Oh god

Another year.

Bumper sticker

"If animals could talk we'd all be vegetarians."
Other stickers in that series:

• "If I had a billion dollars, I'd be rich."
  
• "If a perpetual motion machine were invented, energy would be free."
• "If the moon were made of cheese, feeding a moon base would be easy."

Besides the highly counterfactual protasis, I think the sentimentality of the apodosis is unusually dippy. If animals could talk, we'd have to consider them a bunch of murderous psychotic perverts. Three minutes' thought about what animals actually do would suffice to find that out, but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

There is also the possibility that animals would beg to be eaten:

A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.

"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.

Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a white wine sauce?"

"Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.

"But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer."

Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.

"Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there." It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.

"Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.

"You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford.

"Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."

"That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard."

"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.

"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing here inviting me to," said Arthur, "it's heartless."

"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.

"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ..."

The Universe raged about him in its death throes.

"I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.

"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."

"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.

"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"

"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."

It managed a very slight bow.

"Glass of water please," said Arthur.

"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare steaks please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."

The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle.

"A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."

He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.

"Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."

It waddled unhurriedly off into the kitchen.

A matter of minutes later the waiter arrived with four huge steaming steaks. Zaphod and Ford wolfed straight into them without a second's hesitation. Trillian paused, then shrugged and started into hers.

The Center for Future Storytelling

MIT has opened a Center for Future Storytelling, a determined effort to destroy the written word in even its debased www form. Sam Leith's (until this week, literary editor of the Telegraph) comments are interesting, although characteristically of a modern Englishman he feels obliged to lout to pop culture (Twitter, GTA4, soap operas) however unconvincingly, and even if, characteristically of an English journalist, he misrepresents the situation. There is no doubt about what the Center intends: it wants to provide the tools for worldwide LARPs.

By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web.

Vampires ahoy, matey.

Even worse, one of the professors is a Ramesh Raskar, "a pioneer in the development of new imaging, display and performance-capture technologies." In a word: bodcasts.

Leith is only pretending not to understand what MIT is up to and is only playing at pop culture, but he really does know English. He says it perfectly:

The eggheads at MIT have, in this respect, more than just a prose style in common with the governing body at Meadows Community School in Chesterfield.

The closure of the library at this 759-strong comprehensive is being explained as "a move towards the relocation and redistribution of non-fiction and fiction resources in the light of the new developments in a virtual-learning environment and interactive learning".

Every clause is doubled-up into redundancy in the hope of sounding grand. How does "relocation" differ from "redistribution" - and don't they add up to "relocating from the library to the skip"? What are "non-fiction and fiction resources" - other than a fancy way of saying "all the books we have"?

How does "a virtual learning environment" differ from "interactive learning" (what learning isn't "interactive", come to that) - and is it just clever-sounding verbiage for the internet?

The thing is, the internet does some things very well, and the codex book does other things very well. There is an overlap - they are both means of preserving and sharing information - but it's foolish to see the two as interchangeable, or the former as supplanting the latter.

One of the clichés about education is that it should teach you not what to think, but how to think: and a vital part of that is understanding the shape of knowledge - being able to evaluate categories of information and degrees of authority in sources. If the educators themselves can't or won't think about these distinctions, God help their pupils.

Rem tetigisti acu, to address him in his ill-concealed native tongue.

A tip

If you have your hair cut at one of those strip mall franchise places, do not use the word "proportionally" when describing how much you want cut off. She found out how much I wanted off the sides, and when she asked about the top, instead of trying to work out just what length I said something like "shorten it proportionally." She clearly thought I meant "make all the lengths equal." Now my head is a round ball of bristly red.

This is going to be an embarrassing week.

Gervaise on religion

Ricky Gervaise, of The Office, preaches atheism, or at least the falseness of the Old Testament, through stand-up comedy. There are the usual objections: he is beating on an easy, harmless target instead of dangerous ones; he is attacking a minority (Old Testament literalists) among Christians; he does not know what he is talking about (saying he is "fine" with the New Testament when he rejects the Old Testament entirely); he is using his high status to abuse a low-status minority in front of audiences who loathe that minority; worst of all, he is being unfunny and calling it comedy. I wish I knew what hater of comedy first encouraged a stand-up comedian to pretend at thought.

Of course Gervaise is right that the Old Testament is substantially false as a record of fact, and even the historical books are full of errors. That bothered me quite a bit as I found out over the years just how extensively wrong the history is, but the things he makes fun of, like Noah's ark, either convert you to atheism on the spot as a child or in time stop feeling like questions of fact. That effect of a story losing the sense of facticity without undermining the worldview it helped build is a curious thing. Whatever the explanation, it is why tackling an adult Christian over Noah's ark is so futile; he has stopped believing that its truth value and relevance to his faith are connected to its facticity.

Most Christians are comfortable with assessing Biblical stories as myths, though many will refuse to use that word, since it implies affiliation with liberal theology and even outright spiritual disbelief. Instead the emphasis is on its true or inner meaning, that is, its mythical essence. Even the ones who feel obliged to defend its factual truth are, so to speak, fighting outside their borders; they can lose any number of scientific or engineering arguments without losing anything they really care about. A story that once supported a worldview has long since come to take its support from that worldview. Children in non-liberal churches are still taught the stories as written, which is a rather dishonest way of implying their factual truth and one I resent in hindsight, even if it is a little funny to think of a Sunday School teacher trying to present ideas about fact, truth, and myth to six-year-olds. It also cannot be over-emphasized how much contemporary Christians are ignorant, and disregarding, of the Old Testament, other than the chief Sunday School stories.

In none of his errors does Gervaise differ from the rest of the new atheist movement, but I want to point out something extraordinary he says in the Telegraph article:

I don't care if there are 50 per cent atheists or 75 per cent atheists in the world. I've got no problem with God being the most the popular thing in the world, with churches being filled, worship, no problem at all. People who believe in God that don't impinge on me, I don't care about. When it starts infringing on people and taking people's rights away that's a battle that's not going to be won by satirists or comedians. That's going to be won by governments saying: 'Ok you can worship what you like, but you are going to teach that evolution is the truth. You're going to tell them about matter and anti-matter and particle collision. Then you're going to say: Some people believe in the myth of Arthur and Santa Claus.' Religion is going to be lumped in with that. [emphasis added]

He is utterly incoherent in all the things I linked to, so it might be too much to expect him to mean what he seems to say, but then Sam Harris infamously wrote in Letter to a Christian Nation, "The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live." (Harris's defense.) Perhaps then Gervaise does mean it when he says that some other person teaching that evolution is false infringes on his rights. What a radical, what a totalitarian idea! This sick worldview, which is certainly Harris's if not Gervaise's, is why the new atheism must be resisted. As much as I love the discoveries of science, and even though I am not a believer, I would rather live among backwoods Pentacostals than grant the existence of a right over others' thoughts and words. Thank God for the First Amendment.

Hiroshima

The book of WW2 journalism ends with John Hersey's short book, Hiroshima, which was first published as a single issue of The New Yorker. It is odd not to end the book with V-J day, which as it is gets very little mention in the book, unless the editor is making a moral comment on the Good War. Expecting moralizing and not really looking forward to it, I almost did not read it. Instead, it proves to be astounding, powerful and understated, honest and horrifying. Only an ignorant fool would conclude from it that the bombing was manifestly impermissible, yet equally only the most callous could be left with any pride in it. And at the time, there were a great many who were proud of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the one point where it is easiest to hate the U.S. for its decision is when as the wounded are still dying in the fires the U.S. propaganda broadcasts boast on and on about how only the U.S. could have organized so expensive and difficult a scientific and military invention. Hersey's understatement slightly falters there, saying the voices on the radio were "shouting," but you understand why he would lose control there.

It took me two days to read it, though it is hardly 80 pages (in this closely typeset edition), because very suddenly I would find I had taken on as much horror as I could stand; an almost physical sensation somewhat like the visual numbness produced by five or six hours in an art museum. It is beyond belief that people could live on with that in their past, and yet they did. Of the six survivors Hersey follows, none is wholly wrecked in the disaster. One young woman becomes a nun; she was crippled by a collapsing building, her leg badly twisted and shriveled, and abandoned by her fiance, a soldier who survived the war but never returned to her. Japanese Christians have always been rare; her conversion in the hospital and her discovery of a vocation are distressing indications of her desperation. Even so she turned her disaster to something brave and praiseworthy. The other five were less wounded, but the degree to which they lived full lives afterward is hard for me to comprehend.

Hersey does not hesitate to show how ruinous invading Japan was going to be--the hillsides around Hiroshima were being heavily dug in even as the bomb fell--and how to the bombed the atomic bomb did with horrible novelty what had been done to many other Japanese civilians by incendiaries and HE. Because the Japanese did not know how to interpret a daytime flight of just three bombers, and so gave the all-clear before the bomb fell, it is likely that the atomic bomb maimed and killed a great many people, especially children, who would have escaped a conventional bombing. On the other hand, it was widely thought that Hiroshima was coming due for a severe bombing, since it was the mainland military's headquarters and mostly untouched. The Japanese had already evacuated about a third of the city for that reason. The U.S. could have lessened some of the misery by warning more clearly beforehand and by broadcasting whatever was known about the risks of radiation afterward, but the one would risk a shoot-down or even a capture of the bomb and the other supposes more knowledge than the U.S. had.

In the end, the only two moral conclusions to be reached are still either grim relief that the atomic bombings prevented many hundreds of thousands of deaths in a longer war, or Richard Weaver's conclusion that the war should never have been pressed to that point. Perhaps the Japanese military would not have accepted terms that left the island and its closest possessions intact, but the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender made it certain that massive bombings and eventually a mainland invasion would be needed, in the absence of the atomic bomb. Unconditional surrender is a startling demand, and possibly, though I doubt it, one day it will be clear that it is always immoral, as the civilized world has come to accept that rape and pillage, once the natural prizes of victory, are always immoral.

I cannot really believe it made a difference in this case, however; it was not going to be politically, or indeed morally, possible to leave Japan with Manchuria, for instance, and they were at least as attached to it as Germany was to Alsace-Lorraine. Moreover in everyone's mind was Germany's surrender at its borders in 1918, and the disaster that followed. Twenty years after Armistice, Germany was again attacking the world, even more savagely than before; twenty years after Hiroshima, Japan was foremost among the peaceful nations, a bulwark against aggressive neighbors with global ambitions. Perhaps the Japanese military would have accepted defeat gracefully, surrendered Manchuria, and never again tried to build a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but it beggars belief. Would it really then be the moral choice, to prepare the ground for another terrible war? Even if it were to prove safe, could anyone at the time, as Europe still smoldered, believe that?

The bombings, atomic and conventional, were evil things; if they were not, it is hard to think what is. But so were the horrific landings at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Peleliu; so were the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking; so were the enslavement of Korea and the Philippines; and what good actions were there that would counter those evils and more like them? It is the end of morality, if evil is permitted against evil, but there is often no good, nor is it always possible even to know what is good or evil, and if it should happen to be known, still often the best path was lost long before the crisis, sometimes by men acting for the best. Weaver would unwind three or four generations to find the right path in 1945; but what use is so hypothetical a moral theory?

The perfect gift

Durable illusions. Advertisers offer ephemeral illusions, but lost illusions cause too much upset. Religions (wrong ones only, of course) offer illusions that only death conclusively dispels. Their durability lacks confidence, though; the thought that they might be illusions gives them a hollow feel, no matter how vigorous the inquisition is. The market is wide open for truly durable illusions, as indubitably real as a sports car and as lastingly deceptive as a superstitious habit. Perhaps a large illusion would be destructive, but something too small to cause structural problems would be the perfect gift.

I think these illusions would have to be alterations of memory or sensation. My first catalogue will offer these illusions: in memory, inserting a minor bravery or a brief, requited crush, or shifting an esprit d'escalier to the proper moment, or perfecting a conversation; in perception, coloring a day with significance, or infusing a lover with special glamour, or giving the air some subtle exhilarating scent. Wonderful dreams, remembered clearly, would sell well too. The most prized of all those would surely be the entire day marked by a sense of significance, too unobtrusive to doubt and too enveloping to miss.

It occurs to me that I have memories of all those sorts of things, though not too many; just enough to make it plausible that some other entrepreneur beat me to market. People must have been buying me a durable illusion or two every Christmas. Maybe the past grows sweeter in memory not by nature but because that is where we keep our durable illusions, like toys in a toy box.