Big Questions

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Skimming my way through Amazon.com, as I often do either in search of interesting books to read or simply to pass the time, I came across the following description of my former student, best-selling author/historian Yuval Harari. Here is what it said:

Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is currently a lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He originally specialized in world history, medieval history and military history, and his current research focuses on macro-historical questions such as: What is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?

I cannot claim to have researched these questions in any depth. Let alone sold books by the million as Harari did and does. As so often, though, I considered the questions interesting. Sufficiently so to try and provide my readers, and myself, with some off the cuff answers. The more so because, as a historian, in one way or another I’ve been thinking about them throughout my life. As, indeed, most people, though not historians, have probably done at some point or another.

Off the cuff my answers may indeed be. Still, if anyone has better ones I’d be very happy to see them. Not wishing to have my thoughts censored, not even by Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, I refuse to join the so-called social media. But my email is mvc.dvc@gmail.com.

A. What is the relationship between history and biology?

Q. There is no question but that many of our most basic qualities are biologically determined. Including the need to eat, drink, rest, sleep, and have sex; but for them, we could not exist. Including the quest, if not for happiness, which is both a modern idea and hard to define, then at any rate for avoiding pain and sorrow and having “a good time.” Including the desire for security, recognition and dominance. Including the desire to do what we consider good and right (this desire even Adolf Hitler, talking to a small and intimate circle, claimed to feel). Including the need to “make sense” of the world around us. And the desire for sex, of course.

The number of humans who have ever lived on this earth is estimated at 90-110 billion, of whom almost one tenth are alive today. With very few and very partial exceptions, all have experienced these needs and these desires. To this extent biology and history, meaning cultural change, are independent of each other.

But history, meaning social and cultural change, does affect the way these needs and these desires are experienced and expressed by people belonging to different cultures at different times. An ancient Chinese living, say, 3,000 years ago would instantly understand both what food is and why we stand in need of it. What he would not understand is why we in our modern Western society consider some foods (e.g seafood) fit for consumption and others (e.g. insects) not.

A. What is the essential difference between homo sapiens and other animals?

Q. Historically speaking, the answers to this question have varied very much. For the authors of the Old Testament, later followed by any number of adherents to the other two so-called Abrahamic Religions, it consisted of our belief in God as well as the ability to distinguish between good and evil; whoever could or would not do these things was considered in- or subhuman and deserved to be treated as such. For Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and the thinkers of the Enlightenment it was our ability to use reason in order to both understand the world and achieve the goals we have set for ourselves. For Rabelais it was our ability to laugh; for Marx, our ability to create and sustain ourselves by means of work; for Nietzsche, out concern with beauty and with art in general; and for Johan Huizinga, our willingness to engage in play both for fun and on the way to exploring the world and creating something new.

This organ has the ability to make love and satisfy your partner. viagra generika 50mg How Fast usa cialis Does Kamagra Work Normally, Kamagra is effective with an hour of its consumption. Thus, the man is guaranteed strong erection until generic levitra professional the medication ingredients are present in the system. Because ultimately if you can sort it out cialis online discount http://greyandgrey.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Court-of-Appeals-Ruling-in-Shutter-NYLJ-1997.pdf don’t you think the direct consequence could be that you will get bigger and longer lasting erection. Each of these views have been elaborated in mountains of publications of every kind. Each one has also been questioned at some length. Never more so than over the last two decades or so. The primatologist Frans de Waal, widely acknowledged as the world’s greatest expert on bonobos, in his 2013 book The Bonobo and the Atheist even went so far as to argue that the members of this species show something like religiosity, however rudimentary it might be.

A. Is there justice in history?

Q. Without going into detail as to what justice may mean, let me say that I doubt it very much. However, this question reminds me of a story I once heard about Israel’s former Prime Minister, Menahem Begin (served, 1977-1983). This was not long after he had concluded a peace agreement with Egypt and, by way of recognition, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The story, which was told by an ideological rival of his, went as follows. Back in the summer of 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of World War II, twenty-five year old Begin was in Warsaw attending a meeting of Betar, a right-wing and rather belligerent Jewish movement of which, in Poland, he was the chief. Doing so he got into an argument with his mentor Zeev Jabotinsky, the equally right-wing leader and ideologist of Betar, world-wide. Then and later Begin was a fiery orator who tended to be swept away by his own words. On this occasion he spoke about might governing the world, called on Jews to use might and even violence in order to counter it, etc., etc. Whereupon Jabotinsky took the floor and said, “The world is run by judges, not robbers. And if you, Mr. Begin, do not believe that is true, then go and drown yourself in the Vistula.”

To repeat, whether there is justice in history I do not know. However, I do know one thing: but for the belief that there is such justice we might indeed drown ourselves in the nearest river.

A. Did people become happier as history unfolded?

Q. Some people today, including Harari himself in at least one of his books, have argued that, far from people becoming happier as history unfolds, they have become less so. As by having to work harder, being subject to greater stress, losing the intimacy that only members of small societies can experience, watching the world around us being polluted and nature destroyed, etc. This is a modern version of the Pandora story; except that, instead of Pandora (literally, “all blessings”), people speak of civilization.

To me, much of this seems to be based on nothing but nostalgia. More to the point, there is no way this question can be answered with any degree of certainty. Public opinion surveys aimed at doing so only started being held over the last few decades, and even they are hardly reliable. So I’ll skip.

A. What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?

Q. I doubt whether science and technology raise any new ethical questions at all. To mention a few only, people have always confronted the question how evil—however defined–should be dealt with. They have always been forced to deal with the gap between the desires of the individual and the dictates of society. They have always been forced to decide what, from an ethical point of view, means should or should not be used to attain what ends. They have always done their best to influence the minds of others by whatever means at their disposal. And they always had to decide whether, and at what point, the deformed, the handicapped, the sick, and the old should (or should not) be killed or left to die.

In the words of Ecclesiastics, nothing new under the sun.

What We Did

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One of my favorite sites on the Net is Quora. For those of you who do not know, Quora enables anyone to put forward any—well, almost any—question and have it answered by whoever feels like answering it. Perusing the German version some days ago, I came across the following question: As a youth what did you do that would be completely out of the question today and legally subject to all kinds of punishment?

The question was answered by a Herr Christian Campe. All I know about him is that he lives in a small village not far from Muenster and is the father of four children. I tried to look him up, but without success. Hence, in translating and posting his answer (which he wrote in German), I was unable to ask him for permission. My apologies, Herr Campe. I hope you are not offended. In case you are, and in case you insist, I shall of course take my post off line immediately.

*

What we did?

Build shelters on “unoccupied” land. Yes, there used to be such a thing. Later we also built tree houses. With no help from any adults.

Build bonfires. Yes, children love bonfires. That is as true today as it was at the time. We even built them close to houses. Often causing some old gentleman to appear and give us a sack full of old potatoes so we could roast them. Coming home we smelled of smoke. But that is what bathtubs are for.

Each of us used to have a camping knife. We used it to carve our initials into tree trunks, which may have done them some damage.

Aged 12, we already started going on long bicycle trips. Arriving at a lake, we never needed either towel or swimsuits. We stripped and jumped into the water, just as God had made us. When it was over we dried ourselves in the sun before getting dressed and going home.

At that time no one had ever heard of children’s rights. Parents were entitled to spank their offspring and did so quite often. Fortunately for me, my parents were somewhat more progressive in this respect.

Swimming was something we were taught by our older siblings and friends. Looking after us, they wore their swimsuits. The same applied when girls were present and also when we visited a swimming pool. There were not too many pools, either covered or open air. But reaching them with our bikes was never a problem.
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We used to have friends whom we only met during the afternoon, given that they did not attend the same school we did.

We may not have had rights, but we were free. Our parents respected our free time and left us alone. There was a reverse side to the coin: parents did not take much of an interest in what we did between about 2 and 7-8 and, during school vacations, the whole day.

Perhaps one reason why we survived was that there were so few electric railways around. As a result, we could climb parked wagons without running the danger of being electrocuted. Another reason was that there were far fewer cars than there are now. Those we did encounter drove slowly and made more noise. So you could not help but notice them.

So life was dangerous, but perhaps not as dangerous as it is today.

How glad I am not to be a child today. In particular, I miss one thing. The green meadows where we used to roam, but which have since been covered by industrial zones and single family houses. As well as all other empty lots now protected by signs bearing the words, private property, no entry, parents are responsible for their children.

*

As I said, I know nothing about Herr Campe. So I thought it would be amusing to use my imagination to try and conjure him up. Somewhat more than fifty years old, which means that he grew up during the 1980s. Knowing Germany as I do, I can tell you there was lots more nudity then than there is now! Eyes either blue or brown. Blond, clean-shaven, and somewhat stocky. Speaks Low German which, being close to Dutch, is easy for me to understand. Happily married. Excellent family life. By profession, a teacher; his wife, either a nurse or a social worker. Lower middle class. Meaning they are not rich but, as long as they do not splurge (which they do once a year, going on vacation), they have enough to live on. Live in a one- or two family house he or his wife inherited from their parents and look after very well. In the garden, flowers. Approaching the front door, the first thing you see is lots of shoes of all sizes; indoor they wear either socks or slippers. They run a car—perhaps a second-hand one—large enough to hold the six of them plus, probably, a medium-sized dog. However, when moving about in the village where everyone knows them and they know everyone, all of them prefer to use a bike.

In case you, Herr Campe, read this post, will you do me a favor and let me know whether I hit the mark? All in good fun, of course.

My email is mvc.dvc@gmail.com.

Scams

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Now that corona has disrupted social life and increased the number of people who are isolated and lonely, the Net is full of sob stories about social media users who were contacted by scammers and, falling for the latter’s pretended interest in them, lost money as a result. To learn more about the problem, I opened Duck Duck and typed in the search words, woman loses, savings to phantom lover. As you would expect, in no time at all I got an avalanche of headlines to explore.

Here are a few examples.

“Woman loses $2,000 to romance scam” (about a New York woman who sent a supposed admirer in Benin $2,076 before she realized she was being milked).  See https://www.wkbw.com/money/consumer/dont-waste-your-money/woman-loses-2-000-romance-scam).

“Woman loses $150,000 in online dating scam.” “A woman in Indiana learned that the hard way this month, after losing over $150,000 to an online scammer whom she’d thought was a local man falling in love with her. See https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/woman-loses-150000-in-online-dating-scam-072414.html.

Woman loses £320,000 in ‘romance fraud’ scam. Now she says she fees “violated.” See https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-54613937.

“Online dating relationship ends badly, $1.3M later.” “Ellen was retired, living a comfortable life in a nice home in British Columbia. In the driveway was a luxury car, and her house was paid for.

And then she joined an online dating site, hoping to find some companionship.

Instead of romance, Ellen says she lost her life savings, and more — over $1.3 million — seemingly taken by an online scam where villains prey on people looking for their perfect partner.” At https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2013/11/30/online_dating_relationship_ends_badly_13m_later.html.

Since the problem has aimed viagra without rx at quite a large number of male entities, therefore, it has become a huge hit among men with ED. The supplier later admitted overcharging 100,000 customers over 200,000 – the result of a seven-year fault on the company’s Warm Home djpaulkom.tv commander levitra Discount scheme, where they receive a rebate of 120 a year. The side-effects caused by Kamagra Jelly divide into 2 types- cialis online usa common & serious. ED medications contain prescription drugs so they should be taken tadalafil without prescription under proper supervision. This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. Not every person who got scammed reported the fact to the authorities. Of those who did, only a tiny percentage made it into the headlines; either because the sums involved were large, or because the victim came to a particularly sticky end. According to the Federal Trade Commission, in 2018 it “received more than 21,000 reports about online romance scams, totalling $143 million in losses. As the number of dating sites and social media apps has gone up, so too has the number of romance scams reported — from 17,000 in 2017, 11,000 in 2016, and 8,500 in 2015. Last year, the median loss reported was $2,600, which is seven times higher than the median loss for other forms of fraud tracked by the FTC. Most affected are people over the age of 70, for whom the median loss rose to $10,000.”

“Online romance scammers,” the report goes on, “work individually and in teams, often creating fake profiles using real people’s photographs in order to form close (if internet-based) relationships with unsuspecting victims, whom they eventually ask for money — because they’re overseas in the military, because they’re sick, because they’re trying to buy plane tickets home, etc. Given victims’ presumed complicity in these scams (because, technically, their money is given voluntarily), and the resulting stigma, it’s likely that online relationship scams are much more prevalent than even FTC reports suggest.”

Back to the headlines. Note that, in them, all the victims are women, all the perpetrators, men. I am not saying that male victims of “love scams” do not exist. As you will discover if you try, though, stories about such people are much harder, sometimes almost impossible, to find. That remained true even when I deleted the original search term, woman, and replaced it by man; indeed many of the same stories kept popping up in both searches.

What is going on here? Surely the problem is not that all women are simple and/or foolish. To remind yourself of that, just think of what Potiphar’s wife did to Joseph, Delilah, to Samson, and Judith to Holofernes. Indeed we have the whole of history to suggest that men are as likely to fall for women’s wiles as the other way around, if not more so.

The real explanation must be as follows. Men on the average are considerably stronger than women. Certainly that is true in terms of physical strength; perhaps, in spite of all feminist attempts to prove the contrary, also in terms of aggression and dominance. As a result, when a woman is victimized by a man she is likely to attract sympathy and even love; she may, indeed find herself more attractive to men than previously.

For men, the situation is exactly the opposite. By presenting themselves as victims, hence as weak, foolish or both, they make themselves less attractive to women. Afraid of being despised, ridiculed or both, they are likely to shut up about what happened. Shutting up, they are much less likely to reach the headlines. As one seventeenth-century English judge put it, it was not his job to help idiots who could not prevent their wives form taking their money from them.

And so the story goes marching on. Wicked men attack poor, weak, witless women; poor, weak, witless women are attacked by wicked men. The outcome? The most intense hatred between men and women there has ever been. One that is bound to end in disaster both for men and for women.

I can see the Taliban laughing.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

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I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four—not 1984, but Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is the correct title—when I was still a teenager. It made a tremendous impression on me, with the result that I’ve read and re-read it many times since. Just recently I did so again, only to discover, once again, how spot-on George Orwell really was. Not for nothing have I been using the title of one of his columns, “As I Please,” as the motto of the present blog. What follows is an attempt to set forth some of the points on which he was right—and those on which he was not.

List of things Orwell did foresee.

– The partition of the world among three great states: To wit, Oceania, Eurasia (which, so far, remains divided into EU-nia and Russia) and Eastasia.

– The fact that these states are, or easily could be made, self-sufficient. Which means that they have no real reason to fight each other except mutual hatred, often artificially stirred up by propaganda.

– The fact that these states are always at some kind of war with each other. The importance, in this war, of air attacks on civilians and floating fortresses. Ask the people in Beijing, who are just now rehearsing attacks on the American variation of the fortresses.

– The fact that, since all the states have plenty of nuclear weapons, final victory is impossible. To avoid destruction, the states take care to ensure that the war in question remains limited to the periphery (what is known, today, as the “developing” world). One interesting omission, though; the only mention of India is as a battlefield. Apparently Orwell did not consider it capable of becoming a great power.

– Constant close supervision of each individual, made possible by the introduction of increasingly sophisticated technological devices so ubiquitous that there is practically no way of escaping them.

– The rise of thoughtcrime; even in “advanced” Western countries, some would say especially in “advanced” Western countries, there are any number of thoughts which, if you dare express them, will land you into trouble. Some of it very serious indeed. For example, the idea (in large parts of EU-nia) that mass immigration can be bad for a country and even lead to its destruction. Or the idea, popular in North Oceania, that certain groups in the population are culturally more inclined to commit more crimes than others; unless we speak of heterosexual white men, of course.

– Partly because both the state and the high-tech companies employ hundreds of thousands of censors, partly because of the sheer number of persons and organizations with access to the Net, distinguishing between truth and falsehood has become all but impossible.

– Thanks to Foucault and company, objectivity, invented by René Descartes about 350 years ago and developing into the real clue to the modern world, no longer exists. Especially in the humanities and the social sciences, knowledge has been turned into a mushy mess. The color of vomit.

– The rise, especially in legalese as well as the social sciences, of a form of Newspeak. A language replete with acronyms and consisting of long strings of nouns linked by very few verbs and often meaning almost nothing.

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– For visiting a prostitute, men (Party members) are punished. Judging by the number of complaints about sexual harassment etc., apparently far more women hate sex than we, misguided but horny men, ever suspected. To them sex is a disgusting thing, like an enema.

– Julia, the novel’s heroine, is practically the only female character. About 27 years old (but still referred to as a “girl”) and a member of the Outer Party, i.e not just a female “prole” beast of burden, she hates children and does not intend to have them. Ever.

– “Everyone always confesses” in the end. As shown by the fact that the vast majority of the criminal accused, fearing a trial whose outcome is almost certain (in my own country, fewer than 2 percent are acquitted) accept a plea bargain.

List of things Orwell did not foresee.

– The rise of organized feminism with its first, second, third and fourth waves. Nowhere in Nineteen Eighty-Four is there the slightest hint that such a thing exists or could exist. As Winston Smith, the book’s hero, says of Julia, she is only a rebel below the waist. Nor, on the other hand, does Orwell show the slightest understanding of the terrible effects sexual harassment has on poor, hapless women who, each time someone says boo, need lifetime psychological treatment (as the expense of the boo-er, of course).

– The rise of terrorism, unless it is state terrorism.

– The truly meteoric rise of computers and other means of surveillance. Technologically speaking, Nineteen Eighty-Four is rather conservative. The only real innovation is the telescreen, a device that enables its operators to watch those who are in front of it. . Considering what modern computers can do, life in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a picnic.

– In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the method used to make Winston love Big Brother is torture. Today, torture is often unnecessary. Instead, we witness the rise of biological- and brain science. It enables, or will soon enable, the state—the coldest of all cold monsters, as Nietzsche calls it—to interfere, not just with what we own, do, and think, but with what, biologically, we are.

*

Will things get better? I do not know. But definitely not before the worst comes along.

Thank God, I am 75 years old.

What We Cannot Know

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du Sautoy, What We Cannot Know, Kindle ed., 2016

This is perhaps the best book about the history and philosophy of science I have ever read—and, having taught the subject at the university level for a number of years, I have read quite some. The author is a professor of mathematics at Oxford. In 2008 the University appointed him to the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, which was all but tantamount to launching him into a new career. Judging by this book, he has done so with great success indeed.

*

To start at the beginning, the great strength of science has always been its ability to predict what given certain conditions, will happen in the future. On such and such a day, at such and such an hour, in such and such a place, there will be an eclipse lasting so and so many minutes or hours. Mix stuff X with stuff Y, and the outcome will be an explosion. So far, so good. In the hands of the philosopher Karl Popper (1892-1994) this ability to predict has been turned into the test as to whether or not a proposition or theory is scientific, an idea to which any modern scientist who hopes to publish his work must subscribe.

Enter chaos theory. Developed from the 1960s on, it centers on the question why many major physical events—tornadoes, for example, or earthquakes—are so devilishly hard to predict. The answer? Because, in many systems, very small initial changes can sometimes lead to enormously different outcomes. As, for example, when a buttery flapping its wings in Beijing combines with any number of other factors, some great some small, to cause a tornado in Florida. Another example, central to du Sautoy’s book, is provided by the throwing of a dice (or multiple dice, but there is no need to go into that here). No knowledge we can obtain, however accurate and however detailed, is ever likely to tell us which face a dice is going to land on the next time we throw it. Instead, all we can hope for is a statistic—namely that, assuming the dice is perfectly balanced and as we keep throwing it again and again, on the average one out of six throws will result in a six.

Next, what is the universe made of? The Greek philosopher Democritus believed it was material (that is why we call him a materialist). Using a knife to cut it up, the outcome would be smaller and smaller pieces of matter until, finally, we would find ourselves dealing with indivisible, a-tomos in Greek, particles forming the building blocks of the universe. Two and a half millennia have passed, and we still do not know whether he was right. On one hand particles much smaller than the atom—protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos, positrons, muons, bosons, quarks, and many others—have been discovered and keep being discovered, leading to the question whether the quest will ever end. On the other, of many if not all these particles it is not at all clear whether they are in fact particles. They are perhaps best described as flashes of light (electromagnetic waves) appearing now here, now there; in other words, as waves.

Much worse still, there is the Uncertainty Principle. First pronounced by Werner Heisenberg back in 1927, it tells us that we cannot know both the location of a particle and its momentum; the reason being that any attempt to focus on one of these qualities will cause the other to change. So much for determinism at the smallest level of them all.

Still staying with the universe, we want to know more about its genesis, its qualities, its size (if it has a size), and its ultimate fate. It is not that we have not been making progress; even as I write, man-made machines are exploring the surface of Mars. Whereas the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) once declared that we would never know what the oh-so-remote stars are made of, now spectroscopy enables us to do exactly that even for those that are billions of lightyears away. But other questions remain. Assuming that the Big Bang really did take place and is not a convenient fiction as the aether used to be, what exactly was it that “exploded”? What, if anything, did it explode into? Will the expansion of the universe that the Big Bang initiated go on forever, or will it one day come to an end and reverse itself, leading to a Big Crunch? Is our universe the only one that exists, or are there others? How about the possibility that other universes exist, not simultaneously but sequentially, one after another, each preceded by its own Big Bang and each ending in its own Big Crunch? Either way, are the remaining universes we are talking about subject to the same physical and mathematical laws as ours is? Or are they entirely different? Will we ever be able to observe them and communicate with them? In that case, will we benefit from doing so or will the outcome be our annihilation?

Starting at least as far back as Parmenides in the sixth century BCE, is has been widely believed that only God can create something out of nothing, Does that mean that the Big Bang, assuming it ever took place, provides proof of His existence? And what is this God? Is he eternal? If not, when and how did He come into being? Is He separate from the universe, or are the two one and the same? Was his creation of the Big Bang a one-time act, or did He go on interfering with the universe ever after? Can we communicate with him?

The Big Bang is supposed to have taken place, and the universe come into being, approximately 13.7 billion years ago. Referring to time, what does that mean? Did time exist before the Big Bang? Or didn’t it? What is time, anyhow? Does it have an objective existence the way space and mass do (at least du Sautoy does not seem to question their existence, though others have done so)? Or is it, to speak with Stephen Hawking, simply that which certain of our instruments measure?

And how about life? Many other researchers have worked on this question, trying to imagine, and to a very limited extent model, the conditions that might have led to its rise. However, for du Sautoy it seems to be of secondary importance, given that he only devotes remarkably little space to it. With him it is as if the mapping of DNA, and our ability–as exemplified, some say, by China’s modifying some genes so as to create the corona virus—to manipulate it to some extent, has solved the most important mysteries of all. Never mind that, so far, no one has been able to create even the simplest forms of life in a test tube; nor explain, for example, how a fetus develops from a blastula into a fully formed baby.
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As if to compensate for this, du Sautoy delves quite deeply into another aspect of life: namely, the fact that we are conscious, aware of our own existence, and capable of experiencing things. Precisely what is this consciousness? Are we the only animals who possess it? If not, how far “down the ladder of life” do we have to go before we hit on creatures that do not have it? Do primates have it? Do snails? Can there be such a thing as life that does not have consciousness as manifested, if not in the form of launching into a dialogue with itself, at any rate by the ability to feel some kind of pain? Looking at the problem from its other side, will we ever be able to build a conscious computer? Or must we forever put up with one that behaves as if it were conscious?

Closely tied to the question of consciousness is that of the free will. On its supposed existence rests our entire society; our education, our religion, our law (or, before we had law, taboos which individuals did or did not violate), our system of justice. Some would say that this applies to all societies; a society that does not assume that we are autonomous beings, at least so some extent, is inconceivable. But does the free will really exist? Or is it, as not just some ancient authors but some modern brain scientists as well claim, just an illusion? And if illusion it is, what are the implications for the abovementioned social phenomena? Will future criminals, tried for theft e.g, be able to save their hide by claiming that it was not them but the neurons in their brains that committed it? Suppose we succeed in building a computer possessing, as part of its consciousness, a free will; when it comes to law and justice will we treat it as we do humans?

Finally, math. In any inquiry into natural science, math makes a good starting point. That is because, starting at least as far back as Galileo, and in some ways going all the way to Pythagoras two millennia earlier, mathematics is the one great pillar on which all the natural sciences rest. So astronomy, so cosmology, so physics, and so chemistry; and so, increasingly, biology too. Wherever math reigns, we feel that we have reached some kind of unique insight or understanding. Wherever it does not, the mysterious quality known as “scientific” is either present only to a limited extent or altogether absent.

The difficulty is that, contrary to the usual view of math as the one science that can yield certainty, math itself is not without its problems. First, as du Sautoy himself is at pains to emphasize, much of it deals with things that do not really exist. Not just irrational numbers and imaginary numbers but perfect circles, straight lines, points that have no dimensions, movements proceeding in straight lines and at constant speeds, and much more. Second, there is the much-discussed, but so far unanswered, question why such artificial creations and abstractions should not only fit the physical world with which we are familiar but provide the best tools for analyzing it; in other words, why nature should allow herself to be governed by mathematics in these and other things.

Third, it has been shown—by Kurt Goedel, Einstein’s constant companion at Princeton during Einstein’s last years—that any mathematical system will necessarily contain propositions that are self-contradictory, unprovable, or both. Such as can only be resolved by drawing on propositions taken from outside that system, where the game starts afresh. No Baron von Muenchhausen pulling himself up by his bootstraps, in other words. To use another metaphor, it is as if we were living inside a Russian doll. No sooner do we succeed in gaining what we think is a complete understanding the innermost one than we discover that surrounding it on all sides is another doll; and so on and so on in a succession of dolls. One whose end, even assuming there is one, we cannot perceive.

*

Goedel did not develop his theories in a vacuum. Just one day before he first announced them a famous German mathematician named David Hilbert, in an address to the Society of German Scientists and Physicians, claimed that “we must know/we shall know.” In other words, that everything is in principle knowable; and that, given sufficient genius and hard work, it will end up by becoming known.

Certainly he was not the first scientist to fall victim to that delusion, at least in certain fields and for a certain time. Prominent others before him were Albert Michelson, who first measured the speed of light while simultaneously showing that there was no such thing as ether in which it moved. And William Thomson, aka Lord Kelvin, who calculated the absolute freezing point. Nor was he the last. Both Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein made similar claims. Hawking, in A Short History of Time when he wrote that the then current physicists’ model of the universe was getting so close to the ultimate truth as to leave fewer and fewer loose ends; Einstein, by famously claiming that “God does not play dice,” thus sticking to determinism and knowability as opposed to indeterminism and unknowability.

*

My mother used to say that a single fool can ask more questions than ten wise people can answer. That is true; not are the abovementioned questions by any means the only ones du Sautoy discusses. As a layman reading the book, all I can say is that I emphatically did not feel that any of them—at any rate, those I was able to understand—were of the kind fools might ask. To the contrary: many go down to the core of our existence, and many have important practical implications. Even those that do not—e.g what time is and whether, before the Big Bang, there was such a thing—sounded interesting to my ears. One reason for this is because the author, an expert on mathematics as the science that seems to underlie all the rest, is uniquely qualified to look not just at one of them but at them all. Another, because he writes in a fluent, fairly light-headed way complete with just enough stories, anecdotes, and jokes to keep the reader asking for more.

As du Sautoy, in his last chapter, keeps telling us: It is the deficiencies of knowledge, and our attempts to obtain it, which make up the essence of life by endowing it with a sense of purpose.

Highly recommended.

Conspiracies

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Historically, we are told, conspiracy theories are the outcome of stress. Each time things go wrong, or are perceived to be going wrong, some people will come up with all kinds of ideas as to why this happened and who is to blame. I hardly need to remind my readers that, with COVID-19 running amok over the world, conspiracy theories concerning the disease’s origin are floating around like confetti in air. The more so because the Net provides even the proverbial “common” man (or woman, I suppose, but this seems to be one male domain feminists are not in a hurry to invade) with an opportunity to spread his views. So I’ve done your work for you and collected some of the theories I could find.

  1. COVID originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, long known to be a center of pharmacological as well as biological warfare research. At some point something went wrong. A virus escaped from the lab where it was being either manufactured or modified. Each virus measures about one 120 nanometers (one millionth of a millimeter) on the average. The outcome? Perhaps 5.5 million dead so far.
  2. COVID did originate in a lab. However it was not located in Wuhan. Rather, it was a Canadian lab which first came up with the virus, only to have it stolen by Chinese scientists who were working there and took it to Wuhan in order to continue their experiments with it. The scientists later had their license to work in Canada revoked. Too late.
  3. The virus was created by the CIA, or the US Army, or some other equally nefarious American organization. Special mention in this context was made of Fort Detrick, Maryland, where this kind of research is being conducted and which has sometimes been named in connection with Anthrax and similar nice diseases. However, up to 200 other US labs spread all over the world may also be involved. This, of course, is the mirror image of No. 1 on the present list.
  4. The virus was created and spread by Jewish/Zionist/Israeli organizations out to emasculate the world in general and the Islamic part of it in particular. As has also been the case in some other countries, an Israeli vaccine against COVID now under development is itself said to be part of this campaign.
  5. COVID is being deliberately spread by members of the Muslim minorities in such countries as India and Britain in order, ultimately, to depopulate those countries and take over.
  6. COVID is part of a global attempt by global governments to expand their control over the global population.
  7. 7. COVID is part of a global attempt by global corporations to prevent the billions of people under their rule from expressing their resentment and weaken them.
  8. 8. COVID is a global attempt by left wingers to do away with global corporations and their power over the people everywhere.
  9. COVID is being spread by fifth-generation cellphones. This theory is said to have led to at least twenty attacks on mobile phone masts in Britain alone, not counting thirty or so confrontations with the technicians who were trying to install them. Causation apart, the spread of electronic communications has been blamed both for alleged attempts to under-state the effects of COVID and to exaggerate them.
  10. COVID came to us riding piggyback on meteorites arriving from outer space. According to one variation of the theory, it is part of an attempt by extraterrestrials to take over the earth.

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  11. Corona spreads by eating bats or snakes, both of which are sold for food in the abovementioned city of Wuhan.
  12. Bill Gates created COVID in order to sell more of the vaccines he and his corporations are developing.

All these theories, and many more like them, can easily be found on the Net. Many have been investigated at enormous length. No good evidence has ever been found for any of them, making them and their authors easy to debunk and ridicule. As a great many of them undoubtedly deserve to be.

Still I suggest you keep in mind two, and only two, sentences:

“Man is the conspiring animal” (John Larouche.)*

“No one believes there is a conspiracy to kill the emperor until he is killed” (the Emperor Domitian, before he himself fell victim to a conspiracy and was killed).

 

* A now deceased, self-appointed, leader of the Democratic Party and eternal candidate for US president who visited me at home when I lived in Germany.

Family and Civilization

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Carle Zimmerman, Family and Civilization, Washington DC, ICI, 2008 [1947].

I had my attention drawn to this book by a friend, Larry Kummer, editor of FabiusMaximus website. No sooner had I opened it than I realized I had a masterpiece on my hands. One, moreover, which, at a time when the average American household is smaller than ever before, half of all marriages end in divorce, and only one half of all children are fortunate enough to be raised by their biological parents, seems more opportune than ever before. Rather than review the book myself, I decided to post the splendid introduction to the 2008 edition, written by Allan C. Carlson. Not before receiving his permission first, of course.

*

HAVING TAKEN A BREAK FROM planning the World Congress of Families IV, an international assembly that took place in 2007 and focused on Europe’s “demographic winter” and global family decline, I turned to consider again Carle Zimmerman’s magnum opus, Family and Civilization (1947). And there, near the end of chapter 8 in his list of sure signs of social catastrophe, I read: “Population and family congresses spring up among the lay population as frequently and as verbose as Church Councils [in earlier centuries].” It is disconcerting to find one’s work labeled, accurately I sometimes fear, as a symptom rather than as a solution to the crisis of our age. Such is the prescience and the humbling wisdom of this remarkable book.

With regard to the family, Carle Zimmerman was the most important American sociologist of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. His only rival for this label would be his friend, occasional coauthor, and colleague Pitirim Sorokin. Zimmerman was born to German-American parents and grew up in a Cass County, Missouri, village. Sorokin grew up in Russia, became a peasant revolutionary and a young minister in the brief Kerensky government, and barely survived the Bolsheviks, choosing banishment in 1921 over a death sentence. They were teamed up at the University of Minnesota in 1924 to teach a seminar on rural sociology. Five years later, this collaboration resulted in the volume Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology, and a few years thereafter in the multivolume A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology. These books directly launched the Rural Sociological Section of the American Sociological Association and the new journal Rural Sociology.

In all this activity, Zimmerman focused on the family virtues of farm people. “Rural people have greater vital indices than urban people,” he reported. Farm people had earlier and stronger marriages, more children, fewer divorces, and “more unity and mutual attachment and engulfment of the personalit[ies]” of its members than did their urban counterparts. Zimmerman’s thought ran sharply counter to the primary thrust of American sociology in this era. The so-called Chicago School dominated American social science, led by figures such as William F. Ogburn and Joseph K. Folsom. They focused on the family’s steady loss of functions under industrialization to both governments and corporations.

As Ogburn explained, many American homes had already become “merely parking places for parents and children who spend their active hours elsewhere.” Up to this point, Zimmerman would not have disagreed. But the Chicago School went on to argue that such changes were inevitable and that the state should help complete the process. Mothers should be mobilized for full-time employment, small children should be put into collective day care, and other measures should be adopted to effect “the individualization of the members of society.”

Where the Chicago School was neo-Marxist in orientation, Zimmerman looked to a different sociological tradition. He drew heavily on the insights of the mid-nineteenth-century French social investigator Frederic Le Play. The Frenchman had used detailed case studies, rather than vast statistical constructs, to explore the “stem family” as the social structure best adapted to insure adequate fertility under modern economic conditions. Le Play had also stressed the value of noncash “home production” to a family’s life and health. Zimmerman’s book from 1935, Family and Society, represented a broad application of Le Play’s techniques to modern America. Zimmerman claimed to find the “stem family” alive and well in America’s heartland: in the Appalachian-Ozark region and among the German- and Scandinavian-Americans in the Wheat Belt.

More importantly, Le Play had held to an unapologetically normative view of the family as the necessary center of critical human experiences, an orientation readily embraced by Zimmerman. This mooring explains his frequent denunciations of American sociology in the pages of Family and Civilization. “Most of family sociology,” he asserts, “is the work of amateurs” who utterly fail to comprehend the “inner meaning of their subject.” Zimmerman mocks the Chicago School’s new definition of the family as “a group of interacting personalities.” He lashes out at Ogburn for failing to understand that “the basis of familism is the birth rate.” He denounces Folsom for labeling Le Play’s “stem” family model as “fascistic” and for giving new modifiers—such as “democratic,” “liberal,” or “humane”—to otherwise disparate civilizations to reveal deeper and universal social traits.

To guide his investigation, Zimmerman asks: “Of the total power in [a] society, how much belongs to the family? Of the total amount of control of action in [a] society, how much is left for the family?” By analyzing these levels of family autonomy, Zimmerman identifies three basic family types: (1) the trustee family, with extensive power rooted in extended family and clan; (2) the atomistic family, which has virtually no power and little field of action; and (3) the domestic family (a variant of Le Play’s “stem” family), in which a balance exists between the power of the family and that of other agencies. He traces the dynamics as civilizations, or nations, move from one type to another. Zimmerman’s central thesis is that the “domestic family” is the system found in all civilizations at their peak of creativity and progress, for it “possesses a certain amount of mobility and freedom and still keeps up the minimum amount of familism necessary for carrying on the society.”
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So-called social history has exploded as a discipline since the early 1960s, stimulated at first by the French Annales school of interpretation and then by the new feminist historiography. Thousands upon thousands of detailed studies on marriage law, family consumption patterns, premarital sex, “gay culture,” and gender power relations now exist, material that Zimmerman never saw (and some of which he probably never even could have imagined). All the same, this mass of data has done little to undermine his basic argument. Zimmerman focuses on hard, albeit enduring truths. He affirms, for example, the virtue of early marriage: “Persons who do not start families when reasonably young often find that they are emotionally, physically, and psychologically unable to conceive, bear, and rear children at later ages.” The author emphasizes the intimate connection between voluntary and involuntary sterility, suggesting that they arise from a common mindset that rejects familism. He rejects the common argument that the widespread use of contraceptives would have the beneficial effect of eliminating human abortion. In actual practice, “the population which wishes to reduce its birth rate … seems to find the need for more abortions as well as more birth control.” Indeed, the primary theme of Family and Civilization is fertility. Zimmerman underscores the three functions of familism as articulated by historic Christianity: fides, proles, and sacramentum; or “fidelity, childbearing, and indissoluble unity.”

While describing at length the social value of premarital chastity, the health-giving effects of marriage, the costs of adultery, and the social devastation of divorce, Zimmerman zeros in on the birth rate. He concludes that “we [ever] more clearly abandon the role of proles or childbearing as the main stem of the family.” The very act of childbearing, he notes, “creates resistances to the breaking-up of the marriage.” In short, “the basis of familism is the birth rate. Societies that have numerous children have to have familism. Other societies (those with few children) do not have it.” This gives Zimmerman one easy measure of social success or decline: the marital fertility rate. A familistic society, he says, would average at least four children born per household.

Given current American debates, we should note that Zimmerman was also pro-immigration. In his era Anglo-Saxon populations around the globe had turned against familism, rejecting children. Familism survived in 1948 only on the borders of the Anglo-Saxon world—in “South Ireland, French Canada, and Mexico”—and in the American regions settled by 40 million non-English immigrants, mainly Celts and Germans. However, “when the doors of immigration were closed (first by war, later by law [1924], and finally by the disruption of familistic attitudes in the European sources themselves), the antifamilism of the old cultured classes … finally began to have effect.” In short, “within the same generation America became a world power and lost her fundamental familistic future.”

Rejecting the Marxist dialectic, Zimmerman asserts that the “domestic family” would not be the agent of its own decay. When trade increased or migration occurred, the domestic family could in fact grow stronger. Instead, decay came from external factors such as changes in religious or moral sentiments. The domestic family was also vulnerable to intellectual challenges by advocates for the atomistic family. Zimmerman was not optimistic in 1947 about America’s or, more broadly, Western civilization’s future. Drawing on his work from the 1920s and ’30s, he finds signs of continued family health in rural America: “Our farm and rural families are still to a large extent the domestic type”; their “birthrates are relatively higher.” All the same, he knew from the historical record that the pace of change could be rapid. Once familism had weakened among elites, “all the cultural elements take on an antifamily tinge.” He continues: The advertisements, the radio, the movies, housing construction, leasing of apartments, jobs—everything is individualized. … [T]he advertisers depict and appeal to the fashionably small family. … In the motion pictures, the family seems to be motivated by little more than self-love. … Dining rooms are reduced in size. … Children’s toys are cheaply made; they seldom last through the interest period of one child, much less several. … The whole system is unfamilistic.

Near the end of Family and Civilization, Zimmerman predicts that “the family of the immediate future will move further toward atomism,” that “unless some unforeseen renaissance occurs, the family system will continue headlong its present trend toward nihilism.” Indeed, he predicts that the United States, along with the other lands born of Western Christendom, would “reach the final phases of a great family crisis between now and the last of this century.” He adds: “The results will be much more drastic in the United States because, being the most extreme and inexperienced of the aggregates of Western civilization, it will take its first real ‘sickness’ most violently.”

In the short run, Zimmerman was wrong. Like every other observer writing in the mid-1940s, he failed to see the “marriage boom” and “the baby boom” already stirring in the United States (and with equal drama in a few other places, such as Australia). As early as 1949, two of his students reported that, for the first time in U.S. demographic history, “rural non-farm” (read “suburban”) women had higher fertility than in either urban or rural-farm regions. By 1960, Zimmerman concluded in his book, Successful American Families, that nothing short of a social miracle had occurred in the suburbs: This Twentieth Century … has produced an entirely new class of people, neither rural nor urban. They live in the country but have nothing to do with agriculture. … Never before in history have a free urban and sophisticated people made a positive change in the birth rate as have our American people this generation.” By 1967, near the end of his career, Zimmerman even abandoned his agrarian ideals. The American rural community had “lost its place as a home for a folk.” Old images of “rural goodness and urban badness” were now properly forgotten. The demographic future lay with the renewed “domestic families” replicating in the suburbs.

In the long run, however, the pessimism of Family and Civilization over the family in America in the second half of the twentieth century was fully justified. Even as Zimmerman wrote the elegy for rural familism noted above, the peculiar circumstances that had forged the suburban “family miracle” were rapidly crumbling. Old foes of the “domestic family” and friends of “atomism” came storming back: feminists, sexual libertines, neo-Malthusians, the “new” Left. By the 1970s, a massive retreat from marriage was in full swing, the marital birthrate was in free fall, illegitimacy was soaring, and nonmarital cohabitation was spreading among young adults. While some of these trends moderated during the late 1990s, the statistics have all worsened again since 2000. Zimmerman was right: America is taking its first real “sickness” most violently.

Any solution to our civilization’s family crisis, he argued, must begin “in the hands of our learned classes.” This group must come to understand the possibilities of “a recreated familism.” Accordingly, it is wholly appropriate for this new edition of Family and Civilization to appear from ISI Books in 2008. Zimmerman wrote the volume at the height of his powers of observation and analysis and as a form of scholarly prophecy. The times cry out for a new generation of “learned” readers for this exceptional book. It is important, too, to remember Zimmerman’s discovery that it had proven possible in times past for a “familistic remnant” to become a “vehicular agent in the reappearance of familism.” Hope for the future, Zimmerman concludes, “lay in the making of [voluntary] familism and childbearing [once again] the primary social duties of the citizen.” With the advantage of another sixty years, we can conclude that here he spoke the most essential, and the most difficult, of truths.

*

Need I say anything more?

The General in General

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I’ve just learnt that the new German government is preparing to put a former Bundeswehr general (he used to command a tank brigade) in charge of the country’s COVID-19 Crisis Staff. As a fairly well known military historian, it has been my good (or bad?) fortune to meet quite some generals in many of the world’s countries where I was invited to speak. Germany included. So when my editor, Andreas Rosenfelder, asked me to do a short article about generals—a sort of Jungian analysis of the architype, I suppose—I jumped at the opportunity.
Some members of the species I met were polite, thoughtful, soft-spoken and possessed of a fine sense of humor. As, for example, the late Colin Powell, who during the first Gulf War served as Chief of the Joint Chief of Staffs and later became President Bush Jr.’s secretary of state, did. Others, who in this essay will remain unnamed, were unpleasant and even offensive. At least one was a real bastard. Perhaps that was because, at the time we met, he had just been told that, contrary to his expectations, the post he was then holding would be his last. Too much of a roughneck, not sufficiently good as a diplomat, people said. Understandably, he was in a bad mood.
To generalize from this, on day X you are a great man. With thousands and even tens of thousands of soldiers obeying your orders and a staff that laughs at every joke you make. One general told me that, before he was promoted, he did not know what a good sense of humor he had. If you live on base, on day X+1 everyone can watch you as, having retired, you are evicted from your nice government-owned quarters. Trailed by your wife, you find yourself carrying your belongings to a waiting van. Some onlookers, especially those who took your place, enjoy the spectacle. But for you it is not fun.
Generals I met tended to have several things in common. First, they had big egos—they have to. Second, many of them look down on their civilian opposite numbers. In Germany in the bad old days before 1945, General Staff officers sometimes referred to the foreign ministry as The Idiot House. Not always without reason, I should add. One former Israeli general, a bona fide genius in fields such as math, computers and operations research, told me more or less the same about the Knesset of which, following his retirement, he was briefly a member. Only to run for his life as soon as he could.
Third, though there are exceptions (with, at their head, Helmut von Moltke Sr.) very few generals are scholarly types. I even suspect that the reason why some of them embarked on a military career was precisely because they thought, often mistakenly, that it would not involve them in much reading and writing. Some went so far as to express their contempt for scribblers such as myself. But not all. I vividly remember an evening I spent at Camberley, England, the base where the British Army’s Staff College was located. It being dark and foggy, like some figure out of a Brothers Grimm tale I lost my way. Blindly, I wandered about the base until I saw a light. I went up, and knocked at the door. It opened and I found myself standing in front of the commander of the Army’s officer education system, General Sir Charles Waters.
It was winter and, instead of shoes, he was wearing white socks. He recognized me and asked me to come in. He sat me down, gave me a glass of sherry, and pointed to the eight books he was reading at the same time—if memory serves me right, most of them about nonmilitary subjects. Then he told me that his next job would be that of commander in chief, British Army, Northern Ireland (I think this was in 1989, and the struggle with the IRA terrorists was still ongoing). In this post, he said, he would try to make sure that as few people as possible would die. On both sides. I thought then, and think now, that it was a very sensible approach indeed. As became clear some years later when, during the watch of another British general I knew, Sir Rupert Smith, a peace agreement was signed.
Fourth, given how rapidly complex modern technology changes, generals are used—as they have to be–to dealing with things they do not understand. Is that the reason why Germany’s new government is considering General Carsten Breuer for the job? Makes you wonder.
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There are also a few female generals. A close friend of mine, himself a former general, prefers them to male ones. Why? Because some of them have nice legs. Much better than beer bellies, he says
Here are some other considerations that people may find interesting.
First, generals are used to move from one job to another (starting with Napoleon, in all modern armies, officers, to gain promotion, are rotated between commanding units, staff work, and training).
Second, they tend to be good organizers. As, for example, Leslie Groves, the general who ran the Manhattan Project, was.
Third, they tend to be very hard workers. As a rule modern armies, with the American one at their head, do not tolerate layabouts. If there is no work to be done, sure as hell they will create it. Neither Kutusov, who commanded the Tsar’s armies against Napoleon in 1812, nor “Pere” Joffre, who saved France from the 1914 German invasion, would have made it today.
Fourth generals, assigned to a civilian job, may do very well. As, for example, Dwight Eisenhower did. Or take two of my own country’s generals, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. Rabin played a crucial part in the great Israeli victory of June 1967; later he became a good prime minister. Sharon was perhaps the greatest warrior Israel ever produced, and he too turned out to be a good and courageous prime minister. By contrast Ehud Barak, a protégé of Rabin’s and a superb soldier (special forces), made a less than mediocre one.
Finally, never forget that generals have the hardest job of all. To wit, sending men to their death. America’s general George Patton was not exactly known for his delicate feelings. Yet on one occasion, visiting the wounded in hospital, he broke down and said that, if only he had been a better general, these poor people would not have been where they were. Even if the story is fake, which it may well be, still it shows what being a general is really like.
Briefly, generals are a tribe of their own. There is no saying what a general may do; in that respect they are much like the rest of us. To repeat, I do not know why the German Government chose General Breuer for the job. So all I can say is, good luck.

On War

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Clauzewitz in cyber

Some time ago, a Polish TV station asked me for an interview. I found the questions they asked to be quite interesting; so much so that I decided to put them to my readers and answer them in a slightly more organized way.

Here they are.

  1. Modern public opinion is convinced that globalization rules out wars. What can wars look like in times when everyone knows everything about each other and often everyone cooperates?

 

  1. I am not so sure about global public opinion. I am, however, convinced that, if that is indeed what people believe, they could not be more wrong. Just look at the history of the twentieth century. From 1900 to the present there has been hardly a single day in which peace reigned all over the world; including not one but two of the largest and most deadly armed conflicts ever fought. The number of wars that took place since 1945 alone has been estimated at 200 or so. Of those 200, a few are ongoing even now. Perhaps more seriously still, not one of the causes of war been eliminated. Not one! Not human nature. Not fear of an increasing powerful enemy, as Thucydides and Thomas Hobbes thought. Not economic competition, as Marx and Lenin believed. Not religion. Not nationalism. Not the sheer ruthless ambition of certain leaders who, like Louis XIV, believed that going to war was the suitable thing for a prince to do. And not the absence of a powerful and widely recognized judiciary capable of deciding conflicts and have its decisions implemented.

As to knowing everything—that is simply not true. Surprise attacks have always been possible and remain so today. Why? Because, while many of the facts concerning each country’s intentions and capabilities are often known, interpreting them—deciding how they are linked, what they mean, and where they are leading–is often very difficult. Example: they say that, in 1973, Israeli intelligence knew that a quarter of a million Egyptian soldiers were massed on the Suez Canal. Rumor has it that they even knew the name of every Egyptian pilot’s girlfriend. The only thing they did not know was that those 250,000 were going to attack within 24 hours.

Concerning interstate cooperation, do you really believe it is greater (or smaller) today than it was, say, back in 1795 when Prussia, Russia and Austria divided Poland among themselves?

  1. Do the thoughts of old theorists of war like Clausewitz remain valid for the 21st century?

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  1. Many years ago I wrote an article about exactly this question. I called it, “The Eternal Clausewitz,” and you can still find it on the Internet. The argument was that plenty of military theorists, seeking to be of practical use to commanders, have focused on the question, how to successfully wage war. Now this is a question the answer to which depends on circumstances, specifically including rapidly changing technology. As a result, in the great majority of cases hardly had their work been published than it became out of date.

Clausewtiz, ”the philosopher in uniform” [philosoph im Waffenrock] as he has been called, took a different approach. He did not try to teach commanders how to wage war. Instead he focused on the following two questions: what war is, and what it is waged for. The first question enabled him to identify the most important characteristics of war: such as its strategic nature—the fact that it is a duel between two sides, each of whom is free to do as he pleases—its tendency towards escalation, the role of emotional factors as opposed to merely intellectual ones, the fact that the defense and not the offense is the stronger form of war, the role played by uncertainty and chance, and so on. The second pushed him towards the most famous sentence he ever wrote, namely that war is the continuation of politics (here understood in the broadest sense possible) with an admixture of other means.

So, yes. Much of Clausewitz’s famous book, On War, still retains much of its relevance right down to the present day.

  1. How have the Internet and digitization changed war? Isn’t it true that on-line operations, being as difficult to detect as they are, hold the advantage over physical ones?

 

  1. The Net and digitization have changed war in the following ways. First, they enable war to be waged from any telephone link to any other. In other words, from any point against any point on earth; and this, regardless of distance, intervening geographical features (mountains, deserts, oceans) or movement. Second, not being waged with the aid of physical movement but at the speed of light, they can make their effects felt instantaneously. Third, as you say, it is often very difficult to determine who is responsible for what move.

Whether, in the conduct of cyberwar, the defense still retains is advantage over the offense is uncertain. But cyberwar does share many other characteristics of war on Clausewitz’s list. Including its strategic nature—move, countermove, counter-counter move, and so on—its tendency to escalate, the role played by uncertainty—one never knows what the enemy is going to do next–its role as a servant of politics, and so on.

All in all, I’d argue that it leaves Clausewitz as relevant as he had ever been.

Hardly a Clever Thing to Do

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25 November, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (why against women? World-wide, far more men than women die a violent death) is coming along. Focusing on Israel, between 2019 and 2020 the number of women who called the hotline complaining about domestic violence is said to have risen 31.5 percent. Compared to a year earlier, the May 2020 number of battered (or, at any rate, claiming to have been battered) women asking to enroll in a shelter went up 27 percent. The number of femicides went up from 20 to 26, 13 of whom were killed by their spouses. That of attempted femicides went from 2 to 14—a seven hundred percent increase, no less. The numbers go on and on. I have neither the time nor the inclination to check each one of the world’s 200-odd countries. From the few cases that I did check, though, it would seem that the situation in them is hardly different.

Attempts to explain the phenomenon vary. One school of thought has it that corona is forcing more people to spend more of their time at home where they are in close, sometimes inescapable, contact with their apparently not so congenial spouses. People get on each other’s nerves, leading to violence. Another focuses on the economic hardship that corona has helped bring about in many cases. Businesses have closed, employees have been fired. Nothing like penury, or the fear of it, to make people quarrel.

Supported by two decades of research and countless publications I wrote about various aspects of the problem, and always assuming the data are genuine and not faked or doctored by all kinds of feminists, I have two other explanations to offer. One is that women who for any reason dislike their male spouses or acquaintances have learnt how to harness the system and make it work for their own benefit. Not just for legitimate causes, but to settle all kinds of accounts, obtain compensation, explain how they got pregnant, and simply draw attention to themselves. Confident that they will not be punished—regulations issued by Israel’s Ministry of Justice actually prohibit prosecutors from tackling women found to serve bear false charges—they do as they please. For launching a complaint that a woman beat them up, men can be, and have been, arrested. For daring to defend themselves in court, they have been execrated. As, by the way, their lawyers have also been.

Second, for decades now men have been humiliated and discriminated against. It all starts at kindergarten where toddlers, barely out of their diapers, are taught that girls are sacrosanct and should never be annoyed or touched in any way. Even in the face of provocation. It goes on at school where boys, subjected to “sex education” are taught that they are, all of them, potential rapists; it goes on throughout young (and by no means only young) peoples’ lives. So defective, so one sided is some of the “education” in question that, having undergone it, one sixteen-year old boy I know had never even heard the word syphilis mentioned.

Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the tuberculosis germs a minimum cialis 20mg tablets click over here of six months. This therapy is given by a device that comfortingly perhaps look likes a computer mouse which passes on sound waves at a very low pressure. generic cialis prescriptions As more blood flows in, the level viagra samples no prescription of pressure enhances and the penile region gets stiffer. There are pills in the online market for erectile dysfunction but also cures different types of sexual sildenafil generic viagra dysfunction. When the time to be conscripted comes, Israeli men serve thirty-six months, Israeli women barely twenty-too. For a woman, to escape conscription altogether is also much easier. All she has to do is to declare she is religious; that done, the military are prohibited from following up and checking. In large part because of women’s physical weakness, the combat arms consist almost entirely of men. A handful of pilots apart, no IDF woman has even been sent to fight in enemy territory where, which heaven forbid, she might be taken prisoner and treat as captive women often have been. By contrast, a huge proportion of the cushy slots—primarily in intelligence and administration—are held by women. In proportion to their numbers, women also find it easier to earn a commission. Whereas men are often called up for reserve duty, in the case of women this hardly happens. In all the forty years I spent teaching at two different Israeli universities, not a single female student ever missed a single class for that reason.

At their wedding, Jewish men are required to sign a standard document known as Ketuba. It obliges them to provide their brides with “food, clothing, and [sexual] fulfilment;” a woman, by contrast, does not have to commit herself to anything. As long as the marriage lasts, public opinion always gives women the option of not working; whereas men who do not work and/or keep their families fed can expect to be treated with contempt. Men work longer hours, and in harder, dirtier, and more dangerous jobs than women do. Women retire at an earlier age than men.

When the time for divorce comes—in Israel as in other “advanced” countries, two thirds of all divorces are initiated by women—fathers of young children in particular are very likely to lose custody. Whether or not they do so, chances are they will be made to pay. As the existence of ads aimed specifically at such men shows, not seldom to the point where they are left practically penniless. And not seldom even though their spouses are much better off than they themselves are. As cases—and there are quite a few of them—when men, having killed their spouses, do not try to escape but either turn themselves in immediately or commit suicide show, some men are being driven to despair, even madness.

But nothing lasts forever. As I have told my readers several times, I am a Hegelian. By that I mean that I see social life—history—as unfolding, not in a straight line but in zig-zags: action, reaction, action, and so on. Could it be that the rise—supposing it is real and not just a figment of feminist propaganda—in femicide is at least partly a reaction to the way Israel, a Western society, has been (miss)treating men over the last few decades?  

Don’t get me wrong. I oppose femicide—and viricide, a term no one else seems to be using–as much as anyone else. I look forward to the day when social life improves to the point they, as well as the death penalty, are eliminated. Meanwhile, though, the world is what it is. As the trends seem to show, in their attacks on men women, with feminists at their head, have gone much too far. Considering that it is only men who can defend them against other men, hardly a clever thing to do.