Heroic Eve

           Heroic Eve

 

          In this fairy-tale critique I propose that Eve did the right thing. I admit that I cannot prove this, but I have faith.

          I refer to Eve from the Book of Genesis, as understood by popular thought in Western culture. Here I take the legend on its own terms, as befits fairy-tale critique; but I myself do not read the tale literally.

          To me Genesis is a fairy tale, but I don’t mind; I’ve written fairy tales myself. A fairy tale is a lie that tells a deeper truth. This distinguishes it from propaganda, which is a lie that tells a deeper lie. So a fairy tale differs from propaganda by how the reader takes the tale.

          The deeper lie in the common reading of Genesis is that Eve did something wrong, in fact did everything wrong. If she had not disobeyed Yahweh and eaten the Apple, then she and Adam would not have been expelled from Paradise; nor would there be any evil in the world; and therefore disobedient Eve is responsible for all sin.

          To which I reply; if she is responsible for all sin, then she is also responsible for all virtue. She did not eat an Apple of Evil; she ate the Apple of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Such knowledge implies moral choice; so this was also the Tree of Choice.

          It is true that the Apple gave her, and Adam, and their descendants, the capacity for evil; but it also gave them the capacity for good, and the freedom to choose between them. Eve partook of none other than the Liberty Tree, whose mind-opening fruit is Wisdom.

But alas, wisdom can be bitter. Eve and Adam heard some bitter wisdom right away, from Yahweh himself, about the oppression of women by men, the oppression of men by labor, and the oppression of all by death. This passage is commonly read as a punishment: I read it as warning and initiation. The truth will set you free, but first it will hurt.

For then Yahweh set them free! Or expelled them, as a mother expels a baby from her womb. Eve and Adam were growing up, they were acting out, they were a breeding pair, it was time to release them into the wild. Yahweh was practicing sound wildlife management.

          And as for Eve; what courage! What initiative! What gumption! She took a risk; how brave! It was for freedom; how spirited! For love, she shared her knowledge; how noble! And Adam accepted; how sweet!

          And she suffered for this. Is that not martyrdom? Ask any daughter of Eve if Eve and her daughters are not martyrs!

So blessed be Eve! She suffered for the good of all!

          Or did she? Can I be sure that she did the right thing? For it was the sense of right and wrong itself that (according to the tale) was what she stole. Is the human sense of right and wrong itself right?

          But how am I to decide such a question? With my human sense of right and wrong? That would be circular logic, which proves nothing. Therefore I speculate that no-one can prove that the human sense of right-and-wrong is itself right. Morality is inherently dubious.

          I call this the “conjecture of inherent doubt”, which I distinguish from the “doctrine of original sin” so central to the popular, propagandistic, reading of Genesis. The doctrine of original sin is like the scolding of an irritated moralist; it is sure that Eve did the wrong thing. The conjecture of inherent doubt is like the questioning of a perplexed philosopher; it is not sure that Eve did the right thing.

          Are we in the right? That is; is the human moral judgement itself justified? Should we know good from evil?

          The doctrine of original sin says no! It claims that without that knowledge, we would be innocent. To this I reply that ignorance is not innocence. Ignorance of the Law is no excuse. 

          For suppose that the doctrine of original sin is false, and we ought to know right from wrong. Then the doctrine would not just be wrong; it would be a grave mental disorder, for it denounces moral knowledge itself. Now suppose that the doctrine is true; then it would itself be moral knowledge, which is what it denounces!

          Therefore the doctrine of original sin is either insane or hypocritical. Either way it is a sin.

          Now consider the conjecture of inherent doubt; that you cannot prove the rightness of our sense of rightness. Suppose that the conjecture is false; that in fact you can prove the rightness of our rightness. Then the conjecture would be an error that’s corrected by the proof. Now suppose that the conjecture is true; then it would be moral knowledge which you can’t prove; hence a revelation.

          Therefore the conjecture of inherent doubt is either a correctable error or it’s a revelation. Either way it is forgivable.

          I cannot tell if the doctrine or the conjecture is true; but I must choose; so I must wager. Of the two bets, the conjecture of inherent doubt seems (to my possibly-flawed judgement) to be the better bet.

          And so I say that Eve did the right thing, even though I cannot prove it! But I have faith.

Therefore I praise and honor Eve, for her courage, her curiosity and her hard-won wisdom. I also praise and honor her daughters.

          Thus I end this fairy-tale critique.

 

 

Alternate History

Alternate History

 

          A Time Traveler rode his space-time machine back to 1890, armed with historical data and impressive techno-tricks. His aim was to split off an alternate time-line without the “Great War”, a.k.a. World War One. Upon arrival he quickly made his presence and nature known; but preventing the suicide of a civilization was not that easy, even for a Time Traveler with two decade’s head-start.

          At one point, exasperated by a visitor’s absurd imperialism, he burst out:

          “What, are you pumping me for data? Your little empire wants an edge over all the other little empires? You want unstoppable power from the super-science of the far future? All right then, God damn you, listen up!  E EQUALS M C SQUARED!  There, I said it! And now you’re damned! Oh, you think I’m joking? You think I’m exaggerating for poetic effect? Think what you like, but really, you’re toast. The rest energy E equals mass M times the square of C, the speed of light. That formula is the price of your soul. Go report it to your masters, you tool.”

          The government bureaucrats couldn’t make head or tail of this. Shouldn’t a kinetic energy be one-half mass times speed squared? And why light speed? And what did he mean by rest energy? That’s absurd!

          He took a female admirer, with dowager chaperone, on a ride on his space-time machine ‘to go see his girlfriend’. That ‘girlfriend’ turned out to be Mother Earth, as seen from orbit. He raved to his passengers (the admirer, thrilled; the dowager, terrified) “Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen in all your born days?”

          The Time Traveler quietly paid Madame Curie a visit. He spoke of pitchblende, radium, radiation and cancer, and of her husband’s early death from radiation poisoning in the time-traveler’s world-line. He recommended that  instead she devote her talents to proving the double-helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, the molecule of heredity. To help out, he gave her a copy of the bacterial transformation paper by Avery, and Crick’s book.

          His aristocratic Host found the Time Traveler’s lack of faith disturbing. The Aristocrat reported, “Neither church, state nor market holds his heart, milord; and what’s worse, he seems unaware of his own irreverence. It is as if he imbibed it with his mother’s milk. He speaks casually of marvels and horrors, yet he is amazed by the simplest details of everyday life. His artistic taste is plebian, his politics are outlandish, his speech is vulgar, and his beliefs are bizarre. Can such a man represent Progress? What could possibly have happened, in our future, his past, to create so strange a descendant?”

          The Time Traveler admitted to his Host, “I am indeed a mad scientist; as mad as hell, and I won’t take it any more.”

After struggling for decades to prevent the catastrophe that he knew was coming but the powers-that-be were blind or indifferent to, the time-traveler took drastic measures. First he quietly recruited a large number of people, for he had a big job in mind. (Recruitment was easy; he just had to boot up his history book and show them what was in store for them, unless they did something.) He taught them some of his machine’s tricks, and with their help the following occurred:

          On the day that the Archduke Ferdinand would have been assassinated, he instead…

          …disappeared…

          He softly and suddenly vanished away. And so, at the same instant, did the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. Also the Czar of Russia. And the Kaiser. And the King of England. And the Pope. And all the crowned heads of Europe. And every prime minister without exception, along with all their officers and generals, five layers of bureaucracy deep. All just went poof into thin air.

          So did the top tycoons. Weaponeers and bankers were hard hit. On the other end of the social scale, certain then-obscure revolutionaries also went poof.

          All of this happened simultaneously; a time-traveler’s trick. It was a big job,  that’s why he recruited help. In all, tens of thousands vanished; orders of magnitude less than WW1 killed.

          The Traveler’s aristocratic Host was one of the few of the old order left standing. The Aristocrat met the Traveler, who noted the above statistic, and said, “Don’t worry, they aren’t hurt, they’re just pushed 40 years into your future.” The Time Traveler told his Host when and where they’ll all show up, and he said, “Do with them what you will. In the meantime you’ll have to do without them. Sorry about the inconvenience, but I’m telling you, those guys needed a time out. Let’s see if you can do a better job than they did. Here’s a history book for comparison. Don’t try to suppress it, others have copies, so you might as well publish it instead. But don’t rely too much on it; time is a tree. Good luck, you are now on an alternate world-line, one where European civilization was decapitated before it committed suicide.”

          Then the Time Traveler vanished, never to be seen on that world-line again.

Due to chrono-informational limits, the Time Traveler knew, and could know, only two things about that alternate time-line. One was that it exists. The other was that, on that sunny day 40 years later, on the isle of Elba, when the old rulers rematerialized, there were feasts to greet them, and music, and jugglers, and confetti, and cheering crowds... but as far as the Time Traveler could see on his view-screen, not one single government official.

 

Abiotarians

          Abiotarians

 

          Awhiles back I read a blog discussing veganism and vegetarianism. I wrote in to say that there are many entirely logical arguments for it (health, economic, etc.) but the moralism around it is sentimental. I asked; why valorize animals over plants? I called it “neurochauvinism”.

This got me to thinking. Could it be possible to one-up the Vegans? Here’s my scenario:

          The Space Marines find a way to ‘live off the land’; namely, the Artificial Food Machine. You feed it some dirty ice from a comet or an ice-moon; it processes that into a bland fibrous nutritious paste. Fibrous for regularity, of course, and it has every essential nutrient. The machine has no biological components; for the admirals did not want their troops’ life-support system to itself need a life-support system.

          This military technology is adopted by a cult of pacifists wishing to morally one-up the Vegans. These “abiotarians” boast that they don’t eat any living things at all; not even cells! (1)

          The food machine produces a substance called “spoo”. (2)  The Abiotarians tried to rename it ‘manna’, but the rough spacer name prevailed. Spoo is white, wet, tasteless, and of variable fiber content. Low-fiber spoo is like jello, high-fiber spoo like beef jerky. Of course you can put in artificial color and flavor.  If you roll high-fiber spoo into sheets and bake it  dry, you get a kind of crunchy cardboard called “matzoid”.

          “Snarge” refers to snail slime, and also the horrible bloody guck resulting from a bird being sucked into an airplane engine. The artificial-food machine’s snarge is a thick paste, like peanut butter or jam; it’s reddish-brown, oily, and smells slightly like 3-in-1 oil.  It’s completely artificial; it’s just named after the horrid animal-derived guck. Not the most popular of repasts, you see; but you need an oily foodlike substance to carry the oil-based vitamins. (A, E.)

          If you put spoo and snarge through a blender, then zap the resulting emulsion with microwaves for a kilosecond, then it partially coagulates and polymerizes; and that, my friend, is how you make Crottled Greeps!

          Yum, yum! And what do you wash this delicious meal down with? What but Tang?

          I think you’ll agree that the Space Marines and the Abiotarians show real commitment, by living on this stuff. Talk about intestinal fortitude!

 

          Footnotes:

          (1) The natural role for Abiotarians is first-wave colonists for terraforming. They eat rock, water, and nuclear power, and mix their feces and urine with the planet’s regolith to create soil. So their job is dirt-making; and they are therefore prone to sneer to vegans, “You eat from what we shit!” Holier Than Thou strikes again.

          These extreme militant pacifists rely upon military high-tech, for some are former Space Marines. Soldiers have turned monk before, as a cure for post-traumatic stress syndrome. They left behind combat but kept the routine and the menu.

          (2) “Spoo”, referring to a fictitious food-like substance, has previous reference.  There was a New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast in which “sppooo” is being prepared in a parallel world. Also, in JMS’s series “Babylon 5” , spoo was a bland white gelatinous stuff made from space worms.