that the spin of a given particle points up or down. The odds are 50/50 for this completely indeterminate quantum event. Now suppose that an experimental subject sits in front of the gun and will be killed if the gun fires and will go on living if it does not.  According to Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, both outcomes occur, but in non-communicating, parallel worlds. From the point of view of the experimental subject, however, only one outcome is observable so that in principle a scientist who is willing to put their life on the line could verify the many-world’s interpretation by repeating the experiment on herself until the null hypothesis were rejected with any desired level of confidence. The experiment raises the possibility that everyone is immortal from their own point of view, assuming, and it’s a big assumption, that there is always set of some quantum events that would allow the subject to avoid death. This notion apparently occurred to Everett himself. According to his friend Keith Lynch, “Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death.”

Here’s the strange thing. I wrote a short story back in 1985 that features a version of the quantum-suicide idea. I wasn’t trying to do physics without a license—the experiment was just an elaborate plot device—but I wonder where I got the idea from or if I just pulled it out of my ass. The story itself isn’t anything special. Only a few friends and relatives ever read it. I’m offering it here for its curiosity value.

All Men are Mortal

I always treasured my obscurity much as other people cherish their fame. I chose quite deliberately to be a mousey and obsequious nonentity—not out of timidity and certainly not because I think humility to be a virtue, but solely out of a cunning and shameless selfishness. I very early recognized that the world always takes more than it gives its famous names. That’s clear to any halfway intelligent observer in the case of celebrities who are doomed to carry, Atlas-like, the lust, envy, or devotion of the many; but I saw that it was no different for the local real estate man who must atone for his minor triumphs in the Purgatory of the Rotarian luncheon. The visible man inevitably becomes a symbol to his fellows, his identity a pawn in a pointless game whose rules are laid down by the others. I wanted to possess myself, and I made this project the rule of my life.

That’s why I became a professor of English Literature at a small college in Ohio. Of course as a teacher and researcher I did have a social role, but a role far less burdensome than the strenuous occupations of rebel or madman that a less subtle man might have rashly chosen in pursuit of himself. I would have preferred to be utterly invisible or transparent; but, obliged to take on some color, I opted for gray. I thought of myself as a geode, one of those wonderful hollow rocks which looks like a nondescript clod of dirt from outside, but whose dark interior hides a brilliant bloom of colorful crystals.

In this disguise I might have lived and died like a dog in perfect happiness. It was not to be.

I had fallen asleep in my armchair watching an indifferent baseball game on the television when I suddenly startled awake. I thought something had finally happened in the ballgame, but the score was still 0 to 0 in extra innings. “Muscle twitch,” I muttered to myself. I was still rubbing my eyes when I heard a loud but muffled crack coming from the other unit of my duplex. I might have ignored it if I lived in a big city, but Lindley is a very small town indeed, and I couldn’t imagine what could have caused such a noise. Certainly, I didn’t think that my neighbor would do anything rash. Bill Wolfson was a physics professor at my school, an unremarkable middle-aged man with whom I was friendly but hardly close.

I got up, walked around to his door, and called out to him. There was no answer, but the lights were on in the kitchen, so I was sure he must be at home. The door was, as usual, unlocked, and I hurried in, suddenly concerned that something had happened to Bill.

As you will have already gathered, I am a most stolid individual; but I confess that what I saw in the kitchen left me gasping for breath. Bill, or what remained of him, sat or sprawled on cheap dinette chair. His jaws were still clamped tightly on the barrel of an old 10-gauge shotgun. The top of his head was gone and the wall beyond was splattered with blood and brains. An atrocious odor of smoke and burning flesh filled the air. It took a moment for me to be sure that the shock of this grisly scene had not given me a coronary, but as my heartbeat gradually slowed again, I noticed a yet more macabre particular. Bill had set up a video camera on the kitchen counter, and I could still hear the gentle whine of the recorder. For some unaccountable reason, this perfectly normal man had blown his brains out and recorded it all on a Panasonic. I turned of the machine as one might close the eyes of a corpse. Then I called the police.

While I was waiting, I discovered one more thing. Bill had a microcomputer on the kitchenette table. It had been turned off, but I noticed that a long manuscript was hanging from the printer. I guessed it was a suicide note, as indeed it was. For Bill’s sake and, I admit, from my own curiosity, I tore it from the printer and hastily carried it back to my own apartment. I could think of no better place to hide it than my freezer where I nestled it among the petrified leftovers and frozen steaks.

When I returned the cops were banging on the front door. I let them in and showed them to the kitchen. The local police turned out to me far more efficient than I expected. They were also a little irritating to me with their exaggerated deference as if I were some hysterical old woman whose world had been irremediably shattered. In fact, though I actually liked Wolfson well enough, I was more intrigued than horrified by what had transpired, especially since a glance at this last words had given me an inkling that this was anything but the routine suicide of a secretly desperate man. Besides, though I have long affected a slight, scholarly stoop as part of personal disguise, I’m really in very good shape. For once it offended by vanity to be dismissed as an old crock. And dismissed I was, “You can come down to the station anytime tomorrow and make a statement, Professor Hayes—just a formality—no need to worry about it.”

As I imagine the young sergeant expected, I nodded gravely and withdrew to my own side of the duplex, but only because I couldn’t think of a credible reason to hang around the scene of this fascinating incident. As I left, I passed the medical examiner, Dr Stingley, coming in. We looked at each other for an instant—I had played bridge with the man once or twice—and I remember whether this neat little man was as shrewd and competent in his morgue as he was at the card table.

I was extremely anxious to read the dead man’s last message, but both from prudence and a sense of style I decided to wait. I was slightly concerned that I might somehow be discovered with the note if I read it while the police were still rummaging through Bill’s place, but even more than that, it occurred to me that the fragile old scholar character I was playing had to react to the horror he had witnessed with some suitable show of unease. That no one would see me wring my hands and pace through my apartment was immaterial: I was artist enough to know that follow-through is as crucial to pretence as it is to a golf swing. It vexed me inwardly, however, that I couldn’t find out who won the ball game.

It was only much later, when the voices and footsteps from next door had ceased, that I removed the printout from my freezer and with a tint of ice cream. I sat at my own kitchen table eating marble fudge out of the carton and reading the peculiar message Bill had left behind.

Wolfson’s Testament was almost forty pages long—apparently word processing makes even suicides voluble—and was by turns affecting, closely reasoned, and simply crazy. It began with a cri de coeur, “Dear Woody, dear, dear Woody. How I hate you,” and continued in the same Joan Crawford vein for some pages. The tale was a hackneyed one. Bill had fallen in love with Woody; Woody had reciprocated; now Woody had jilted Bill. Bill couldn’t take it, would make Woody sorry, etc. I was a little disappointed, though it was interesting that Bill had evidently had a homosexual affair—I assumed Woody was a he. I was also surprised that so wooden a figure as Bill Wolfson could work himself into such fits of emotion.

As I read along, it gradually dawned on me that Bill never actually used the word suicide. He always referred to blowing his brains out as ‘the experiment.’ At first I dismissed this locution as gallows humor, but it became clear that Bill wasn’t kidding. “I’ve become a mad scientist. In a few hours, I may be dead, but if I’m not, I’ll know the biggest secret of them all because I’m going to perform the grandest and craziest experiment of them all. I’m going to find out if it is possible to turn out the lights.” Somehow the mundane business of self-destruction had gotten conflated in Wolfson’s mind with a weird metaphysical experiment. I interpreted his remarks as a kind of prosy paraphrase of ‘to be or not to be,’ but evidently the undiscovered country he had in mind was not the next world but simply his kitchen.  For some reason, Bill seemed to think that he could blow his brains out without dying.

Bill’s ramblings also had a cosmic slant. Sometimes he wrote grandiloquently about his own existence as “the big, obscene mystery,” and likened his mind to a hot, naked light bulb shining alone in a huge, empty garage. “Without me, without the inexplicable witness, what is there in this world but silence, dust, and cobwebs? Why should the light go on burning? Why does it have to hurt?” Apparently Bill thought this his shotgun would supply an explanation or, failing that, at least the sovereign Novocain of oblivion.

Sometimes Bill fairly cackled with crazy glee over what he was doing, but mostly he sounded guilty, and not just because of the pain he planned to inflect on his lover. “I’m a mad scientist because I’m not going to solve this puzzle for anyone but myself. If Frankenstein had proposed to reanimate the dead at the Salk Institute instead of his lonely castle, I bet he would have gotten a grant. In science you can try anything, but you have to let everybody in on it. That’s my secret crime. I’m going to find out about that fucking light bulb, but only for me, Dr. William Wolfson. I’m fed up with being a good little boy.”

Wolfson went on like this for many pages, but just when I thought he would on repeating himself to the end, his tone abruptly changed. I found myself reading a proper treatise on the physics of death. “Ironically, it was you who first pointed out that my interpretation of quantum mechanics may have drastic consequence. Consider an inertial frame of reference such that…” I sighed.  In such a dark wood a humanist like me was immediately astray. I who have made a career out of glossing Joyce and Pound could barely stay afloat in a pitchy sea of standing waves, singularities, and nodes, of Hilbert spaces and Hamiltonians. Every time I though I had caught my bearings, the page would break out with equations—it might as well have been written in Chinese. I was all the more frustrated because from time to time I caught sight of a human meaning, but only when a little jagged piece of comprehensible madness broke the black and greasy surface of scientific reason.

To my increasing confusion, Bill went on and on about an animal called Schrödinger’s Cat, and the Anthropoid Principle, and somebody named, improbably enough, Hugh Everett the Third. I was nearly ready to put the paper away and simply go to bed when I arrived at the crux. I had repeatedly read and re-read on particularly dense paragraph without really registering its point when I realized that I had jotted down a note that summarized the whole amazing performance: “Gist of the theory: everybody is literally immortal from their own point of view.” That night between the writing down and the reading over, I felt a distinct sensation of falling.

As any rate, I woke up. While Bill’s reasons were completely opaque to me, his conclusion was quite straightforward. According to him, the stream of time constantly branches into an infinite delta of parallel worlds. Everything physically possible—and apparently that just about anything imaginable—can and in fact does happen in one of the emerging worlds. It follows that whatever peril I undergo, there will always be some escape hatch, some quirk of destiny, which will allow my consciousness to move ahead into one or more futures. We’re all like James Bond or Luke Skywalker. We always dodge the razor-sharp brim of Odd Jobs bowler; we always elude the light saber of the invincible Vader. We can’t even die of old age, for if need be the atoms of our sclerotic arteries will jig instead of jag and get us out of the ICU. The Hell with Aristotle. No man is mortal.

All of this is, of course, sheer theory and lunatic theory at that as Bill seems to have realized. He was too much of a scientist to accept his conclusion a priori. Hence the experiment. “When I shoot myself, I won’t prove a damn thing to anybody but me. In most universes I’ll simply be a problem for the coroner and for you, faithless Woody. From my perspective, though, only successful outcomes can occur; they are the only cases in which I’ll be around to draw a conclusion. I calculate that if shoot myself a couple of times and live, I will verify my own immortality at the .001 confidence level.”

Had you asked me then what I thought of Wolfsan’s theory I would have dismissed it as symptomology.  Certainly I was not overwhelmed by all of Bill’s technicalities. O, the pages full of unintelligible mathematics, with their elegant integral signs, Greek letters, and symbols that looked like backward 6’s, were impressive, especially the conclusions marked with a little square for QED. The citations of Bohr, Einstein, and Tipler meant nothing to me. I had no way of knowing whether Bill’s physics was legitimate and in any case doubted if scientific reasoning could touch cogently on a matter of such existential concern. Besides, Bill himself insisted that his experiment violated all the rules of his profession, for it could only yield a personal sort of knowledge. If he fired the shotgun and lived, he might learn something, but in the vast majority of universes the result would simply be a half-headless corpse and a bemused neighbor.

For all my skepticism, I admit I did hope that Bill wasn’t just nuts. What gripped me was the reawakening of an ancient human hope. Who has not secretly consoled himself with the fantasy of his own immortality? Young men are said to disbelieve their own mortality—it is this crazy confidence that sends them whistling off to war. But in the middle of the night when an inexplicable pain wakens an old man’s anxiety, what half-formed thought allows sleep, if not the old dream that it can’t happen to me? I recall that at the end of his life the novelist William Saroyan wrote that he always thought he was exempt from death because was such a good writer, By Wolfson’s theory, one need not fend off one’s doom with superior adjectives, and it isn’t just the heroes who can look forward to the Elysian Fields.

Shaking off such ruminations, I continued to read the note. After all the physics, Bill went on for several paragraphs discussing the ethical import of his ideas. It was as if Wolfson were working out the moral consequences of physical immortality. He seemed to think that right ad wrong were as cut and dried as mathematics and that the new postulate of everlasting life, like the denial of the parallel postulate in geometry, would generate a sort of non-Euclidean morality. He concentrated, not surprisingly, on the new ethics of suicide. “If I am right, murder isn’t so bad as we had thought. In some ways in is impossible. Suicide takes the place of honor, for it harms the living at no cost to the erstwhile victim. In 99.999999% of all universes I will leave you alone to mediate on what you’ve done to me. Trillions of Woods will have to live with that I’ve done while in the comparably few worlds in which I go only living, I will glory in the thought of my revenge and the possession of my great secret.”

Bill’s note wound up with a dark hymn to loneliness. “People have thought that death was the great evil, but the great evil is really loneliness. We will all live on forever in our separate universes, but our immortality will cost us the loss of everyone we ever love. Losing someone is bad enough for beings that can die, but they can at least console themselves with the thought that they too will pass away. In the new world I give you, my faithless lover, there is only eternal loneliness. That was your last gift to me, Woody. Now I’m returning it.” It was this last passage that I had read while it was still hanging on Bill’s printer.

It was almost 5 when I looked up from this peculiar document. I would have to go down to the police station in a few hours, and the prospect made me feel exceedingly weary. Worse was to befall me, for as I undressed it struck me that my attempt to protect Wolfson might be in vain. I might even be in trouble myself. In the excitement of discovering the body and the not, it hadn’t occurred to me that the note might be preserved electronically in the machine. I tried to remember if the power were still on whether that made a difference. Would Dr. Stingley be able to determine if the note had ever been printed out? For once I wished I knew something about the damned computers. With such thoughts gnawing away at me, I struggled to fall asleep and finally succeeded.

I woke up with the happy thought that I was in fact immortal. I jumped out of bed and shouted at no one in particular. Then I chuckled because no one was there to hear me in the silent house.

“Ah well,” I thought, “Life goes on!” I remembered I had errands to run. I picked up my laundry, I went grocery shopping; and to the amusement of several kids, I played a video game in the mall. Everything could have happened the same way a day before my discovery, but somehow my little chores had become intensely pleasurable. Everything was a privilege—a drink of water, the sound of my shoes slapping on the sidewalk in front of Watson’s diner, the blowzy friendliness of the checkout clerk at the supermarket. Everything was magical because of all the inhabitants of the earth, I alone owned these ordinary moments free and clear. I could go to the store a million times. I could let my mind wander for a century if I liked, for my thoughts were as eternal as God’s and I would never again be under any obligation to come to a conclusion.

I amused myself with the theological consequences of my new state. Surely an every lasting being is eo ipso God even if he is also a harmless middle-aged man in polyester pants. Of course, I knew I was neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but it seem to me that I ha a far more important attribute of divinity: complacency. I didn’t need thunderbolts or a cloak of fire. I didn’t need a chorus line of angels behind me. I would be a hidden God whose transcendence never manifested itself in anything more violent than an infinitely knowing smile whose secret I alone possessed.

I looked up at the sun and though that after that great light goes out for good, my stubborn little habits would to on, the true laws of nature. Under a new heaven, I would someday absently pick my teeth and recite poetry to myself.

That sun kept getting brighter and brighter until I realized that it was the sun coming in my bedroom window and that I had been dreaming. It took me a few minutes to sort out what was dream and what was history. A quick trip to the freezer assured me that Bill Wolfson had indeed died in the name of science and love and that I still had a problem with the coroner. By then I certainly didn’t feel immortal. My eyes were red, and my whole body ached.

It was about eleven when I finally went in to see the police. A visibly bored secretary took my statement, and I began to hope that the whole affair would blow over. I had risen to leave when the young woman stopped me.  “Excuse me, Professor Hayes. The medical examiner would like to have a word with you before you go.”

Stingley’s office was at the end of one of those linoleum halls what could as easily be part of a hospital, a junior college, or a courthouse. His secretary showed me into a tiny office shoe air bore, or so I imagined, a faint aroma of formaldehyde. Stingley came in almost immediately. He wore his usual neat suit with its aggressively unfashionable how tie, but his seemed uncharacteristically frayed as if he had been up most of the night. His eyes were red and staring.

“I’m glad you came in, Dr. Hayes,” he began formally. “There are a couple of details about Bill Wolfson’s death that need cleaning up.

“I wouldn’t think there would be much for a medical examiner to do in a case like this.”

“You wouldn’t think so. Certainly the immediate cause of death is no medical mystery.”

“Was Bill drinking?” I ventured.

“I don’t me to be impolite, but I think I’ll ask the questions. Tell me what happened.”

“I just gave my statement.”

“Be good enough to repeat it.” Stingley’s request sounded like an order.

In my best academic-obtuse fashion, I told him what happened—everything but the detail about the printout.

“Look, Dr. Hayes, I know this whole affair makes you nervous, but please spare me the professor bit. You can’t be more than 50 and, according to the college, you publish three or four articles a year even though you have tenure. You aren’t the diffuse old gent you pretend to be. Your secret is safe with me, but I want information.”

“Very well,” I said and pulled up my chair. I was impressed by this young fellows acumen.

“Who’s Woody?”

“I don’t know anybody of that name.”

“You’ve encountered the name recently, though, haven’t you?”

I was framing an answer when Stingley help up his hand, “I know all about the printout. When you tore it off, you left a piece of one page hanging on the printer. It had the last page number on it.”

I opened my mouth but didn’t manage to say anything.

“Please don’t deny it. When I first realized that you had taken the printout, I thought you might be involved somehow; but after I read the note, I guessed you took it to satisfy your own curiosity. Anyhow, you certainly aren’t Woody.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Woody is a woman. I found some letters Wolfson wrote to her on his machine. Unfortunately, they must have been hand delivered.  There were no addresses.”

I tried to protest my innocence.

“Please don’t waste my time professor. In the first place you were the only one who had a chance to get the printout. The machine was still warm when I arrive. It had just been turned off. It follows that it had been used just before Wolfson shot himself.”

“Couldn’t someone have removed it between the time I hard the shot and came in.”

“It would have been on the video recording. Besides you’ve obviously been awake most of the night. From what I’ve heard you didn’t know Wolfson all that well. I can’t see you sitting around all night mourning him. I figure you pored over the paper as if it were one of your old books. Frankly, I’m not very interested in hanging you out to dry for stealing printout. It would be a small-potatoes crime in any case. Besides, for someone like you it must be punishment enough to know just how stupidly you’ve acted in all this.”

I did feel stupid, but I resented Stengley’s tone. “I’m sorry I violated the letter of the law, doctor, but I don’t see why you have to be abusive about it.  After all, I was just trying to protect a friend.”

“O come now. You took the note because you were fascinated by the whole thing. Evidently you like secrets.”

“I don’t deny my own curiosity in this affair. After all, my profession, like yours, is about finding things out. In any case, I didn’t want the truth about Bill Wolfson.”

“Just you, ey?” Stengley regarded me narrowly. “Maybe you should know the whole story. You were willing to steal evidence out of your scientific love of secretes. Let’s see how well you like this one.”

At this, the coroner unlocked a drawer in his desk and took out a videotape. He led me unprotesting into an inner room and put the cassette in a player. I should have been reluctant to see the tape; in fact, I was full of guilty eagerness.

The tape was surprisingly long. Wolfson had turned on the camera early to capture all of his preparations. He went about his business in complete calm, making sure that the angles were right so that the tape machine would catch everything, even positioning a clock on the shelf beyond the chair. Finally set himself down, very carefully loaded the shot gun and showed it to the lens, leaned back, inserted the muzzle in his mouth, and pulled both triggers in what you’d have to call a matter-of -fact way. There was a loud report and a huge volume of smoke pored from Wolfson’s mouth. Behind his head, the wall was peppered with shot. Bill sat up bolt upright and coughed furiously. Presently the cough turned into an uncontrollable laugh as Bill looked full on at the camera. His eyes were glowing and smoke continued to issue from his powder-stained smile.

For a moment he seemed to lose himself in thought. Then he reached for the cartridge box on the table. Very deliberately, he reloaded the gun, sat back down, put the muzzle in his mouth, and again pulled the triggers. His death was so instantaneous that it wasn’t even frightening: one moment a lanky, forty-year old scientist was settling himself in a chair and the next all that remained was a motionless, partly decapitated corpse.

After a few minutes I rushed in. You could see my eyes get very big, but what actually embarrassed me the most how quickly the expression drained from my face once the sheer impact of the scene had faded. Obviously, because I hadn’t noticed the video machine, I hadn’t bothered to register any emotion at all except perhaps a lingering note of surprise. Because I though myself unseen, I had the blank look of a man blind from birth. Eventually I noticed the camera was on and turned it off.

I stared at the screen for a long time after it had gone black.  When I finally looked around, I saw Stingley sitting rigidly in his char with an exasperated look on his smooth face. “I expect I don’t need to tell you to keep quiet about all this. Was it enough of a secret for you?”

I think I nodded, but it was a very long time ago and I may not remember everything perfectly.

Rewards and Punishments

The problem with capitalism is that it is too rewarding. The prospect of unlimited income is undoubtedly motivating—drug lords have excellent work habits—but that’s precisely the problem. We know that people will lie, cheat, and steal for relatively small payoffs. What do you suppose they’ll do if they can make $345 million a year doing it? Swindle their customers? Destroy the environment? Sell tainted food? Sell people into slavery? Buy politicians? Subvert the courts? Start wars? Betray their country? As we all know, the lords of universe do all that and a great deal more as a matter of routine. Even the most fervent disciples of the gospel of wealth are perfectly aware that the doings of the great would be the sheerest criminality in small timers. They simply assert that these activities automatically result in good consequences, a conclusion they apparently base on something they read somewhere.

What we have here is a dosage problem. If one pill makes you feel better, it doesn’t follow that it’s a good idea to empty the bottle. The opportunity to get ahead can certainly make people work harder and sometimes smarter, which is very often a good thing. Increasing the potential rewards without limit, however, simply means that other motives and considerations will be overwhelmed. Offer me enough and I’ll not only ignore my obligations to my fellow man, I’ll feel that I ought to ignore them.