I give up

Back at the beginning of the year, nobody wanted to talk about my observations on Mark Twain’s observations in Rome.

What my observations were really about is this: The concept of a person being both ‘True God and True Man’ has become more and more forbidding and incomprehensible to me the more I think about what I mean by God.

This is one half of a trap.

The other half of the trap is my well-intentioned but insidious universalism, as detailed in Part Eight of my ‘Spero’ document. This does not necessarily deny a ‘special’ role for Jesus in whatever mysterious mechanism allows contact between God and Man, but it makes that special role seem more and more arbitrary and irrelevant.

What this trap means is that, while I have never found it easy to believe that Jesus is God, it has gotten harder and harder. And I can’t do it anymore.

On Christmas Eve, 2007, I was watching ‘Carols by Candlelight’ on the television, and suddenly felt the monstrous incompatibility between the enormity of the thing we were asserting and the half-hearted, puerile, unworthy way we were asserting it, and I just felt an enormous tide of revulsion against the whole thing. I didn’t want to celebrate Christmas anymore. And I didn’t want to keep straining to try to believe that Jesus is God anymore. So I gave up. I could still probably affirm that Jesus is God, but it would be hard to do. It would be an emotive, rather than a reasonable affirmation. It would also make no difference to my behaviour in any way.

So I have given up. I have fallen over into pure Monotheism, and won’t call myself any kind of Christian in the census anymore, because the custom of the past 1700 years is that you have to believe that Jesus is God to do that.

I affirm and glory in the message that Jesus brought, that we can call God our Father: that He is not only transcendent, but immanent, and can relate with us as a person: and not as a Master, but as a Father. This seems to me now, as it always has, the essence of what Jesus was trying to do. And I have built and will continue to build my life on the words of Jesus as recorded in the synoptic gospels.

W is for Wyndham

It is fitting, I guess, as the ‘Holiday from History’ (August 21^st, 1991 – August 8^th, 2008) draws to an end, to say a few words about the work of John Wyndham, which more than most other bodies of work breathes the sense of Apocalypse that overshadowed my youth.

I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to write about Wyndham back around B or C, but I am afraid it has pretty much evaporated. My mind is like one of those thingies, you know, that is full of holes, and I don’t seem to remember much unless I write it down. And as I never wrote down what I was going to write back then, I haven’t remembered it. So I will have to start again.

‘She was quite abruptly aware that the world was almost noiseless.

There was an alarming feeling of unreality. She held her breath to listen for some reassuring sound. Supposing it had all stopped, now? – As it might do one day.

Perhaps, even at this moment, there were in some parts of the world great columns of smoke writhing upwards in Medusan coils, swelling out at the top into cerebral convolutions that pulsed with a kind of sub-life, marking the beginning of the silence that meant the end of everything.

For years now, when she was off her guard, those pillars of smoke had been likely to start up in her mind. She hated and feared them.’ (Wild Flower, 1956)

In another way, it is inappropriate for me to construct this around Wyndham, since I didn’t start reading him until I left the Old Country and no longer lived in fear. It was The Martian Chronicles that best embodied the feeling of Apocalypse when I was young. There was something I never understood. Why did all those people leave Mars and go back to Earth? Isn’t away the direction you ought to run, when everything goes pear-shaped? There was such a deep, deep, vein of melancholy in those two doomed civilisations, Mars and Earth, following each other into the void in the twinkling of an eye.

The short stories of John Wyndham are not always about the end of the world as we know it, but the novels almost always seem to be, in one way or another. I guess it is hard to keep writing for so long without doing something drastic. In The Outward Urge, which I am fond of for no particularly good reason, the nuclear war happens offstage and isn’t really so bad given the action takes place over centuries and in Brazil and Australian when its on Earth. In The Kraken Wakes and The Trouble with Lichen, civilisation isn’t quite destroyed, but it is clearly going to be replaced by something very different.

I remember that Stanislaw Lem was quite dismissive of ‘End of the World’ fiction. Ah, here he is:

‘In the course of its evolution science fiction has renounced the positive omnipotence, and for a long time it has occupied the opposite pole- that of maximum despair. Gradually it has made this pole its playground. Because the end of the world, the atomic Last Judgment, the epidemic provoked by technology, the freezing, drying up, crystallisation, burning, sinking, the automation of the world, and so on no longer have any meaning in science fiction today. They lost their meaning because they underwent the typical inflation that changes eschatological horror into the pleasant creeps. Every self-respecting fan owns a science-fiction library of the agonies of mankind that equals the book collection of a chess amateur, since the end of the world should be as formally elegant as a well-thought-out gambit. … There are specialists who have slaughtered mankind in thirty different ways, but still search diligently and calmly for further methods of murder. Structurally this (end-of-the-world) science fiction has put itself on the same level as the crime novel, and culturally it acts out a nihilism that liquidates horror, according to the law of diminishing returns.⁴’

To me what is written and what is unwritten have always loomed equally large in these sort of novels, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the countless tragic stories that are not the adventures of the hero. My own imagination always interpolates the eschatological terror back into the most pedestrian of the sort of books Lem is talking about.

I have been reading ‘My Apprenticeship’, by Beatrice Webb, off and on for the past month or two. I had only ever heard of the Webbs as people mentioned unfavourably in books by or about Chesterton or Wells- sort of Machiavellian powerbrokers of the Socialist movement, the sort of people who might go out to dinner at Iguana Joes. It has been a pleasant surprise to find Beatrice so engaging, so rational, so- Clammish:

‘What body of scientific men, or even of ordinary shrewd business men, spoken to on the subject that interested them most, whether intellectually or materially, would tolerate that extraordinary mixture of personalities, dogmatic assertions as to fact and principle, metaphysical theories, grand and vague moral sentiments, appeals to personal devotion on the hand, and self-interest on the other, this extraordinary medley of sentiment, passion, and expediency which makes up the argument of the politician?’ (Beatrice Potter Webb, diary, July 1884)

But I wanted to quote something that she wrote when she was much younger, about ten:

‘A novel now and then is a wise recreation to be offered to a growing mind, it cultivates the imagination, but taken as the continual nourishment, it destroys many a young mind … The whole of their thought (for a child of nine or ten spends little or no thought on her lessons) is wasted on making up love scenes, or building castles in the air, where she is always the charming heroine without a fault.’

When I was of that age, a good many of my castles in the air involved the destruction of everything I knew, a desperate struggle to survive, and my death at the age of 21 from radiation-induced cancer after playing a role in the salvage of something from the wreck of civilisation. I thought, a lot, about the exact sort of story that the first chapters of The Day of the Triffids is, with myself as the protagonist. Most times I travelled into town- for we lived on the edge of town- I would think about how far we were likely to be from Ground Zero, and what our chances of survival might be. My calculations were based on false premises; for I later found out the city I lived in was surrounded at a goodly distance by a ring of Titan II missile silos, which no doubt had at least one missile each allotted to them, so wherever I went I would have been comprehensively obliterated by overlapping blast zones in the event of a nuclear exchange.

I still think, uneasily, sometimes. Should I lay in a better store of organic seeds? Do I really have any practical skills that my neighbours in the village might find useful, were civilisation to collapse? Are we far enough away from the highway to avoid the starving hordes from the cities?

Oh well.

It appears to me that the holiday is over. We had for a little while the luxury in the West of casting down tyrants, but now we are well on our way back to being tied-up by Realpolitik and the Balance of Terror from effecting anything good in the world.

We shall see.

4: The quote from ‘Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case - With Exceptions’ was long enough, so you will have to hunt down a copy of ‘Microworlds’ yourself to read the footnote. But it will be worth it, if you have any weakness for curmudgeonly footnotes at all.

Spot the Difference!

A: This head of state is arriving to open the Olympic Games before his regime murdered tens of millions of people.

‘WE should all wish the People's Republic of China success as host of the 2008 Olympics, for which it has made heroic efforts to prepare itself’ ?!?

Did any of you notice this dreadful thing a few weeks ago?

I thought Frank Devine was supposed to be a crusty old conservative Catholic bloke. A real Catholic bloke would have fulminated about the Chinese state’s attempts to impose its will on the Church, all those clergy from the ‘underground’ Church who are still arrested and die mysteriously in prison, and most of all the ‘One Child Policy’ and accompanying horrors, which is just about as un-Catholic as anything I can imagine.

I can only think that Frank Devine must be conditioned to reflexively take the opposite position whenever Bob Brown expresses an opinion on anything. ‘If he’s agin’ it, I’m for it.’

Words ought to mean something, don't you think?

When people kill civilians in a democratic country, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald is happy to call them militants.

When people kill men belonging to an armed and uniformed force of the world's largest dictatorship, the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald calls them terrorists.

This is not what those words ought to mean.

What I think

Of course, this whole blog is what I think, so that isn’t a very good title. But in the comments to the post just below about the problem of radiation poisoning in the 25th century I have ended up in the position of more or less defending the Catholic party line on contraception, which is not precisely what I think. This runs the risk that I will go on exchanging comments at cross purposes in an unproductive way. And as what I think on this issue is one of those things that I have never been game to set down on virtual paper, it is probably overdue for me to write what I think.

The Orthodox position of the Churches of the East is self-consistent and logical within its postulates in rejecting all forms of birth control. It is also unworkable, and universally ignored, as the only traditionally Orthodox nation not in demographic free-fall that I can think of is Ethiopia.

Humanae vitae departs from this logical and traditional position of all historical Christian churches by allowing- hedged about with various caveats- the use of temporal barriers to conception. It rightly condemns strongly the ‘direct interruption of the generative process already begun’, as well as deliberate sterilization. However, this message is blurred because it condemns without making any distinction (‘Similarly excluded…’) the use of spatial barriers to conception.

I do not see any fundamental meaningful difference between a barrier method in time and a barrier method in space. I do not think the distinction drawn between them in Humanae vitae is very clear or particularly valid. If both forms of barrier method were lawful, hedged about with various caveats, then the line in the sand could be clearly drawn at conception and defended with vigour on the basis of the very clear commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’.

Is that clear? I am saying that it would be more logical, within the shared postulates of Judaeo-Christian-Islamic thought, to have made the compromise with modernity at such a point that a very clear distinction was made between grudgingly allowed methods such as natural family planning and condoms on the one hand and absolutely forbidden methods such as ‘the pill’ – which may interrupt the generative process already begun, even if such is not their main intent- on the other.

I am not entirely convinced that what I think is right, but all my doubts are in the direction of tradition, not away from it.

Lest we remember

Over at Klaus Rohde’s blog, he has mentioned the Phillipine-American War.

You might know of this war in connection with this work.

It was also the inspiration for The War Prayer by Mark Twain.

While concurring entirely with Mark Twain, I observe that what he wrote can readily be tweaked, just a little, to make another document that I also concur with entirely.

Fragments from the 25th Century

Far be it from me to grudge the Farseer and his entourage a warm welcome to K’toomba Dome, still less refrain from extending our legendary hospitality to the hundreds of pilgrims who have crossed many leagues of blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland to come here. Even without the infectious enthusiasm of these dusty, maimed fanatics, there are few among us who do not recognise the spiritual power of the Farseer, or respect his principled stand, for instance, against the Emperor’s war on the cannibal mutants. Yet, we should remember the darker side of what the Farseer stands for. All over the continent, at this very moment, thousands of men, women, children, and sentient quoll-people are suffering from radiation sickness. Many will die agonising deaths. Why? Because the Farseer forbids his followers from wearing lead-lined garments. Because of this irrational religious mania, a simple and effective safeguard against radiation is neglected, and countless wretched victims are condemned to a horrible existence. Vomiting, weakness, hair loss, bleeding, recurrent infections, anemia. It is an unspeakable and ghastly malady. Some will survive, only to be stricken down with cancers in later life. Many will not survive. Remember this, next week, when you see the joyous crowds of worshippers throwing garlands of flowers at the Farseer. Remember this.

* * *

[Our reporter caught up with Cassowary Jorj T’eepot, leader of the Farseer’s followers in the Blue Mountains and organiser of the Sacred Festivities. After making inquiries as to the Farseer’s health after his arduous journey from Wee Waa, and congratulating the Cassowary on his preparation for the Farseer’s visit, our reporter raised the contentious issue of the Faith’s anti-lead stance.]

Was the Farseer taken aback by the protests? I understand he looked rather bemused.

The protests? Oh, yes. Handing out lead loincloths to passers-by. Very childish, really. Actually, I don’t think he was taken aback. One might think that this sort of thing is only something that the Faithful have to put up with in a cosmopolitan, secular place like K’toomba Dome, but even in the sacred city of Wee Waa there are people who resent the Farseer’s condemnation of lead, there are protests from time to time.

I suppose it is not surprising that the Faith’s lead ban is resented, with the problem of radiation sickness.

Well, as you know, radioactivity is associated exclusively with the ruins of the ancients. The Faith teaches that the ruins of the ancients are cursed by God, and strictly forbids any of the Faithful to enter them. The signs of dangerous levels of radioactivity are very obvious- sickly plants, sand melted into glassy slag, twisted ruins, malformed animals covered with lesions...

But you can’t just expect people to stay out ancient ruins, can you? It goes against human nature. There is all sorts of neat loot in those places. You have to admit that whatever you say, people are still going to go into radioactive ruins. If they do, shouldn’t they be wearing lead clothing?

Well, there are a few problems with that. The first is that, as you know, lead is not 100% effective against radiation. People have ventured into ancient ruins wearing lead clothing and died from radiation sickness. The second is that, lead is itself toxic: there are illnesses associated with being exposed to lead. And most importantly, what lead clothing does is, it normalises entering radioactive zones. If it is seen as something that is safe, something that is fun, then there will be pressure for everyone to do it. Some of them will be exposed to unsafe levels of radiation. And radiation is not the only danger in the ruins: there are cannibal mutants, we hear of people coming across still-functioning killer robots with laser eyes, for example.

Let me pose you another question, Cassowary. What about the ‘innocents’? People who have never ventured into radioactive zones themselves but are exposed, say, when someone else in their dome goes into a ruin and comes out with an artifact that gives out radioactive rays of death? Wouldn’t lead clothing protect them in that situation?

I think, anyone untrustworthy enough to bring a radioactive artifact into a dome like that, they’re hardly going to tell the others in the dome that they should wear lead garments, will they? They’re not the sort of person who is going to be swayed by what you or the Farseer or anyone tells them about ethical conduct. In the old days- and I’m not saying that we should go back to the old ways, mind you- but in the old days, someone like that would have been staked out in the desert for the death toads.

But if everyone in the dome wore lead clothing as a matter of course, that wouldn’t be an issue, would it?

No, it wouldn’t. But there would be a much graver issue. It would show that no one in that dome trusted one another, that they didn’t think they could rely on each other. And a dome like that is not going to last. The next time that bandits attack, the next plague of flesh-eating locusts- a dome like that is going to fall.

Well… I’m afraid that’s all we have time for, Cassowary. I hope the Sacred Festivities go off without a hitch for you.

Thank you.

The Hidden Cost of Global Warming

Here is some data- which was very hard to find- giving the average monthly death rate in Australia:



And just to show that 1999 was not a fluke:

If, like me, you subscribe to the germ theory of disease popularised by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century, the obvious explanation for this trend is an annual celestial event- perhaps the Earth passing through the cloud of comet debris associated with Comet 96P/Machholz, causing a rain of deadly space bacteria to Earth.

But... in the Northern Hemisphere, these same months are associated with lower mortality rates! The winter months seem to be more unhealthy if you live in a developed country in the temperate zone, despite the fact that they are less conducive for microbial growth. Go figure. Here are some data for Germany, New Zealand, and Macedonia. (Note that if you are not a developed country, the germ theory holds up just fine: a hundred years ago, our death rate was highest in summer, due to juvenile diarrhea. Actually the figures I saw on this are only for Perth c.1900 and Bangladesh today, but I am going out on a limb and generalising.)

Now, we could try mounting a complicated ad hoc rescue of the germ theory where clouds of space bacteria lurk a little above and below the plane of the ecliptic, or need to strike the atmosphere at a shallow angle to avoid burning up... but it seems that there are a whole slew of disorders, comprising the bulk of mortality, for which even small reductions in temperature give an increase in mortality. Maybe some of this mortality difference is true seasonality, but it looks like- for whatever reason- it is related to cold weather.



So who are these people who are dying? This paper from New Zealand suggests that this increase is accounted for almost entirely by deaths of people over 65. It seems logical that they will be disproportionately the ones who are sick already, and the ones who are poorer. Though I don’t have any data for this.

Thus, these excess deaths are accounted for by people, who statistically:

(1) Contribute much less to the economy than the average.

(2) Consume much more health care than the average.

Thus, cold weather clearly has an economic benefit by removing an unproductive population who are a burden on the economy. I remember that Ross Garnaut always used to write articles in the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald about the economic challenges posed by an aging population, so it is no surprise he is worried about global warming.

I believe he points out that some of this shortfall in deaths of the weak and aged might be made up for by heat-related deaths in summer, but the statistics we've looked at on seasonality of mortality in the developed world show that this is very unlikely. Unless, perhaps, we mount a crash program of not building power plants and letting electricity infrastructure decay, to increase the probability that old folks will be trapped at home without functional air-conditioning during episodes of extreme hot weather.

A serious study is required to determine if the economic cost of maintaining all these unhealthy old people will be outweighed by some of the economic benefits of global warming- such as longer dry-periods in southern Australia forcing an end to uneconomic uses of marginal land, or increased first-world mosquito-borne disease giving drug companies a greater incentive to develop treatments for these endemic third world problems.

So what is the moral of this?

It could be that a ‘cost/benefit’ analysis is never value-neutral. One person’s cost is another person’s benefit. And a short-term cost might turn out to be a long-term benefit, and vice versa. Dollars in cost/benefit analyses are not like milligrams in chemical analyses. They are more rubbery, subjective, and flamboyant entities.

It could be that it is snarky and dishonest to talk about the likely negative health effects of global warming and ignore the likely positive ones. There is this trivial point which you should verify for yourselves, not trusting me, and that you should then bring up in conversation often, that death rates in the developed world correlate overall with cold weather, not with hot weather.

Or, the moral could be that I am nothing but a contrarian sophist. Maybe I am just being silly. It guess there's a good chance that this excess seasonal mortality has nothing to do with climate, and its really all due to those weirdly gyrating clouds of space bacteria.

V is for van Vogt

Or more accurately, V is for Voyage of the Space Beagle.

I have never managed to get through much of anything else written by A. E. van Vogt, but Voyage of the Space Beagle is one of those books that changed my life.

It was one of the first science fiction books I read- along with Decision at Doona by Anne McAffrey- and so every standard sci-fi trope hit me as something new and fresh.

My copy seems to have crumbled away- at least, I can’t find it anywhere, and it was looking pretty shabby last time I saw it. It had a picture of the coeurl on the cover. What this means is that I won't be checking any of my facts in what follows. Or putting any quotes in.

One appealing thing about Voyage of the Space Beagle is that the direction of the narrative is quintessentially Clamly - outwards, outwards, ever outward, on, on, on, into the unexplored intergalactic vastness, onwards and outwards! I can think of few more fitting ends to a story than to an endless journey through empty space in order to lead a planet-killing black cloud to its doom in the void.

I mentioned before how Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle provided one fine role-model for my professional life. Voyage of the Space Beagle provided two more: the smart-arse nexialist who makes it his business to know more than everybody else does in their particular specialty, and the empire-building chemist who takes over said nexialist’s lab space. I see my subsequent career* as an attempt to harmonise these two competing visions of the scientist.

I immediately went off and started writing a story with a similar spaceship on a similar expedition. As you do, I crewed it with all the people I knew. This was partly so I could kill off all the people I didn’t like in gruesome ways on alien planets. As you do.

I didn’t make myself the nexialist- I made my know-it-all friend Steven Mathiesen the nexialist. I gave myself a role that I made up, which I think I called ‘environmental engineer’. Or ‘ecosystem engineer’. Something like that. As these stories work out, I think we got halfway through our first planet before I moved on to another project.

Sometime around then I was hanging around school after school because my Mum, who was a volunteer teacher person, had to do some after school thing. I think I was boooooooored. I can’t remember. But I do remember my english teacher pointing to one of these seedpods and saying: ‘That looks like an alien creature. Why don’t you write about that?’

So I did. They are about twice as high a person (I think) and live in endless sand deserts, where they filter tiny things out of the sand to eat- sort of funneling them towards their maws with those long arms of theirs. They were intelligent. I think only one of them had ever been brought back to Earth, and it did not survive long because of our high gravity.

The only other thing I remember writing about them was a list of the emotions they could experience. Something like Type 2 Joy, Type 1a Despair, and an emotion with no common English name, characterised by parameters X = 2.3 and Y = 7.0 on the Pfitzer-Gloschburg scale. Something like that.

My English teacher was horrified. ‘You can’t do that,’ I remember her saying.

‘What?’

‘Here- this is all scientific, about what they eat and such, and then here you’re talking about emotions. You can’t talk about emotions scientifically like that.’

‘Why?’

I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but I’m sure we ended up staring at each other in mutual incomprehension.

*: Collins Essential English Dictionary: verb. to rush in an uncontrolled way.

The picture of the Devil's Claw seedpod is lifted from evil-nature.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html. I don't know anything about that website except it had this picture sitting there for me to nick, so can't recommend you go there.

U is for Unfinished Business

I would like to offer the following spoiler for The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

The narrator loses consciousness on page 298.

At the close of the novel, on page 449, he is still unconscious.

I humbly tips me lid to this impressive display of authorial chutzpah.