The Leader said: “Mindful of my own
shortcomings, I have always attributed them to some other person”. (The New Analects)
Poststructuralism
has taught that the meaning of any text depends on context and, since context
is infinite, a text has an infinite number of meanings. ‘Reader Response’
theory taught us that the meaning of a text resides not in the text but in its
readers, who are free to attribute to a text any meaning that they find
compelling. The fact that this doctrine is not generally accepted, being
repugnant to both common-sense and the law, among other things, has not
prevented its finding high favour, even in our most prestigious universities. Quos deus vult perdere…
Being
an academic myself, I therefore feel authorised to present this new translation
of the Lun Yu (The Analects of Confucius), a patriarchal, reactionary text I first
learned to read in Classical Chinese when a student in the Cambridge Faculty of
Oriental Studies, over fifty years ago, under the guidance of old-fashioned
scholars who naively believed that it was possible to ascribe a true meaning to
a text. They had not yet – poor, misguided souls – encountered Deconstruction.
Nor did they know, not having read Borges or Pierre Menard, that the only
adequate way of translating The Analects
would be to render it into the original Classical Chinese, without deviating in
the slightest from the accepted text.
The
context of this translation is the postmodern world and its morality. Si monumentum requieris, circumspice. The
meaning that now emerges from this text is clearly one that the age demands and
fully countenances. We get the philosophy we deserve and deserve the philosophy
we do not get. Science has aided and abetted our confusion. The now
authoritative Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics tells us that the
wave packet does not collapse. Instead, all possibilities are realised and
trillions of new universes are being formed every nano-second. Somewhere,
therefore, there is a Lun Yu like
this one and a Confucius who said exactly what he says in this text. Who could
ask for more? Not even Pierre Menard.
I
dedicate The New Analects to al my
obscurantist Nietzschean and Derridean colleagues who teach their students that
all texts and their translations are equal, being equally meaningless in a
meaningless Multiverse, where nothing is certain except bodies, sex and Power.
Since we appear to be rapidly heading towards a new computerised Fascism, this
translation should prove useful for future Leaders, sardonic Übergruppenführeren wearing Death’s Head
insignia, who will soon deconstruct us and our illusory values, even as
Baudrillard and his fellow nihilists are telling us that nothing is really
happening in our prison house of language. As one of Franco’s generals
presciently cried: “Viva le muerte!” The
coming decades look set to fulfil his wish.
ertain
cultures (e.g. Japan)
seem to produce charming, attractive women as naturally as a rose bush produces
roses. Others (e.g. Hong Kong) produce mainly
stinging nettles. A particularly dangerous plant is found in the Philippines. Though
its flowers are often gorgeous, its thorns are poisonous and can inflict fatal wounds.
It is a current truism that men are
reticent and tongue-tied (does no one read poetry these days?) while women
freely express their emotions. I have not found this to be so.
Beautiful women are notoriously high-handed
towards men. It is surprising how much more tolerant of them they become as
they grow older.
A woman who feels herself intellectually
inferior to the man she is involved with – though not many do – generally resents
him bitterly. Sooner or later, she will strike hard at him. This is so even if
she has no pretensions to intellectuality herself and he is recognized as
outstanding. Many women prefer stupid men, for then they can both manipulate
and despise them – an irresistible combination. Men, of course, have always
preferred to marry good-looking bimbos. Luckily there is more than enough stupidity
to go round for all of us.
Men seldom marry women cleverer than
themselves, for they are frightened of them. If they do, they are either quite
unaware of it or else almost childishly proud of their wives.
“Women love men for their defects,’
said Wilde. They do so for two reasons. Firstly, they hope to reform them;
secondly, they feel superior to the poor idiots.
David once stupidly asked his first
wife why she had never told him she loved him. Surprised, she replied that it
had never occurred to her to do so. Indeed, she could not see the point of it.
He learnt later that she reserved such confessions for her lovers. She had a
view of marriage reminiscent of Restoration comedy. “Husband! Odious word!
Pray, never mention it.”
Many women prefer men younger than
themselves. It helps them to regain the illusion of youth. This is true even of
women in their twenties.
A brilliant medical scientist in his
late thirties hates his mother because she neglected him shamefully when young,
even consigning him to an orphanage. He treats his numerous girl friends
brutally, especially those who try to mother him. The only women he respects
are those who treat him even more brutally than he treats them. He is thus
unconsciously honouring his mother.
Some men dwell constantly on their
former lovers, like an oyster turning grit into a pearl. Women almost never do
so, for they are more practical and less sentimental than men, knowing there is
no point in crying over split milk, especially if they have split it
themselves. No woman could ever have written A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The nearest feminine counterpart to
this is Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,
a comparatively minor work. (The night after writing this, I saw Lessing on TV
mentioning this very book! She said it was a historical statement,
misinterpreted as a feminist tract.)
A young man does not realize that
often, if he wants to keep his girlfriend, he should be charmingly attentive to
her mother. Sometimes, however, he does so because, subconsciously, it is the
mother he wants and not her daughter. He then marries the wrong woman – and his
mother-in-law, subconsciously, never forgives him for it.
A young man of my acquaintance was
judged and found wanting by his first loves’ steely-eyed mother. The daughter
therefore rejected him, only to inflict disgrace upon her strait-laced family a
year later by bearing an illegitimate child to a plausible Lothario whom the
mother had approved of. This was, perhaps, the daughter’s unconscious revenge
upon her mother. The daughter died young, as though to apologize to her mother –
or to punish her further. The mother buried her daughter alongside her own
three husbands and lived well into her nineties. This is not a world for the
sensitive or the faint-hearted.
Some men are compelled to transfer
their entire libido from their mother to their first love. This is fatal,
because not only will they turn against their mothers, but when their first
love rejects them – as she is almost certain to do, given the Oedipal intensity
of their passion – they will spend the rest of their lives hating her, often
without realizing it. Like a piece of iron placed next to a compass, this
Oedipal derangement will send them off course irrevocably.
Some men are so obtuse and conceited
that they frequently believe that a woman is fond of them or even in love with
them, when actually she dislikes or despises them. Women never make such a
mistake about men.
The rarest of women is the
spiritually intellectual. At one time, this species was confided almost
entirely to the Continent, especially to France
and Italy.
One thinks of Maria Ardinghelli, Emilie du Chatelet, Laura Bassi, Maria Agnesi and
others. Even rarer is the beautiful, multi-talented, spiritually intellectual.
While I was still in my early fifties, one of my
wife’s friends used to enquire with false solicitude about my mental health. “Is
he senile yet?” she would ask my wife, hopefully. She herself was only six
years younger than I. This woman could never conceal her contempt for, and
dislike of, men. Her own husband, not surprisingly, died in his fifties,
perhaps because he was tired of hearing her make the same enquiry about him.
She is still flourishing, though slightly senile.
An elderly divorcee of my
acquaintance used to exclaim “Men!” whenever anyone of that sex did anything to
displease her – and she was easily displeased. She had, she implied, through a lifetime
of diligent research, single-handedly uncovered the cause of all the evils in
the world.
Women are supposed to be sensitive,
gentle and caring. On the whole, I have not found them so, though there are
some rare exceptions. My mother was highly intelligent and sadistic, with a vinegarish
disposition and a tongue like a serpent’s. This
should have prepared me for my later relationships with women. My very first
girlfriend spent her time putting me down, often publicly. A devout Catholic,
she informed me at least once a week that I was destined for hell-fire, which,
oddly, did nothing to cool my ardour. Built like a pocket battle-ship, she was
an ardent sportswoman. Once, when I was not playing singles tennis to a
standard high enough for her satisfaction, she simply walked off the court,
leaving me red-faced and discomfited before my amused friends. At fifteen, this
can scar. Why did I associate with such an athletic virago? Presumably, because
she exuded an effortless superiority, founded on the flimsiest of foundations,
which I must have somehow admired, mistaking it for genuine worth. Why did she
associate with a bookish boy like me, a year her junior? I can see now that it
was because (a) I did most of her homework and (b) she enjoyed humiliating me.
I heard she eventually married someone who did not play tennis at all. I occasionally
wonder how her husband is faring, only to remind myself that he has by now
almost certainly run away, divorced her, or died.
David had a teenage girlfriend,
Barbara, who always called him ‘Stupe’, though she herself, expensively
schooled, was near the bottom of her class, while he had topped his State in
his HSC and was doing brilliantly at Cambridge.
She came up to Cambridge
to see him and was sulky about his being there, for she disliked being outdone in
anything. One the eve of his twenty-first birthday, she sent him a pencilled
note written on a torn-off page – the sort of thing one might leave for the
milkman – saying, “I’m ending this relationship. Goodbye!” The fact that she
had scrawled such a missive (and in pencil!) angered him, for it implied that
he was not even worth a letter. Though he did not realise it at the time, he
was lucky to escape from such an accomplished young sadist. David told me
ruefully that he had richly deserved the nickname that Barbara had bestowed on
him, for he should have dumped her the moment she began calling him a fool.
Relationships cannot thrive without intellectual parity and mutual respect, yet
few of us when young are interested in the former, which sooner or later lead
inevitably to the loss of the latter.
arzan
comes home and says to Jane, ‘I’ve had a rough day. It’s a jungle out there!’ I
like this joke because I feel it’s true. The jokes we appreciate most, those we
remember best, are often indicators of how we feel about life. Sometimes, of
course, we remember them for other reasons, such as their being brilliantly
witty. But the latter are rare.
Bette Davis said of a woman she
detested: ‘She’s the original good time who’s been had by all’. This witticism
was later attributed to Kenneth Tynan, in a slightly amended form. Wit is
often, like a cash cheque, easy to pass off as one’s own. Who knows whether the
above gem really originated with Bette Davis or with someone else? Who cares?
How many of Groucho Marx’s witticisms, for example, really emanated from him
and not from his script writer?
Our favourite jokes, those we
remember and tell to others, reveal so much about us that we should really not
tell them at all. This applies particularly to jokes about sex.
A recent poll revealed that
Australian women prize a sense of humour in a man more highly than they prize
wealth, though not as highly as they prize a well-developed body. I am quite
sure there were very fee Chinese or South-East Asian women included in this
poll. As a Philippine acquaintance of ours remarked, ‘As soon as I learnt he
was rich, I fell head over heals in love with him’. The frightening thing was,
she was telling the truth.
ravel broadens the mind – provided one has a mind
and not just a random collection of opinions and prejudices. Otherwise it may
simply reinforce what is already there. Travel is then called ‘tourism’, the
uneducable gawking at the unintelligible.
I
first saw Europe just after the war, when rebuilding had scarcely begun, for
the Marshall Plan dollars, generously provided by the United States,
had only just begun to trickle in. Without this aid, Stalin would probably have
succeeded in his plan to incorporate the Western democracies into his empire. Germany was the
worst – her cities still a vast sea of ruins, stretching to the horizon, with
hollow-cheeked scarecrows, most of whom were head-scarfed women, gaunt children
or tremulous old men, creeping out from caves under the rubble to star at us or
beg. Cigarettes were the ubiquitous currency, along with chocolate, among
people who were sometimes on the verge of starvation. Morality had collapsed so
completely that an attractive young woman would sell herself for a couple of
bars of chocolate or a packet of cigarettes. As one hard-eyed, blond teenager
remarked to me, when I remonstrated with her for ‘fraternizing’ with a couple
of soldiers in the British zone, “What’s it to you, anyway? I’ve got to make a
living. And your soldiers pay well, not like the Russkis who paid me nothing
when they raped me.”
Rape had been endemic in
the territory seized by the Russians. Towards the end of the war there was a
saying current among German women, ‘Better a Russki on your belly than an Ami
on your head,’ meaning it was better to be raped than blown to bits by American
bombs. It seemed inconceivable at the time that anything could be done to
resurrect this shattered culture. Yet when I next returned, nearly forty years
later, not a trace of the devastation remained in any of the prosperous cities
I visited, all swarming with self-confident, overweight people. Only in the
eyes of some of the older generation could I fancy I glimpsed traces of past
defeats and arrogant triumphs. In the past, when civilizations fell, they did
not recover. Now, such is the power of technology, they can be rebuilt in a
generation. The exception is the former USSR, where the devastation was so
tremendous, the loss of life so great (27 million killed) and the technology so
rudimentary compared with the West that even today the physical and psychic
scars are still dreadfully evident. The collapse of Soviet Communism in 1990-91
was in part due to the face that Marxist economics had singularly failed to
make good the gargantuan damage inflicted on the USSR by WWII.
After devastated Germany, France was a delight. Though many
bridges were still down and the fields were still littered with the debris of
war, especially burnt-out tanks and trucks, her cities were largely untouched
and her people alert, confident and happy. Only the sombre plaques that adorned
every city, country town and village, recording the long lists of hostages shot
by the Germans (Fusillés par les
Allemands), bore bitter testimony to what the French had endured. French
food, in particular, was a revelation to one coming from an England where
tasteless stodge, tough meat and tired vegetables boiled in bicarbonate soda
masquerading as cooking, was ubiquitous. I vividly recall the first meal I had
in a French family restaurant in Paris;
I had never tasted such ambrosia in my life. Elizabeth David had experienced
the same exhilaration some years before, memories of which drove her to write
her first cookery book when suffering the turgid horrors of English hotel food
in 1947. The only thing in short supply was good coffee. Paradoxically, this
was readily available in England,
among Sir Stafford Cripps’s austerities and rationing, because my countrymen
preferred tea. I took kilos of fresh coffee beans into France in my haversack and sold
them when I ran short of money or else gave them to my French friends.
How was it that France, defeated and under Nazi occupation for
over four years, was able to recover so quickly from the war while England
continued to endure fourteen years of rationing and drabness? I suspect the
answer has something to do with the fact that France
was still an agricultural country and therefore able to produce food in
abundance, while England
was still importing food. But it was also due to England’s being fundamentally
a Puritan country, where enjoyment of any sort – even of the pleasures of the
table – was seen as obscurely sinful, whereas the French had never succumbed to
this spiritual blight and were quick to start enjoying themselves again. The
French expulsion of the Calvinistic Huguenots had ensured that the country kept
its capacity for joie-de vivre. The
dour-faced Sir Stafford Cripps, incidentally, was the very personification of
Puritanism. It was said that he rose at four every morning, even during the
Arctic winter of 1947, and took a bracing ice-cold bath before settling down to
his usual fifteen hour day. With such a hair-shirted example of asceticism ever
before us, how dared we even think of having fun?
Along with food, the
greatest delight in France
was the southern sun of the Midi. I have never
forgotten my first glimpse of the Mediterranean, when after hitchhiking from Paris to Marseilles,
I first saw the golden-red sun rise triumphantly over its blue and glittering
expanse. It had been a difficult journey, since the roads were in bad repair
after the war and traffic still relatively scarce. The longest leg of the trip,
from Auxerre to Marseilles
was spent in the company of a haggard truck-driver with a strong Parisian
accent who picked me up on condition that I talked to him throughout the night
to keep him awake. I felt I was undergoing a nightmarishly unending French oral
examination, with a remorseless examiner who would exclaim “Parle! Parle!” if I stopped talking even
for a moment. On the rare occasions when I paused for breath, he would promptly
fall asleep and swerve wildly across the road, while I grabbed the wheel of his
ancient camion, which looked as
though it had seen service in WWI, and shouted “Attention, mon pote!” in a stentorian bellow. I had therefore the
strongest incentive to carry on talking – sudden death if I didn’t.
In the long hours of
darkness that followed a blindingly hot afternoon, I narrated in excruciating
detail my life history and then the biographies of my entire family and
friends; I discussed philosophy, especially the then fashionable
existentialism; French, English, Welsh and European history; education, current
politics, geography, physics, cosmology, zoology, horticulture, women; Latin,
French and English literature; Dante, the Russian novel, and, of course, the
recent war. The latter was the only subject to which he actually responded, for
he had been a prisoner of war before escaping and joining the Maquis and had
undergone some horrendous experiences. (The first question he had asked me when
he stopped to pick me up was if I was German. I had the feeling that if I had
told him I was, he would have run me over immediately and the reversed to do it
again). Every hour or so, we would stop at an estaminet where he topped himself up with a bon coup de rouge, while I drank black coffee to keep awake. To my
consternation, he refused to drink coffee, explaining that it put him to sleep.
Only red wine, vin ordinaire, he assured
me, swilled down in copious draughts, enabled him to drive. What his blood
alcohol reading must have been I am afraid to guess. As we sped on through the
night, along twisting potholed roads, I kept thinking of a doleful English
billboard seen beside every major highway in the UK at that time, featuring a
mournful widow veiled in Gothic black, adorned with the lugubrious message,
‘Keep death off the road!’ At times, indeed, I fancied I saw this ominous,
sable lady perched on the bonnet, staring at the sand running through her
hour-glass and muttering ‘Courage, mon
vieux! We’ll be together soon.’
Finally, as dawn was
breaking, my drunken companion stopped the truck on a level crossing, muttered,
‘Putain! J’en ai marre’ and
immediately fell asleep with his head slumped on the wheel. I broke off the
French infantry marching songs which I had been hoarsely and obscenely singing,
for I had run out of narrative somewhere around Avignon, rubbed my eyes and
then nearly leapt through the windscreen in fright at what I saw in the grey
light of dawn, expecting the Paris-Marseilles express to hurtle out of a nearby
tunnel at any moment and demolish us. Sweating with fear, I tried unavailingly
to wake him, dragged him from the wheel, frantically started the engine and
somehow – for I could not drive – managed to send the truck jumping along until
we were well off the crossing – mistake, presumably, for a lay-by for trucks –
where he had sleepily decided to await his Maker. He was still snoring away
when I grabbed my haversack and clambered down shakily from the truck. Ten
minutes later, while I was waiting for a bus to take me to nearby Marseilles, a train did
rush out of the tunnel, making the earth tremble with the speed of its passing.
I was left with the feeling that Providence
sometimes looks after drunks and English hitchhikers and that I had definitely
earned my passage to Marseilles.
A couple of hours later,
watching the blazing sun soar into a sky of unbelievable crystalline blue while
I lay on a deserted beach and dried out after my swim in the warmest water I
had ever encountered, I had never felt so glad to be alive. I felt profoundly
sorry for my benefactor and hoped he was still sleeping soundly. I did not see
how he could possibly survive many more trips of that nature, undertaken, so he
assured me, only because he had a wife and five children and the more of those
nightmarish trips he made, the more he earned. This was not just my first
encounter with the southern sun; it was also my first encounter with the world
of a brutalized, exploited working-class, whose whole life was one long
struggle for survival in often desperate circumstances. Little wonder that the
French Communist party was so powerful, even under the doubtful leadership of
Maurice Thorez.
It was the quality of
the light that so enchanted me in Provence.
Until then, I had never realized that in England, even in what passed for
summer, I had been seeing the sky through a misty haze. No wonder so many
artists had made Provence
their home. “In England,”
I muttered to myself, “winter slowly mellows into winter. But here…” I made up
my mind that at the first opportunity I would leave England for a country where I could
bask in this marvellous, crystalline radiance for the rest of my life. It was this
desire to escape from the grey skies, rain, yellow fogs, mist and Stygian gloom
that eventually led me to Australia,
via the Middle East, as soon as I had come down from Cambridge. After seven years spend in the Fens enduring the coldest, dankest weather in a cold,
dank island, I was yearning for the sun. Although I did not realize it at the
time, I was suffering from mild depression, which we now know can be remedied
by exposure to intense light. The euphoria I experienced for the first time in
the Midi was due, not only to the excellent
food and wine, but also to the brilliant sunlight which flooded my whole being
from dawn till dusk. I drank it in voraciously, as a man on the verge of dying
of thirst will drink draught after draught of life-giving water, watching my
slug-white English skin slowly turn a healthy brown as the days went by.
Ironically, towards the
end of my life, I now find that the sun has become too dangerous for me to
submit myself to its full rays. The thinning of the ozone layer and the
consequent sharp increase in ultra-violet ionising radiation has meant that I
can only enjoy the sun in the morning and late evening. I have seen too much of
the ravages of skin cancer, especially melanoma, for me to soak myself in
sunshine as I did then. Fifty years on, I find myself living in a strange and
often sinister world - one which I could not possible had foreseen in those
far-off days.
From the French Riviera,
still scarred by the battles fought there after the Allied landing in 1944, I
made my way to North Africa, where I took a job as Assistant in a French lycee in
Oran. When the
summer term ended, I stayed on to work in a colonie
de vacances run by the headmaster, whose Communist sympathies drove him to
devote his summer vacations to the welfare of some of the poorest children of
the colony, most of them Arabs. A few years later, the Algerians rose in revolt
against their French colonisers in a bitter, bloody struggle that lasted for
eight years. Many of my colleagues and – almost certainly – a high percentage
of the children I was caring for, especially the boys, must have died or been
wounded in that long and cruel war. I know for certain that two of them were
killed early on in the struggle. Yet during my stay I never heard anyone express
the slightest misgivings about the future, even though I myself, from the
vantage point of an outsider, could see clearly that the regime was in its
death-throes. Such wilful blindness affects us all at times, especially when we
are most threatened. When we most need to see clearly, we cannot.
I arrived in Baghdad in October 1956, to take up a post as Lecturer in
English Literature in the newly founded University of Baghdad.
I had chosen an inopportune time, for in November the British and the French
invaded the Suez, provoking a violent reaction
in Iraq
which led to the evacuation of most British and French nationals. I had not
bothered to register with the British embassy, so remained behind, largely
unaware of what was going on. My first real intimation of the seriousness of
the situation came when the bus on which I was riding stopped suddenly in Al
Rashid Street, the main thoroughfare, while everybody fled from it, including
the conductor and driver, leaving me sitting there wondering what was going on.
Puzzled, I left the bus and took refuge in a near-by bookshop, only to be
bundled out unceremoniously as the owner began to pull down the steel riot
shutters. As I stood on the pavement, wondering how I was going to get home
again, I heard a loud chanting, turned and saw a mob some two hundred metres
away, advancing rapidly towards me. An exultant cry arose when they saw me, a
solitary Englishman, provocatively loitering in a deserted street.
Enlightenment dawned. I turned and ran towards Bab El Sherji, with the mob in
hot pursuit, like a fox pursued by a pack of hounds, reaching the Sindbad Hotel
just in time to slide under the riot shutters which the management had
thoughtfully raised for me.
“That was a close one,” said the manager,
cheerfully, as I recovered my breath. “We were having bets on whether you’d
make it or not.”
“And if I hadn’t?” I asked.
“Oh, then you’d have ended up like the Frenchman
they killed yesterday. They cut his head off and carried it round on a pole.”
This was my first lesson in Middle Eastern
politics, a game that is played for keeps by both sides.
Less
than two years later, during the revolution, the mob stopped an army truck in
the same street. It was carrying a couple of dozen Swiss and German businessmen
to the Ministry of Defense for their protection. They had been abroad a flight
that had landed just before the airport was seized by revolutionaries and had
not been allowed to leave. The mob, ignorant of bloodthirsty as always, mistook
them for hated Jordanians, who they had heard were being evacuated from the
Jordanian Embassy, hauled them out and beheaded the lot of them there and then.
Such are the hazards of Middle Eastern travel. One moment you are sipping
champagne in business class; the next you are watching your screaming
companions being decapitated in a welter of blood in a filthy Baghdad street,
knowing you will follow them in a few minutes time.
Since
the university was closed, to forestall riots, I spent most of the next three
months closeted in my house, with an armed guard at the gate for some of the
time, learning Arabic while I waited for things to quieten down. It was
disconcerting to be told by shopkeepers, on the rare occasions when I went out,
that I would have to hide myself in a dark place, should the pro-British
government be overthrown. In May 1957, as I was preparing to leave Iraq for Australia, my students gave me a
farewell party. “We are quite fond of you, sir” said their spokesman politely,
as he handed me a going-away present, “But we are glad you are leaving, because
if you stayed we should have to cut your throat.” My other students, neatly
clad in dark suits, white shirts and highly polished shoes, all smiled in
agreement. Nothing personal, of course, for they were well aware that my sympathies
lay with them. It was all routine kill-or-be-killed politics.
My
students had warned me, repeatedly, for several months that I should leave Baghdad as soon as
possible, for my own safety, since there was going to be a revolution which
would sweep away the detested regime of Nuri-el-Sa’id. Even my neighbour’s
houseboy, whose brother was in an armoured regiment, had told me that there was
to be a military coup that summer. Yet when I attended dinner parties or
Embassy receptions, nobody wanted to know the truth, dismissing my warnings as
‘bazaar rumours’. The fact was that I knew what was going one because I mixed
with students, who, in Arab countries are always among the chief instigators of
such uprisings, along with their relatives in the military, whereas the
business community, like the diplomatic set, were cocooned in their own cosy
world, cut off from the people.
In
July 1958, only three weeks after I had quitted Baghdad
for Canberra, a
military coup took place. The entire royal family and their courtiers were
machine gunned, the bodies hastily wrapped in rugs and interred in the grounds
of the palace. The Prime Minister and all his cabinet except one [1] were brutally murdered and dismembered, their bodies being dragged through the
streets behind cars until they disintegrated, along with those of many other
politicians opposed to the Ba’ath party, which had planned the coup. The
British Embassy, where I had attended decorous garden parties and sipped
luke-warm sherry, was burnt to the ground and three of the staff murdered. The
Ambassador, Sir Michael Wright, along with Lady Wrights and other members of
the corps diplomatique, narrowly
escaped death by hiding in the cellars until they were rescued. Insularity and
smugness often come at a price, as in Algeria four years earlier.
Among
the university students who rampaged murderously through the streets in the
slaughter that followed was a certain budding lawyer named Saddam Hussein, who
later became a hit man for the faction that eventually overthrew the new
regime, replacing it with one even more extreme. Iraq
had begun its slide down the long, blood-drenched slope that led through
further revolution, the war with Iran and the Gulf War, to the
starvation, destruction and misery that grip the country today. These events
reinforced the lesson which I had learnt when shattered my childish world
forever in September 1939. I realized afresh that no society – not even Australia – is
either as safe or as stable as we delude ourselves into believing it is. To me
at least, later events, such as those of September 11, 2001, came as no great
surprise. We all wander, blindly, along the brink of a bottomless abyss.
[1] Dr Fadhil Jamali, the Foreign Minister, with whom
I was personally acquainted, survived his imprisonment and was subsequently
released into exile.
ranshumanists
believe that the homo sapiens sapiens is
rapidly becoming obsolete and that within a century or so our species will have
been replaced by homo robotiensi, [1] for we shall have gradually melded with computers, discarding our present flesh
and blood bodies in favour of metal ones.
Sir Roger Penrose, a distinguished Oxford mathematician, has
written two impressive books vigorously combating the idea that a machine can
ever attain consciousness [2].
I have read and admired both of them, but must reluctantly disagree. Even the
Dalai Lama, whom I rank among the wisest of men, has admitted that there is no
bar in Buddhist philosophy to our reincarnating in silicon. I believe the
argument will be settled once and for all some thirty or so years from now,
when we follow Penrose’s suggestion and ask a robot: ‘What does it feel like to
be a computer?’ to hear it answer, ‘Generally, pretty good. But today, I’m a
bit off colour and rather depressed. Could you take a look at my neural
circuits?’
‘Most
of the human race is now obsolete,’ is a transhumanist dictum.
Transhumanists argue our brains are no longer adequate to deal with the major
problems that confront the world today. One solution is to implant computers in
our brains; this will increase our intelligence while also giving us far more
control over our destructive emotions. Since only a relatively small percentage
of the world’s population will be able or willing to afford such implants, this
will eventually lead to the dominance of an elite, drawn largely from the
present developed countries, who will be far above the rest of the human race,
both physically and intellectually. Furthermore, genetic engineering – a costly
process – must surely lead to the breeding of children with enhanced physical
and intellectual powers, as in that prophetic film, Gattaca (1997). Since both computer implants and genetic
engineering will be unaffordable for most people in the Third
World, the prospects for the majority look grim. Furthermore, the
rapid development of robots means the uneducated and unintelligent will be
surplus to requirements. Compulsory sterilization on a vast scale for the
world’s poor maybe in the offing, unthinkable as it may seem to us now.
Countries that refuse to do this on moral grounds will find themselves unable
to compete with countries that have not had such scruples.
The average human brain can perform
twenty million billion operations per second (twenty MOPS). If computers
continue to improve according to Moore’s
law, doubling their performance every twelve months [3],
they should be performing as efficiently as a human brain by 2020. By 2030, the
average desk computer, performing 10>19 operations per second, should be a
thousand times more powerful than the best human brain and also possess what we
term ‘consciousness’. The implications of this are so disturbing that it is not
surprising so few people are prepared to consider them coolly.
[1] Ray Kurzweil. 1999. The Age of Spiritual Machines, London, and Hans Moravec. 1988. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human
Intelligence, CambridgeMA, are excellent introductions
to transhumanistic thought.
[2] Roger Penrose. 1989. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford,
and 1995. Shadows of the Mind. Oxford.
[3] Formerly, every eighteen months; this figure has
now been revised downwards.
