Something happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear...

"Aside from their unpredictability and their susceptibility to fear, hunger and disease, flesh-and-blood soldiers think and move on an unceasingly irrelevant timescale.  From the days of Nebuchadnezzar to those of Saddam Hussein, despite myriad technological improvements, war was waged on an organic timetable. Discussions lasted for hours, battles took days, and wars dragged on for years.  Cyber-wars, however, may last just a few minutes.  When a lieutenant on shift at cyber-command notices something odd is going on, she picks up the phone to call her superior, who immediately alerts the White House.  Alas, by the time the president reaches for the red handset, the war has already been lost. Within seconds a sufficiently sophisticated cyber strike might shut down the US power grid, wreck US flight control centres, cause numerous industrial accidents in nuclear plants and chemical installations, disrupt the police, army and intelligence communication networks -- and wipe out financial records so that trillions of dollars simply vanish without a trace and nobody knows who owns what.  The only thing curbing public hysteria is that, with the Internet, television and radio down, people will not be aware of the full magnitude of the disaster."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

We'll meet again/don't know where/don't know when...

"How rational is it to risk the future of humankind on the assumption that future scientists will make some unknown planetary discoveries?  Most of the presidents, ministers, and CEOs who run the world are very rational people. Why are they willing to take such a gamble?  Maybe because they don't think they are gambling on their own personal future. Even if bad comes to worse and science cannot hold off the deluge, engineers could still build a high tech Noah's Ark for the upper caste, while leaving billions of others to drown.  The belief in this high-tech Ark is currently one of the biggest threats to the future of humankind and of the entire ecosystem.  People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

Dorothy: How can you talk, if you haven't got a brain? The Scarecrow: I don't know. But, some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they?

"According to the Turning Test, in order to determine whether a computer has a mind, you should communicate simultaneously with a computer and with a real person, without knowing which is which.  You can ask whatever questions you want, you can play games, argue, and even flirt with them.  Take as much time as you like.  Then you need to decide which is the computer and which is the human.  If you cannot make up your mind, or if you make a mistake, the computer has passed the Turing Test, and we should treat it as if it really has a mind.  However, that won't really be a proof, of course. Acknowledging the existence of other minds is merely a social and legal convention.


The Turing Test was invented in 1950 by the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the computer age.  Turing was also a gay man in a period when homosexuality was illegal in Britain.  In 1952 he was convicted of committing homosexual acts and forced to undergo chemical castration.  Two years later he committed suicide.  The Turing Test is simply a replication of a mundane test every gay man had to undergo in 1950s Britain: can you pass for a straight man?  Turing knew from personal experience that it didn't matter who you were really -- it mattered only what others thought about you.  According to Turing, in the future computers would be just like gay men in the 1950s.  It won't matter whether computers will actually be conscious or not.  It will only matter what people think about it."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

“All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.” Neil Gaiman, American Gods

"...for thousands of years humans used God to explain numerous natural phenomenon.  What causes lightning to strike?  God.  What makes the rain fall?  God. How did life on earth begin?  God did it.  Over the last few centuries scientists have not discovered any empirical evidence for God's existence, while they did find much more detailed explanations for lightning strikes, rain and  the origins of life.  Consequently, with the exception of a few sub-fields of philosophy, no article in any peer-review scientific journal takes God's existence seriously.  Historians don't argue that the Allies won the Second World War because God was on their side; economists don't blame God for the 1929 economic crisis; and geologists don't invoke His will to explain tectonic plate movements."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

The Anthropocene

"How many wolves live today in Germany, the land of the Grimm brothers, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf?  Less than a hundred.  (And even these are mostly Polish wolves that stole over the border in recent years.)  In contrast, Germany is home to 5 million domesticated dogs. Altogether about 200,000 wild wolves still roam over the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs.  The world contains 40,000 lions compared with 600 million house cats; 900,000 African buffalo versus 1.5 million domesticated cows; 50 million penguins and 20 billion chickens.  Since 1970, despite growing ecological awareness, wildlife populations have halved (not that they were prospering in 1970).  In 1980 there were 2 billion wild birds in Europe.  In 2009 only 1.6 billion were left.  In the same year, Europeans raised 1.9 billion chickens for meat and eggs.  At present, more than 90 percent of the large animals of the world (i.e., those weighing more than a few kilograms) are either humans or domesticated animals."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

Good doggie

"In my view, you cannot have a serious discussion about the nature and future of humankind without beginning with our fellow animals.  Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.  And it is doubly important to remember our origins at a time when we seek to turn ourselves into gods.  No investigation of our divine future can ignore our own animal past, or our relations with other animals -- because the relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans.  You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans?  Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

"Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.  Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights  -- the first step is to retell their history.  The new history will explain that 'our present situation is neither natural or eternal.  Things were different once.  Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today.  If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.'  This is why Marxists recount the history of capitalism; why feminists study the formation of patriarchal societies; and why African Americans commemorate the horrors of the slave trade.  They aim to to perpetuate the past, but rather to be liberated from it."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

The past isn't dead...

"If history doesn't follow any stable rules, and if we cannot predict its future course, why study it?  It often seems that the chief aim of science is to predict the future -- meteorologists are expected to forecast whether tomorrow will bring rain or sunshine; economists should know whether devaluing the currency will avert or precipitate an economic crisis; good doctors foresee whether chemotherapy or radiation therapy will be more successful in curing lung cancer.  Similarly, historians are asked to examine the actions of our ancestors so that we can repeat their wise decisions and avoid their mistakes.  But it almost never works like that because the present is just too different from the past.  It is a waste of time to study Hannibal's tactics in the Second Punic Wars so as to copy them in the Third World War. What worked well in cavalry battles will not necessarily be of much benefit to cyber warfare. 

Science is not just about predicting the future, though. Scholars in all fields often seek to broaden our horizons, thereby opening before us new and unknown futures.  This is especially true of history.  Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don't normally consider.  Historians study the past not in order to repeat it; but in order to be liberated from it. 

...

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past.  It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and to begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine.  By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape -- and we can begin to think and dream differently.  Studying history will not tell us what to chose, but it at least gives us more options."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tommorow
Yuval Noah Harari

Earthseed: The Books of the Living

Octavia Butler's Lost Parables

"The bad news is waiting for us on the first page of the first chapter of Octavia E. Butler’s 1998 science fiction novel Parable of the Talents. “I have read,” writes one of the book’s four narrators, “that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as ‘the Apocalypse’ or more commonly, more bitterly, ‘the Pox’ lasted from 2015 through 2030 — a decade and a half of chaos.” And before you buckle in to at least enjoy what’s left of 2014, take note: “This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.” For those who would call the Pox bad luck —“accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crisis” — our historian has even more bad news: “It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.”

The good news — such as it is — was waiting for us on page one of 1993’s Parable of the Sower, and presented in the short poems that populate the two published Parables books: Earthseed. Earthseed is a new religion founded by a young black woman, Lauren Olamina, who is living in the failing California of the 2020s. The religion is organized around a central proposition: the inevitability of change, and the consequent need to be adaptable and flexible in response to change.

God is Power—

Infinite,

Irresistible,

Inexorable,

And yet, God is Pliable—

Trickster,

Teacher,

Chaos,

Clay.

God exists to be shaped.

God is Change.

The Parables series — Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents — was Butler’s least fantastic series of novels, her attempt to write in the mode critics sometimes call “mundane SF” to denote those science fiction stories that remain in accordance with the laws of physics as we understand them. Gone are the superpowered telepaths that populate her Patternist series; gone is the time travel from Kindred and the aliens from the Xenogenesis trilogy. The sole science fictional conceit in the Parables books is the presence of a psychosomatic malady called “hyperempathy” that is caused by contact with a toxic prescription drug in the womb, which causes its sufferers to falsely experience the sight of another’s pain as their own. The rest is prophecy, not fantasy — Butler’s earnest attempt to imagine the failing world of the twenty-first century, as we are all about to experience it, from that long-ago position of the happy 1990s. “Sometime ago I read some place that Robert A. Heinlein had these three categories of science-fiction stories: the what-if category; the if-only category; and the if-this-goes-on category,” Butler told an audience at MIT in 1998. “And I liked the idea. So this is definitely an if-this-goes-on story. And if it’s true, if it’s anywhere near true, we’re all in trouble.”

In personal journals Butler admits Olamina is an idealized self, her “best self” — and the poetry that drives the Earthseed religion actually mirrors the style of the daily affirmations, self-help sloganeering, and even self-hypnosis techniques Butler used to keep herself focused and on-task. (The Huntington Library contains countless examples of this seemingly daily ritual of writing down things she wants to come true, some dating back as far as Butler’s teens.) The ultimate expression of “shaping God,” the culmination of human historical achievement Olamina calls “the Destiny,” likewise seems to parallel Butler’s deep-rooted psychological investment in science fictional speculation, which dates back to her childhood: “The destiny of Earthseed,” Olamina prophesies, “is to take root among the stars.”

The two published Earthseed books trace the tribulations of Olamina’s early life and her efforts to find some safe space for her nascent utopian community in the desperate and increasingly fascistic America of the coming decades. But the last chapter of Talents skips ahead to the end of the story: jumping forward six decades, the epilogue sees a very aged Olamina, now world-famous, witnessing the launch of the first Earthseed ship carrying interstellar colonists off the planet as she’d dreamed. Only the name of the spaceship gives us pause: against Olamina’s wishes the ship has been named the Christopher Columbus, suggesting that perhaps the Earthseeders aren’t escaping the nightmare of history at all, but bringing it with them instead.

And there Butler left it. The long-promised third book, Parable of the Trickster, never arrived.

Last December I had the improbable privilege to be the very first scholar to open the boxes at the Huntington that contain what Butler had written of Trickster before her death.What I found were dozens upon dozens of false starts for the novel, some petering out after twenty or thirty pages, others after just two or three; this cycle of narrative failure is recorded over hundreds of pages of discarded drafts. Frustrated by writer’s block, frustrated by blood pressure medication that she felt inhibited her creativity and vitality, and frustrated by the sense that she had no story for Trickster, only a “situation,” Butler started and stopped the novel over and over again from 1989 until her death, never getting far from the beginning.

Nearly all of the texts focus on a character named Imara — who has been named the Guardian of Lauren Olamina’s ashes, who is often said to be her distant relative, and who is plainly imagined as the St. Paul to Olamina’s Christ (her story sometimes begins as a journalist who has gone undercover with the Earthseed “cult” to expose Olamina as a fraud, and winds up getting roped in). Imara awakens from cryonic suspension on an alien world where she and most of her fellow Earthseed colonists are saddened to discover they wish they’d never left Earth in the first place. The world — called “Bow” — is gray and dank, and utterly miserable; it takes its name from the only splash of color the planet has to offer, its rare, naturally occurring rainbows. They have no way to return to Earth, or to even to contact it; all they have is what little they’ve brought with them, which for most (but not all) of them is a strong belief in the wisdom of the teachings of Earthseed. Some are terrified; many are bored; nearly all are deeply unhappy. Her personal notes frame this in biological terms. From her notes to herself: “Think of our homesickness as a phantom-limb pain — a somehow neurologically incomplete amputation. Think of problems with the new world as graft-versus-host disease — a mutual attempt at rejection.”

From here the possible plots begin to multiply beyond all reason. In some of the texts, the colonists are in total denial about the fact that they are all slowly going blind; in others the blindness is sudden, striking randomly and irreversibly; in others they all begin to go insane, or suffer seizures, or mad rages, or fall into long comas; in still others they begin to hurt and kill each other for no other reason than the basic inevitable frailty of human nature (the same, alas, on any world). In one of the versions of the novel the colonists develop a telepathic capacity that soon turns nightmarish when they are unable to resist it or shut it off; in one twist on this idea it’s only the women who are so empowered, with the men organizing a secret conspiracy to figure out how they might regain control.

There’s a version where the blindness and the telepathy are linked; Imara becomes able to see out of others’ eyes as she loses the ability to see out of her own. In some Imara finds she needs to solve a murder, the first murder on the new world; in still others Imara herself is murdered, but discovers that on this strange alien world she is somehow able to haunt another colonists’ body as a ghost, replicating Doro’s power from the Patternist books and thereby linking even the Parables to the speculative universe she first developed as a teenager. Sometimes Imara is an Earthseed skeptic; other times she is a true believer; sometimes she is, like Olamina, a hyperempath; still other times the cure for “sharing” has been discovered in the form of an easy, noninvasive pill. Sometimes Bow is inhabited by small animals, other times by dinosaur-like giant sauropods, and still other times by just moss and lichens; sometimes the colonists seem to encounter intelligent aliens who might be real, but might just be tokens of their escalating collective madness; and on and on and on.

One version of the blindness narrative is abandoned with no small grumbling after José Saramago wins the Nobel Prize for Blindness in 1998; another is put aside after she determines it’s just too similar to Kim Stanley Robinson’s famous Red Mars; still another is abandoned shortly after Butler frustratedly, self-loathingly declares Imara to have “a personality more like mine” against Olamina’s “super me — the me I wish I was.” Sometimes Earthseed seems more like a self-help philosophy; sometimes it becomes a genuinely mystical, transcendent religion; sometimes we see it begin to shift from the first toward the second; sometimes it suffers schisms, heresies, and purges. Sometimes Imara is a former cop; sometimes she is a trained psychologist; sometimes she’s a doctor; sometimes she’s that undercover journalist; still other times she was the victim of a horrific series of rapes as a child, saved by one of Olamina’s orphanages when no other entity or institution would bother. When Butler begins writing the book, Newt Gingrich is named as the model for the central antagonist; in the versions from the 2000s, it’s George W. Bush; sometimes in between it’s other science fiction writers with whom Butler didn’t especially get along.

As Butler describes her long-term plan in an interview: “I’m not interested in confronting them with natives. I’ve done that elsewhere. What I’m going to confront them with is just a nasty world. It’s not violent, just nasty and dull and awful, and what they’re going to have to deal with is themselves. There’s no going home. Nobody will follow within their lifetimes. …. The real problem is dealing with themselves, surviving their promised land.”

What Butler had ultimately hoped to do was write four Parables sequels: Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay. The titles suggest a shift from a Christian idiom (Sower, Talents, and Trickster all reference Biblical parables) to an Earthseed one (Teacher, Chaos, and Clay seem likely to be parables drawn from Olamina’s life, not Christ’s). In some of her imaginings it seems as though each of these stories might have taken place on four different Earthseed colonies, showing the diversity of thought Earthseed makes possible — but more commonly she imagines them taking place across the generations on the single world of Bow, as each generation confronts its own new crisis and Earthseed evolves to meet the needs of extrasolar humanity in each new historical moment. When the hallucinations are dealt with — not defeated or cured, she was clear, but adapted to — her notes indicate the colony would have struggled with dictatorship, and then with catastrophic ecological scarcity, and finally with the strangeness of children who were genuinely novel, genuinely new, genuinely post-Earth if not quite posthuman: the children of Bow, for whom the “screaming colors” of Earth might have seemed the real horror.

So of course we discover that achieving Earthseed’s Destiny, despite Lauren Olamina’s dreams, hasn’t solved the problem of the human at all, only extended our confrontation with the very difficult problems that drove its development in the first place — only removed them to some other world where they can take some other form. The Destiny was essentially a hyperbolic delaying tactic, a strategy of avoidance; even achieved, it’s worthless in its own terms. The fundamental problem is still how to make a better world with such bad building blocks as human beings.

As her published novels demonstrate, Octavia Butler was no utopian; in fact she rejected utopian thinking in the strongest possible terms. She believed human beings were biological organisms with sharp instincts for self-preservation that had been honed by evolution over innumerable millennia; she believed evolution had made us clever but mean, creative but selfish and short-sighted. In the Xenogenesis books the aliens who visit the planet determine we are fundamentally broken as a species, brilliant enough to invent nuclear bombs and hierarchal enough, crazy enough, stupid enough to actually use them. In the first Parable book, the young Olamina seems like an exception to this unhappy general diagnosis, even perhaps something like a saint—but her daughter is the main narrator of Talents, and her daughter finds her to be selfish, destructive, and extremely dangerous, a zealot willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for the Destiny. In the archives we actually see this revisionist attitude borne out from an objective, third-person perspective; lost stories and cut scenes set during Olamina’s missing decades reveal her as a steely and callous power-broker when she needs to be, even ordering a local politician’s assassination for daring to defy her. (One version even has Olamina slave-collaring people who try to leave her Earthseed villages: “Boy,” she said, “the dogs eat what’s left of people who try to break into our Communities. We burn what’s left of people who try to break out.”) For anyone who has read the published versions of the novels, this is absolutely startling; Butler’s personal reflections on Olamina reveal her as a much, much darker character than the one we get to know in the books, a character Butler never really trusted and only grew to like despite herself over time. Readers of the Parables books typically call the character “Lauren,” with a soft fondness—but in Butler’s personal notes she is always “Olamina.”

What the all-important dream of the Destiny offered Olamina, offered Butler — offers us — was a chance not to abolish human nature but to perhaps temporarily suspend it; the extrasolar colonies are the chance to start over in circumstances whose radical hardship would offer a chance to build new practices of solidarity and collective life rather than indulge the selfish impulses the bad habits of capitalism and the bad instructions in our DNA have ingrained in us. “If we survive,” Butler once told Larry McAfferty, “we have a whole solar system to grow up in. And we can use the stresses of learning to travel in space and live elsewhere—stresses that will harness our energies until we’ve had time to mature.” In her own notes for Trickster, she echoes this sense of constrained hope, which is to say a hope that is made possible by constraints, our boundless human creativity channeled by necessity into productive and useful ends because otherwise we’ll all die. “We can’t afford to go someplace else and make the mistakes we make here, here in the nest,” she writes. “We can’t afford to assume that another living world with its own biota and its own eons of existence will be able to tolerate our nonsense… taking, and putting back nothing — or putting back poisonous waste.”

Her cynicism led to Butler to think humans as a species won’t behave more decently towards each other and towards our environment unless and until we have literally no other choice — and maybe not even then. But her optimism led her to believe that when push finally comes to shove we are actually capable of it, and might actually do it. Getting off the planet, achieving the Destiny, was to be the start of the hard work, not the end of it — the unfinished Parables sequels would have been Butler’s chance to imagine that we might find some way to be better human beings out there than our bad history has ever allowed us to be here.
The epigram she chose for Trickster captures this tension between optimism and pessimism, and the possibility of actually breaking through this psychic impasse into something new, quite wonderfully:

There’s nothing new

under the sun,

but there are new suns.

Bow was a place where history wasn’t the unhappy curse we were condemned to, a place where the tug-of-war between collective survival and collective insanity might play itself out in another way. On Bow, they can choose: either live together, work together, struggle together, and pray together, or else hoard food alone, scheme alone, lose their minds alone, breakdown and die and murder each other alone. And the tragedy is she was never able, in her short life, to think through the hopeful part. Not “if this goes on,” but “if only”: if only she’d been able to complete that vision of better humanity — not perfect, not even perfectible, just better. If only she’d been able to finish the book."

"There's Nothing New/Under the Sun,/But There New Suns": 
Recovering Octavia E. Butler's Lost Parables
Gary Canavan
Los Angeles Review of Books
June 9, 2014

From Earthseed: The Books of the Living

Choose your Leaders
          with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward
          is to be controlled
          by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool
          is to be led 
          by the opportunists 
          who control the fool.

To be led by a thief
          is to offer up
          you most precious treasures
          to be stolen.

To be led by a liar
          is to ask 
          to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant
          is to sell yourself
          and those you love
          into slavery. 


Parable of the Talents
Octavia E. Butler
(c) 1998

From Earthseed: The Books of the Living

Beware:
At war
Or at peace,
More people die
Of unenlightened self-interest
Than of any other disease. 

Parable of the Talents
Octavia E. Butler
(c) 1998

From Earthseed: The Books of the Living

"All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth is Change.

God is change."

"Olamina believes in a god that does not in the least love her. In fact, her god is a process or a combination of processes, not an entity.  It is not consciously aware of her -- or of anything.  It is not conscious at all.  "God is Change", she says, and means it.  Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and, of course, the second law of thermodynamics: "God is Change, and, in the end, God prevails.  

Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped.  All things change, but all things need not change in all ways.  God is inexorable, yet malleable.  Odd.  Hardly religious at all.   


God is Change,
And in the end, 
God prevails.
But meanwhile...
Kindness eases Change.
Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles. 


Parable of the Sower
and
Parable of the Talents
Octavia E. Butler
(c) 1993 and (c) 1998

A Leader, Poorly Chosen

" I couldn't help but wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do -- a revival of something nasty out the the past.  Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses -- as well as burn them?  The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don't think they wore it on their chests.  There were crosses all over the place during the Crusades.  So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaughters people.  Jarret's people could be behind it.  Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, "simpler" time.  Now does not suit him.  Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him.  He wants to take us back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshiped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different.  There was never such a time in this country.  But these days, when more than half of the people in the country can't read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.

Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches.  Witches! In 2032! A witch, in their view, tends to be a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah's Witness, or even a Catholic.  A witch may also be an atheist, a "cultist", or a well-to-do eccentric.  Well-to-do eccentrics often have no protection or much that's worth stealing. And "cultist" is a great catchall term for anyone who fits in no other large category, and yet doesn't quite match Jerrit's version of Christianity.  Jarret's people have been known to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness' sake.  Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear.  As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of "heathen houses of devil-worship", he has a single answer: "Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race!  Leave your sinful past behind and become one of us.  Help us make America great again!"

Parable of the Talents
Octavia E. Butler
(c) 1998

"I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as "the Apocalypse" or more commonly, more bitterly, "the Pox" lasted from 2015 through 2030 - a decade and a half of chaos.  This is untrue.  The Pox has been a much longer torment.  It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium.  It has not ended.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises.  It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas.  I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970.  I have seen enough to know that it is true.  I have watched education become more of a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive.  I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation.  I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. 

Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III.  In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox.  These were stupid affairs -- wastes of life and treasure.  They were fought, ostensible, to defend against vicious foreign enemies.  All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do.  Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war. 

Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat.  It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox.  Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.  

What is left of it now, what is has become, I do not know."

Parable of the Talents
Octavia E. Butler
(c) 1998

American Exceptionalism

"Pleasant as be the pastures in which their children have sported, and the slopes that hold the bones of their dead, they must leave them for the land of the stranger, and stand not upon the order of their going. There is gold in the hills and rivers of the region, and the white man desires to take possession of it.  What, to the roaming Yankee, are the links that bind the red man, to the home of his fathers.  He is but an episode in the advance of the Caucasian.  He must decrease that the new comers may grow in wealth.  Happy for him the day when the last of his tribes shall fold his blankets around his shrunken limbs, and take his final sleep, to waken in the eyes of the Great Spirit."

Chicago Inter Ocean, on the discovery of gold in the Dakota Hills in the 1870s. 
Son of the Morning Star: Custer & the Little Bighorn
Evan S. Connell
(c) 1984

"Ever since the creation of the modern state of Israel—a miracle for the Jews, the Nakba (“catastrophe”) for the Palestinians—Jerusalem’s daily weather forecast could be described as sunny with a slight chance of apocalypse."

Is this land worth all the pain and suffering and bloodshed? I couldn’t ask God, because I’m convinced that he’s now an absentee landowner. He sold Abraham’s children a lemon.

...

If everyone in the region has a shot at interpreting God’s will, then I’ll offer my own vision. I believe that Jews and Palestinians are religious cousins, more alike than different. They have lived together in the past, eaten each other’s olives, worked each other’s fields, married each other’s family members. Learning to live together again should not be impossible. But this isn’t happening, not anytime soon. So as a realist, I support a two-state solution, one that gives the Jews something of what they want but also treats the Palestinians in a way they haven’t been treated, not by the Israelis or their Arab brethren—with fairness, respect, and an acknowledgment of the right to self-determination. But the political will to reach this solution is missing. The two-state solution has become the inshallah of peace plans. “God willing,” one day maybe, but most people in the West Bank know the two-state solution is just a mirage, a convenient talking point for politicians and diplomats.

...

Two things stand in the way of actual peace. The first is the yearning of some Palestinians for all the Jews to leave. Israelis are not going to make peace with someone who tells them that their leaving is a condition for such a peace. But the second problem—perhaps the even bigger problem—is the settlements, and the exclusivist attitude that motivates the people who live in them. A two-state solution is, theoretically, the best in a basket of bad solutions. But given the dismal realities on the ground, what might be better, alas, is a one-state solution that absorbs all the Palestinians as citizens of Israel and gives everyone an equal vote and equal rights. Ironically, this might be the only thing that many of the most hard-line settlers, and many of the most unbending Palestinians, agree on.


"A Muslim Among Israeli Settlers"
Wajahat Ali
The Atlantic
June 2018

 

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws. The ever-sleepless sea in its bed, crying out "how long?" to Time; million-formed and never motionless flame; the contemplation of these two aspects alone, affords me sufficient food for ten spans of my expected lifetime. It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.

"Religion," from Dust Tracks on a Road 
Zora Neale Hurston (1942)

"You fight a war with guns, you fight the peace with stories."

"Everyone fights an American war."

American War
Omar El Akkad

Jefferson's Overlooked Legacy

"The 1800 triumph of Republicanism also meant the ascendancy of the slave holding south. Three Virginia slaveholders -- Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe -- were to control the White House for the next twenty-four years.  These aristocratic exponents of "democracy" not only owned hundreds of human beings but profited from the Constitution's least democratic features:  the legality of slavery and the ability of southern states to count three-fifths of their captive populations in calculating their electoral votes.  (Without this so-called federal ratio, John Adams would have defeated Thomas Jefferson in 1800.)  The Constitution did more than just tolerate slavery; it actively rewarded it.  Thomas Pickering was to inveigh against "Negro presidents and Negro congresses" -- that is, presidents and congresses who owed their power to the three-fifths rule.  This bias inflated southern power against the north and disfigured the democracy so proudly proclaimed by the Jeffersonians.  Slaveholding presidents from the south occupied the presidency for approximately fifty of the seventy-two years following Washington's first inauguration.  Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated as tribunes fo the common people.  Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth."

Alexander Hamilton
Ron Chernow

Hamilton's Legacy

"The three terms of Federalist rule had been full of dazzling accomplishments that Republicans, with their extreme apprehension of federal power, could never have achieved. Under the tutelage of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, the Federalists had bequeathed to American history a sound federal government with a central bank, a funded debt, a high credit rating, a tax system, a customs service, a coast guard, a navy, and many other institutions that would guarantee the strength to preserve liberty.  They activated critical constitutional doctrines that game the American charter flexibility, forged the bonds of nationhood, and lent an energetic tone to the executive branch in foreign and domestic policy. Hamilton, in particular, bound the nation through his fiscal programs in a way that no Republican could have matched.  He helped to establish the rule of law and the culture of capitalism at a time when a revolutionary utopianism and a flirtation with the French Revolution still prevailed among too many Jeffersonians.  With their reverence from states' rights, abhorrence of central authority, and cramped interpretation of the Constitution, Republicans would have found it difficult, if not impossible to achieve these historic feats.

Hamilton had promoted a forward-looking agenda of a modern nation-state with a market economy and an affirmative view of central government.  His meritocratic vision allowed greater scope in the economic sphere for the individual liberties that Jefferson defended so eloquently in the political sphere.  It was no coincidence that the allegedly aristocratic and reactionary Federalists contained the overwhelming majority of active abolitionists of the period.  Elitists they might be, but they were an open fluid elite, based on merit and money, not on birth and breeding -- the antithesis of the southern plantation system.  It was the northern economic system that embodied the mix of democracy and capitalism that was to constitute the essence of American in the long run.  By no means did the 1800 election represent hte unalloyed triumph of good over evil or of commoners over the wellborn."

Alexander Hamilton
Ron Chernow