Monthly Archives: February 2019

Happy Anniversary, My Blog

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This I my 251st post. Time to celebrate, I think. My way of doing so will be to re-post a piece I first posted two years ago. Word for word.

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No, my site has not drawn very large numbers of readers and has not developed into the equivalent of the Huffington Post. And no, I do not do it for profit; though at times I was tempted by offers to open the site to advertising, in the end I rejected them all. As a result, never did I receive a single penny for all the work I have been doing (normally, about two hours per week). More, even: since I am not very computer literate, I rely on my stepson, Jonathan Lewy, to run the site for me. But for him it would not have been possible. So let me use this opportunity to thank him from the bottom of my heart.

What I have received and am receiving is feedback. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Some people have used the appropriate button on the site to say what they think of my work or simply in order to get in touch. Others suggested that they write for me or else responded to my request that they do so. Others still have asked, and received, my permission to repost my work on their own sites. A few have even taken the trouble to translate entire articles into their native languages. Except for a few yahoos who ranted and swore, almost all my contacts with the people in question, many of whom were initially complete strangers, have been courteous, informative, and thought-provoking. Thank you, again, from the bottom of my heart.

Most of the ideas behind my posts are derived from the media. Others have to do with my personal experiences; others still, such as the series on Pussycats, have to do with the research I am currently doing or else were suggested by various people. Perhaps most important of all, I often use my posts as what Nietzsche used to call Versuche. By that he meant attempts to clarify his thoughts and see where they may lead. The most popular posts have been those which dealt with political and military affairs. Followed by the ones on women and feminism, followed by everything else. Given my background and reputation as a longtime professor of military history and strategy, that is not surprising.

At one point I tried to enlist the aid of a friend to have the blog translated into Chinese and make my posts available in that language too. No luck; I soon learnt that the Great Chinese Firewall did not allow them to pass. Why that is, and whether my work has fallen victim to some kind of dragnet or has been specifically targeted I have no idea. Thinking about it, the former seems more likely; to the best of my knowledge I have never written anything against China. But one never knows.

That brings me to the real reason why I write: namely, to exercise my right to freedom of thought. And, by doing so, do my little bit towards protecting it and preserving it. My heroes are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. The former because he has exposed a few of the less decent things—to put it mildly—out dearly beloved governments have been saying and doing in our name. The latter, because he has shown how vulnerable all of us are to Big Brother and called for reform. Both men have paid dearly for what they have done, which is another reason for trying to follow in their footsteps as best I can.

Freedom of speech is in trouble—and the only ones who do not know it are those who will soon find out. The idea of free speech is a recent one. It first emerged during the eighteenth century when Voltaire, the great French writer, said that while he might not agree with someone’s ideas he would fight to the utmost to protect that person’s right to express them. Like Assange and Snowden Voltaire paid the penalty, spending time in jail for his pains. Later, to prevent a recurrence, he went to live at Frenay, just a few hundred yards from Geneva. There he had a team or horses ready to carry him across the border should the need arise. Good for him.

To return to modern times, this is not the place to trace the stages by which freedom of speech was hemmed in in any detail. Looking back, it all started during the second half of the 1960s when it was forbidden to say, or think, or believe, that first blacks, then women, then gays, then transgender people, might in some ways be different from others. As time went on this prohibition came to be known as political correctness. Like an inkstain it spread, covering more and more domains and polluting them. This has now been carried to the point where anything that may offend anyone in some way is banned—with the result that, as Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind has shown, in many fields it has become almost impossible to say anything at all.
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Let me give you just one example of what I mean. Years ago, at my alma mater in Jerusalem, I taught a course on military history. The class consisted of foreign, mostly American, students. At one point I used the term Gook. No sooner had the word left my mouth than a student rose and, accused me of racism. I did my best to explain that, by deliberately using the term, I did not mean to imply that, in my view, the Vietnamese were in any way inferior. To the contrary, I meant to express my admiration for them for having defeated the Americans who did think so. To no avail, of course.

And so it goes. When the Internet first appeared on the scene I, along with a great many other people, assumed that any attempt to limit freedom of speech had now been definitely defeated. Instead, the opposite is beginning to happen. Techniques such as “data mining” made their appearance, allowing anything anyone said about anything to be instantly monitored and recorded, forever. All over Europe, the thought police is in the process of being established. Sometimes it is corporations such as Facebook which, on pain of government intervention, are told to “clean up” their act by suppressing all kinds of speech or, at the very least, marking it as “offensive,” “untrue,” and “fake.” In others it is the governments themselves that take the bit between their teeth.

Regrettably, one of the governments which is doing so is that of the U.S. Naively, I hoped that Trump’s election would signify the beginning of the end of political correctness. Instead, he is even now trying to prevent people in- and out of the government from discussing such things as global warming and the need to preserve the environment. Not to mention his attacks on the media for, among other things, allegedly misreading the number of those who came up to witness his inauguration. Should this line continue and persist, then it will become imperative to do without him and go against him. Not because of what he has to say about both topics is necessarily wrong, but to ensure the right of others to think otherwise.

This won’t do. That is why I promise my readers, however few or many they may be, one thing: namely, to go on writing about anything I please and go on speaking the truth as I see it. The English poet W. H. (Wystan Huge) Auden, 1907-1973, might have been referring to blogging when he wrote:

I want a form that’s large enough to swim in,

And talk on any subject that I choose.

From natural scenery to men and women

Myself, the arts, the European news.

Polluted: A Jew Reflects on German History

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As Mark Twain, who is supposed to have said everything, is supposed to have said, Germany is the most beautiful country in the world. Let me repeat: Not just in Europe, but in the world. Especially in summer, the season my wife and I like to visit. From the Baltic in the north to the Alps in the south, from the flat, wide-open spaces in the northeast to the more densely settled, often hilly, provinces in the southwest, no country has more variety.

And, yes, the Netherlands and Switzerland apart no country is better looked after by its citizens. The mountains. The “fairy-tale woods,” as the American writer Erika Jong, who spent some time living in Heidelberg and knew Germany well, called them back in 1970. The clean rivers and equally clean lakes (when I first visited Potsdam a quarter century ago I was told they were all contaminated and that I couldn’t swim in them; since then, what a wonderful change!) The infinitely numerous hiking trails that lead everywhere and nowhere. Such as one can walk not only freely—this is not the US, where much of the countryside is privately owned and closed to visitors and where you never know when a roughneck with a gun will pop up to chase you away. But in the kind of safety that, even today, never ceases to astonish and delight visitors.

I have heard it said that Gunther Grass once wrote that, if God had shat concrete, the outcome would have been Frankfurt (sorry, guys, I cannot find the reference). I do not know Frankfurt well; but I know that, applied to other German cities, the comment is highly unfair. Berlin’s Potsdammer Platz apart, you do not often meet the kind of stunning postmodernist architecture you see elsewhere. What you do see, and a lot of it too, are the parks and greenery that grace them. Berlin itself seems to have fewer skyscrapers per square kilometer than any other modern capital. Those it does have are hardly more than 100 meters tall. And then there are the tree-lined streets, including the one in Zehlendorf where my wife if and I spent much of the summer of 2018. And I am not talking just of the major cities. To the contrary: in my view it is precisely the smaller ones, such as Freiburg and Heidelberg, Konstanz and Trier, Bonn and Luebeck, that offer those who live in them a quality of life as good as, if not better than, any other places in the world.

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Historically, Germany has always been a decentralized country. To be sure, there was an emperor. However, his powers were kept in check by the two higher estates, the religious and the lay, as well as the numerous “free” cities scattered all over. As the peregrinations of many emperors down to Karl V show, moreover, for a long time there was no proper capital. Instead, emperors spent their time moving from one town to another, mounting so-called joyous entries and having fun with the local women who were put at their disposal.

Whether or not, in the modern world, federalism is a good thing I shall not discuss here. What I do want to point out is the fact that, with bishops and princes and urban patricians competing to see who could build the most splendid court, no single city, not even Berlin, (and, before Berlin, Vienna) has ever been able to dominate the country’s cultural life as London and Paris do in England and France respectively. The results are, or should be, obvious to the most casual visitor. Almost anywhere one goes, one finds fine public buildings, operas, theaters, musical performances, and museums whose treasures in spite of the destruction and looting occasioned by World War II, match whatever is available abroad. Even a small (population, 54,000) provincial city such as Greifswald, which I happen to have visited recently, has a surprising number of them.

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Given all this, when I feel like teasing my German friends I ask them why, with such a splendid country to call their own, their early twentieth-century ancestors in particular have so often invaded their neighbors! But let’s get serious. Nietzsche, himself a German (though he did not like Germans one bit) once wrote that, at bottom, history is nothing but a list of atrocities. Such as have been carefully pruned to suit the historian and his readers and chronologically arranged, one by one, like beads on a string. That is as true of Germany as it is of all other nations; including, in a comparatively minor but unfortunately not negligible way, the one to which I myself belong. However, until 1933, on which more in a moment, the list of German atrocities was no worse than that of most other countries.

There were even times when things German were held up as examples for others to follow. In antiquity, the rude, but honest and courageous, tribesmen and tribeswomen the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about. During the late middle ages and the Renaissance, the flourishing cities of northern and southern Germany. In the sixteenth century, Luther who first rid the Church of much accumulated mumbo-jumbo and then forced it to reform itself until it became halfway decent. In the eighteenth century, the German Enlightenment and its mighty contribution to world literature, philosophy, etc. In the nineteenth century, “Athens on the Spree.” The proverbial country of poets and thinkers. To say nothing of the unexcelled line of musicians reaching from Bach to Wagner and Strauss.

The list does not end there. It also includes the modern German university system, the house of whose founder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, my wife and I went to visit the other day. German science, and medicine (from about 1860 to 1933). The best organized, most efficient, and least dishonest civil service and judiciary (during the same period). For those who care about such things, the best organized, most powerful single army the world had ever seen (ditto). But why go on? I happen to own a replica of an old Sears and Roebuck catalogue. Printed and distributed in 1902, hundreds of pages thick, it contains descriptions and drawings of thousands of items. Starting with women’s underwear—this was before brassieres were invented—passing though buggies (light vehicles, drawn by a single horse or, sometimes, a goat or a dog!)—and ending with grand pianos. Leafing through it, one cannot escape the impression that anything German was considered best. Including, besides magnifying glasses, something known as a Heidelberg belt; a battery-operated device into which one sticks one’s penis by way of a cure for impotence.

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In brief, even some of Germany’s enemies were sometimes prepared to praise it. Enter the Nazis. In Grass’ novel, The Tin Drum, they figure as eels emerging out of the skull of a dead horse rescued from the sea. At first people are disgusted. Later they get used to them, cook them, and eat them with some relish. Grass’ reputation is well deserved; no better way of showing how unsavory, how revolting, the Nazis were has ever been put first on paper and then on film as well.

To be sure, the Nazis were disgusting. Ironically, though, from Hitler down one of their key objectives—on par, I’d say, with gaining Lebensraum and getting rid of the Jews by exterminating them if necessary—was to build a wholesome world. One cleansed of democracy, an imported system which was not only slow and cumbersome but, by putting quantity ahead of quality, went against what Hitler personally saw as the eternal laws of nature. One cleansed both of communism and of the harshest, most exploitative, forms of capitalism. One cleansed of all sorts of incurably diseased people who were to be given a mercy death in the form of a lethal injection. Once cleansed of “degenerate” art which, deliberately designed to weaken the human spirit, produced not masterpieces but unseemly monsters. One cleansed of feminism, the product of the twisted brains of unnatural women who did not want or could not have children and were effectively eugenic duds. And cleansed of Jews, the race whose members united in their own persons all these bad things and then some; or so the Nazis claimed.

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Years ago, visiting the former concentration camp at Dachau, I came across a sign, not far away. Search as I did I could not locate it on Google; whether it is still there I do not know. So let me paraphrase from memory. Visitor, it said, do not forget that our town, Dachau, existed a thousand years before anyone ever heard of Hitler, National Socialism, concentration camps, etc. (it did; the first mention goes back to 805 CE, but the site was inhabited two thousand years earlier than that). So please, the sign went on, do not judge us solely through the prism of those terrible twelve years. Fair enough, many people would say. Me included.

The problem is that it does not work that way. To be sure, the Nazi years only took up a tiny part of German history. Arguably, compared with such events as the ascent of Otto I in 962, the issuing of the Golden Bull (1356), the Reformation (1517) the Thirty Years War (1618-48), and the unification of Germany in 1871 it is not even the most important part. Yet it is this tiny part that has taken over. As the years went by, instead of fading away as most history does, it started forming a kind of telescope through which both the past and the future of Germany are seen.

The debate about the so-called German Sonderweg, meaning a road that is different or special, went on for decades. Works originating in, or dealing with, the pre-1945 period raise the question as to whether A, B, C or D was or was not a forerunner of, or at least had some affinities with, the extreme evil that was National Socialism. Almost without exception, those originating in, or dealing with, the post-1945 period are judged by whether or not they show traces of that dread disease.

Do I have to add that anything originating during the Nazi period itself is bad by definition? Not just the buildings and the Autobahnen. But also the often astonishing technological progress made. To mention but four examples, the helicopters, jet aircraft, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles which the Germans were the first to build. And the sincere, if ideologically tainted, efforts to keep the environment clean, combat smoking and breast cancer, and protect women so they could give healthy offspring to the Reich.

The Nazis’ attitude to art was notoriously intolerant. There are even stories about Hitler personally destroying some paintings he did not like by kicking holes in them! But that is only half of it. Far from being indifferent to art as many garden-variety politicians have always been and still are, he believed art could and should play a critically important role in educating the German people the way he wanted to educate it. To this end he and his paladins (mainly, in this field, Goebbels and Rosenberg) did his best to encourage artists, give them commissions, award prizes, and the like. Many tens of thousands of artworks were created, bought and put on display either in private residences or in public. Some were even put on parade! After the war practically all this art disappeared into the museums’ cellars where, like a bone stuck in somebody’s throat, it still remains. Is that because it is unsightly? Or, to the contrary, because of the fear that the wholesome world (heile Welt) it tried to create might not only attract countless visitors but enthuse them too?

At the focus of all these problems is the prohibition on the public display of the swastika. Writing as a Jew whose family went through the Holocaust, I find this prohibition completely justified. Yet I cannot keep noting that it gives rise to occasional absurdities. In other countries World War II- military equipment, uniforms, etc, can be freely displayed. Not so in Germany, where it must first of all be sterilized (recently, at the Luftwaffe historical museum at Gatow, I saw the anti-swastika rule being slightly violated; how that came about I do not know). The English version of my own book, Hitler in Hell, has a burning swastika on the cover. As a result, it has been banned from being sold in Germany; yet I would have thought that the title and the image between them demonstrate my opinion of him clearly enough.

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Outside Germany the situation is even worse.  At You Tube documentaries showing the Nazi years are enormously popular in spite of their often mediocre quality. Out of every ten works on German history that are published in English, perhaps nine deal with that period (as, of course, this essay also does). In almost any country one may visit, one only has to mention the word Nazi to fill the air with electricity. There is even something called, and not just jokingly, Godwins’s Law; whenever two persons argue for more than a few minutes, at least one of them is going to call the other a Nazi.

Living in Germany, even for fairly short periods as I did, one sees the consequences all around. I do not mean just the countless memory sites, museums, exhibitions, day tours, and the like that focus on the years from 1933 to 1945.  Partly in the hope of providing Mahnung, which is the official rationale; and partly because the public cannot have enough. I mean the fact that, Potsdam’s Schillerplatz used to be called Adolf Hitlerplatz (it was, in fact, built under his rule). On Berlin’s Fehrbelliner Platz, where I have often dined with my friends, the buildings erected for the Nazi Labor Front sill show the spots where the original swastikas were chiseled off the walls. I mean the kind of day-to-day politics in which the Left, (too often, falsely) pretending to take the moral high ground, accuses the Right of being Nazis and the Right is constantly forced to defend itself against that charge.

Fear of being considered Nazi also does much to explain German foreign policy. Starting with the rather exceptional, not to say strange, relationship between Germany and Israel; when former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited Jerusalem I 1966 I myself had occasion to witness the birth of that relationship, complete with the demonstrations against it. Passing through the one between Berlin and Europe’s remaining capitals, and ending with the way refugees are treated. Aliis licet, non tibi; what others are allowed to do, you Germania, for historical reasons so obvious that they do not have to be pointed out, cannot.

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Let me end by saying that, when I first visited Germany back in 1976, it was all but impossible to go through a single day without some German one had met, upon learning that I was an Israeli, starting to explain that he or she had not done anything wrong. Ditto for their family, town, region, etc; I often wondered whether there had been any Nazis in Germany and how, in that case, they have succeeded in hiding so well. My wife, who was living in Germany at the time but whom I had not yet met, had the same experience. The constant apologies made it very hard to strike up a friendship! Those days, thankfully, are gone. Today and for years past strangers—shopkeepers, waiters, hotel owners, and the like—who learn that my wife and I are Israeli mostly react in a very favorable way.

Of my closer acquaintances, not one is old enough to have reached maturity during those terrible years. The oldest is 83; how old he was back in 1945 you can figure out for yourself. He is a former East German, retired, professor of economics. When still in his prime his hobby was writing illustrated books on ocean-going ships. Now he keeps busy by gardening; he loves cats and has a good sense of humor. He is also a kind man. For almost twenty years, no cloud however small has ever disturbed our sky. Others are much younger. Often so much so that not only they but their parents and even grandparents too cannot have done anything wrong.

The problem is that, far from creating a wholesome world, the Nazis have polluted both the country and its people for all future to come.  And much as I feel for my dear German friends, there is nothing I or anyone else can do about that.

Just as in 1948

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Some years ago I spent some days at Churchill College, Cambridge. One morning, having a few hours to spare, I went to the great man’s archive which is housed there. Among other things, I was shown a small part of a collection of letters which he, as Secretary of the Colonies, received in connection of his visit to Palestine in the winter of 1921. Some of the letters were written by local Jews, others by Arabs.  One that has stuck in my memory, written in good English by an Arab resident, argued that there would never be peace in the Holy Land until and unless the Balfour Declaration—with its promise of establishing a Jewish National Home in the country—were cancelled.

A century has passed. Some of the smallest and weakest trees in the forest have been reaching for the sky, some of the largest and mightiest have been cut down or else fell of their own accord. Amidst all this turmoil, attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there have been by the hundred. Nevertheless it persists and has lost none of its underlying hatred and bitterness. Just as the letter predicted.  With President Trump promising to publish his “peace plan” in the near future, today it pleases me to reflect on some of the outcomes to which it may still lead.

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* Separation. This is the solution much of the world, as well as I personally, would prefer. The idea of solving the conflict by establishing two states, one Jewish, the other Palestinian, has been in the air at least since the British came up with it, as the map shows, back in 1920-21. In 1947 the idea of applying it to the territory west of the Jordan was adopted by the United Nations which voted in its favor, thereby enabling the State of Israel to be established. In 1994, twenty-seven years after the 1967 Six Days’ War in which Israel occupied the Palestinian-inhabited part of the country, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Agreements which seemed to represent a small step in that direction. Since then, however, no further progress has been made. The main obstacles are, first, the fate of the Jewish settlements in West Jordan, as it is sometimes known. Second, control over East Jerusalem, which each side claims for itself. And third, the Palestinian Right of Return. It is as a Palestinian diplomat once told me to my face. We have our rights; why should we give them up?

* A single State with a Palestinian majority. This is the Zionist-Israeli nightmare. The very purpose of setting up the State of Israel was to make sure that Jews would never again have to live in a country where they are a minority and, as such, exposed to discrimination and persecution of every kind. Yet already today, counting Israel’s own Arab citizens, about as many Palestinians as Jews live in the land west of the Jordan. In every way that matters, all of them come under the same government, i.e. that of Israel in Jerusalem. Had it not been for Israel, Abu Mazen’s Palestinian Authority, such as it is, would have been toppled by its own people in a very short time. In this sense the single Palestinian State, reaching from the Mediterranean in the west to the Jordan River in the ease, already exists or will do so quite soon. As in the former unlamented South Africa, all that is needed is a change of government. And of the flag, of course.

* A single Jewish State. In view of the demographics, which are working against it, clearly such a state could only come about as a result of war. And clearly the most likely cause of such a war would be a double one. A desperate Israeli attempt to avert a single Palestinian State on one hand; and an opportunity provided by the collapse of the Hashemite regime in Jordan on the other. A collapse followed by the kind of chaos that will enable organizations similar to Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS to use it as a base for terrorism against Israel, dragging the latter into an unwinnable war like the American one in Afghanistan and spreading west across the Jordan River. Here the fact that a great many—no one knows, just how many—citizens of Jordan are themselves Palestinian or of Palestinian origin could play a critical role.

Both many Israeli Arabs and many right-wing Israelis see the problem the way the French saw that of Alsace Lorraine in 1871-1914. To quote Prime Minister Léon Gambetta (1881-82): Never speak of it, always keep it in mind. And just as the conflict over Alsace-Lorraine played a large role in turning what started as a relatively minor conflict in the Balkans into World War I, so the collapse of the Jordanian State, the outbreak of terrorism from across the Jordan, and an Israeli attempt to throw at least a considerable number of the Palestinians currently under its rule across the river is almost certain to lead to a much larger war in the Middle East.

Just as in 1948, let me add.

Living with the Reaper

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In recent years we have been flooded with predictions about the ways in which we humans are reaching towards immortality, eventually becoming Homo Deus. Whether with the aid of computers that will store our minds even as the rest of us dies. Or with all sorts of new drugs and nannomachinery in our bloodstream. Or simply by having life expectancy increase by more than one year, each year.

Perhaps so. However, making such predictions is not what I am after here. Instead, let’s turn things the other way around. Suppose the Reaper is not going to be pushed out of the way. In that case, what other cardinal elements of life are going to stay more or less as they are?

Death brings two contradictory gifts. On one hand, it is the one thing in life that is even more certain than taxes. On the other, since we do not know when we are going to die, it makes life, as long as we have it, precarious. Even for those who, having admitted their guilt, are now on death row, unexpected things sometimes happen and hope dies last. Perhaps some kind of stay of execution would be issued, or an amnesty granted. Probably there have been few if any convicted persons who did not hope for a reprieve at the last moment. As, according to Herodotus, happened to King Croesus of Lydia. He was already bound to the stake when his executioner, King Cyrus of Persia, hearing him cry Solon! Solon! was overcome by curiosity and ordered him released so he could explain himself. Or the previous execution would be botched, leading to an investigation and a corresponding delay during which anything might happen. Or perhaps the prison in which they are held will be destroyed by an earthquake. Perhaps.

Both in- and outside of prison, it is this ignorance that makes life precarious. Young or old, is there anyone who can be certain that, leaving the home, he’ll return in one piece? Or that he’ll wake up next day and see the sun? It is also what makes it precious and endows it with a certain tang; one a thousand times stronger than, but perhaps not quite unlike, the kind that relish adds to many dishes. “What is food without salt? What is more tasteless than the white of an egg?” asked Job. Depending on circumstances as well as personality, some people may enjoy the tang as much as anything in life. At least for a time. “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight/Nor public man, nor cheering crowds/A lonely impulse of delight/Drove to this tumult in the clouds” wrote William Butler Yeats. Or as Siegfried Sassoon, the World War I English pacifist poet, told his family, the first days of the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest ones in the whole of British military history, were “great fun.”

However, most of the time most people hate death, fear it, and try to push it as far away as they can. Either they do so by taking all sorts of precautions hundreds of which keep being listed on the Net every day. Or by pretending that it is of no account, as the Stoics did, or simply by refusing to think about it. Others still—probably the majority—vacillate between one extreme and the other. Most of the time we seek nothing more than a stable existence in which there is no threat. On occasion, though, a great many of us long for its opposite and make ready to confront it. “The strenuous life,” as Teddy Roosevelt called it, would not be worthy of the name had it not been accompanied by a whiff, perhaps more than a whiff, of danger. However we feel about it and try to cope with it, the precariousness that is the product of death is always there, inevitably and inescapably.

But that is only part of the story. While death makes life precarious, it also provides us with a kind of ballast, or keel, or compass. As it did to Don Quixote; reaching the end of a lifetime of delusions during which he fearlessly acted out an imaginary code of chivalry, he was brought back to his senses by the realization that death, his death, was both inevitable and imminent. And as it did to his real-life counterpart, Ignacio Loyola, who started life as a swashbuckling soldier and violent criminal but repented after being badly wounded and became the founder of the Jesuit Order. These and countless other examples seem to show that, but for death and our fear of it, we would have been capable of going to even greater extremes of folly than we actually are. We could, and probably would, have gone stark raving mad; with the unbearable lightness of being, if nothing else.

As many scholars have tried to explain the origins of religion as there are ants in a nest. Starting as long ago as Epicurus around 300 BCE, though, few of those scholars who did not allot death an important place among the factors involved. The ways various religions have dealt with death vary enormously. Some, notably those of ancient Greece and Rome, did not care whether, as long as people were alive, they were or were not virtuous, promising everyone the same dismal fate. But probably the majority prescribed all kinds of ways to prepare for death, either promising rewards to those who had behaved themselves or purification and/or punishment to those who had not. There is, indeed, a sense in which a religion which simply allows its adherents to pass away without bothering to tell them what may come next is not a religion at all. Either it is a philosophy, as skepticism was and Confucianism still is. Or else an ideology; as in the joke about the woman who, come her thirty-fifth birthday, returned her membership card in the Social-Democratic Party because she found out that its program had nothing to say about what would happen to her after she died.

One way or another, the sturdy child of death is religion. Facing what they believe were going to be the last moments of their lives, even stout atheists have been known to pray, sacrifice, make vows, and the like. Furthermore, today in most Western societies religion occupies a place of its own more or less carefully differentiated from all the reset. Not so in many, perhaps most, societies throughout history. In them the dividing line between secular and religious life hardly existed. Embedded in the former, so to speak, the latter often came close to forming the sum total of culture. Every institution, every move, however trivial, had to be approved by the religious authorities that be. Among orthodox Jews, such is the case right down to the present day. Thus human culture itself is, to a considerable extent, the product of death and awareness of it. Including architecture—from the pyramids down—painting, sculpture, musical and literary opuses, all kinds of symbolism and ritual—most secular rituals are modelled on religious ones—and what not.

As long as we live, the threat of death can cause us to draw more closely together. The outcome is a kind of intense solidarity hard for those who have not experienced it to comprehend. Here is what one very experienced fifteenth-century commander, Jean de Beuil, had to say about it in the Jouvencel: “You love your comrade so much in war…. And then you prepare to go and live or die with him and for love not to abandon him. And out of that there arises such delectation that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight is.” Similar sentiments permeate modern works such as Ernst Junger’s Im Stahlgewitter (In the Storm of Steel), to mention but one. That is not to say there are no limits. Too great and too imminent a threat of death is likely to lead to the cry of sauve qui peut at best and to a desperate struggle of all against all at worst. The kind of struggle that often breaks out when a building goes up in flames, trapping the men and women inside. The less cohesive and disciplined the unit or society, the more likely this is to happen. One may certainly exult over the death of an enemy, and indeed history knows of innumerable cases of this kind. What a delight, as happened to King Hezekiah of Judea in 701 BCE, to wake up in the morning and find 85,000 enemy soldiers, who were just about to capture one’s capital city, dead! And how wonderful, as soldiers of all times and places are known to have done, to cut off their extremities, mutilate them, and put them on show for the edification of friend and foe alike! As these and countless other examples prove, one thing the presence of death may do is to cause us to get used to it and grow callous. “Hard-bitten,” as the saying goes. It may also make us do terrible things which, but for it, we would never have thought about. Much of the time, though, death is accompanied by feelings of horror, pain, sorrow, regret, mourning and grief. Attitudes some of which we may have taken over from the members of some other species and which, whether or not that is the case, unquestionably form an essential part of what it means to be human.

It is pain and sorrow, too, which have led us towards empathy, compassion and remorse. Empathy and compassion for the dead and those whom they have left behind. Remorse for all the things we could have done for our dead but which, whether through malice or neglect, we did not. All these phenomena are among the quintessential characteristics of our lives, almost certainly as prevalent in prehistoric times as they are today. And none that could have existed, or could only have existed in very different, all but unimaginable, form, if it had not been for death. Whether a life without all of them would be human is moot—it may, indeed, not even be life at all.

But don’t worry. Long as our life expectancy has become, the flaming swords remain in place, guarding the gates of paradise and preventing us from eating the forbidden fruit. The reaper is there, waiting for each and every one of us. And pace Ray Kurzweil and other “transhumanists,” there is no way he is about to let us go.