The Sins of the Fathers

Orestes pursued by Erinyes.

“You shall no t make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me…”

Note this second part of the first or second commandment, depending on how you parse them. That makes it near the core of the Judeo-Christian message. It says that children and grandchildren are punished for a parent’s or grandparent’s sin.

Indeed, you get the same idea in the doctrine of original sin. Or that of redemptive suffering. One person can suffer for the sin of another.

And it is troubling: how can an all-loving God be so unjust? How can he punish Tom for Jerry’s sin?

Nevertheless, we have to accept that this is a fair description of reality. All of us either suffer or benefit from actions of our ancestors; these inform the circumstances of our birth and upbringing. Since God could intervene to prevent this, he is ultimately responsible.

But there must be more to this, too.

For this then is a case of God taking direct responsibility for human sin. Which is not theologically correct. We have free will.

And if a parent is morally depraved, it is probably not going to change their mind to hear that their children will suffer for it. That would trouble only a good person. In fact, this is what a narcissistic parent actually wants and tries to do. They inevitably choose one or more children as a scapegoat, and blame and punish them without cause. Most often, they are innocently punished for the very things of which the parent is guilty. That is what “scapegoat” means.

So it seems both false and fruitless for God to declare this commandment to the bad. And after all, if they are idolators—the specific sin which this commandment prohibits—they are not listening to God in the first place.

Nor to the already righteous parents, who care about their children. They are, after all, already righteous, and listening to God, not worshipping idols.

It has to be that he is speaking to someone else.

It has to be that he is speaking to the children. He is speaking to the grown children of the iniquities of their fathers.

Children, especially less thoughtful children, get their worldview and many of their unexamined opinions from their parents. Denominational beliefs, politics, and prejudices of all kinds run in families for generations. This is demonstrated often in demographic surveys, were it not self-evident. In our earliest years, our parents are the font of all knowledge; and this assumption never entirely fades.

Yet we all also have an innate conscience, from God, and must be conscious as well of contradictions, between this and what our parents taught us. And we all have a moral duty to actively seek the True and the Good.

It is perhaps vitally significant that this passage comes at the end of the prohibition against idolatry.

The essential and most dangerous idolatry may be this idolatry of the parent; and what Francis Bacon called “the idols of the tribe.”

The word translated here as “iniquity” is actually closest to the English “crookedness.” It is an image of a thing being bent.

That indeed makes it plausible that it refers to a distorted, dishonest world-view.

And it seems to bookend with Jesus’s condemnation in the New Testament of those who would “cause one of these little ones to stumble.” It is a condemnation of parents who fail in their children’s moral education.

One can see, then, how this commitment to sin is both passed down from the parent, and a matter of personal responsibility. We all have the moral obligation to see past such idolatries—this is what the commandment is telling us. If in an oddly oblique way, as if aware of the necessity at the same time not to upset the authority of the family—the foundation of all social order.

Happily, this conflict between God and parent is not great in most families. However, one can easily see in it the basis for original sin. Every human ancestor must, like Adam, fall somewhat short.

A similar concept of guilt running in families was known to the ancient Greeks. See, most obviously, the Oresteia trilogy: it ends in a formal trial, in which by the grace of Athena the parent is found at fault, and the child not guilty. Plato too speaks of ancestral curses for which a descendant must atone, through bouts of “divine madness” and through rituals of purification.

Plato is referring to melancholy, which is much of what we call mental illness; or at least to depression and mania (now “bipolar disorder”). In the Oresteia, the same experience is represented by pursuing Furies. This, depression, then seems to be a product of the dissonance between parental influence and eternal verities.

But those raised by a narcissistic parent who do not suffer through the ordeal remain in sin. They have broken the first commandment.

A Way to Avoid the Coronavirus?

Virus epicentres mapped to mean daily temperatures.

An enduring mystery of the coronavirus is why it has not yet run rampant in the Philippines.

Filipinos are gypsies. They are working in large numbers in all the other countries of the region, some of which have been hard hit—not to mention being most of the crew on most cruise ships. Because home is near, in East Asia they are always flying in and out—it is not unusual to fly in to Manila for the weekend. The Philippines also had, as I recall, the first confirmed case outside of China. Yet the numbers are still small, and there has been no confirmed community spread.

Another why has the virus been so much more disruptive and deadly in Italy than it has been in South Korea? South Korea got it sooner, and things looked desperate. But the number of new cases has levelled off, and there have been far fewer fatalities.

Wait, there’s more. Why did Vietnam and Singapore, close to China and with so many connections, have a rash of early cases, but the victims seem to recover, and not to spread; while Iran, much further away from the Chinese epicentres, and with much less commerce in that direction, explode with serious cases?

I speculated this was because of better social cohesion in the face of disaster.

But now someone has come up with another explanation, that seems to me to make sense. The places where the virus has been particularly successful at spreading, they discover, lie along a narrow band of latitude. Or more specifically, of temperature and relative humidity. These scientists suggest that the virus needs a steady temperature of 5-11 degrees Celsius and 47-79% relative humidity to spread. All the most affected areas share these parameters.

This makes sense in terms of what we know about viruses. They commonly die back in summer. They commonly thrive only within particular climactic parameters.

So why has the virus stopped spreading so swiftly in South Korea? It may not be that South Korea’s containment measures are so successful. It may simply be that the temperature is getting higher as spring takes hold, putting them on the fringe of the virus-fertile zone.

If this is right, and it looks right, this is good news. It suggests the virus may go dormant throughout the northern hemisphere over the next few months. Buying us all some valuable time.

The bad news is that southern Canada is about to move into the kill zone.

But even so, spring in northern climes may not be that favourable to the virus, as the temperature is not steady day to day, and changes quickly.

And if we can aggressively delay its spread, we might hold it back until the warmer weather comes.

In the meantime, this suggests a useful strategy for retirees, those most vulnerable, or those who actually have the virus and are in self-quarantine, to avoid infection. Check the temperature and humidity daily. If they are within the danger zone, postpone any errands. If they are out of the danger zone, it may be quite safe to venture outside.

Eastern Civilization and Western Barbarism

When I teach young Chinese students, they always seem familiar with the classics of the West. In a recent class, I asked each, “what’s your favourite book?” The first student said “Tom Sawyer.” The next said “Little Red Riding Hood.” They can all recount the story of the Three Little Pigs, or the Tortoise and the Hare. Another was working on an essay on "The Little Mermaid." The Andersen story, not the Disney movie.

I recently signed on to help American students with their high school English Lit homework, and find I cannot. Despite two degrees and most of a doctorate in, essentially, literature. They are all reading recent novels which I would have to read myself in order to advise them.

No doubt North American kids are getting a good taste of the classics outside of school, if in a distorted form: from Disney and other forms of popular entertainment. But we really should be teaching the original versions in school. Obviously, the kids would be interested—this is just about what they are most interested in, according to the box office. Aside from the fact that they teach vital life lessons, these are, after all, the best stories available.

And sometimes versions of the classic stories do appear in North American texts. When they do, however, it is always a modern retelling intended to subvert the original. One classic example I encountered recently was The Boy Who Cried Wolf told from the perspective of the wolf. Who was, of course, a vegetarian.

It almost looks as though the future of Western civilization is in China; or in the Far East. Perhaps also in Eastern Europe.

It is encouraging to know, at least, that it will survive somewhere.

And perhaps this is a good thing. “Western civilization” was always a bit nonsensical as a term. Civilization is civilization. Its centre is perhaps shifting.

Some Straight Talk

On the coronavirus, from The Atlantic.

Lights Are On ...

Some of Biden's odd gaffes.

Welcome to Hiroshima

Things are heating up fast on the coronavirus front, for Europe and America. A doctor has described the Italian situation as “like an explosion.” Canada has so far been lucky, but surely will not be lucky for much longer.

The jurisdictions of East Asia, although they were first hit, seem to have handled the outbreak well. China, after its original fumble, now seems to have things increasingly under control. Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, Macao—all doing relatively well, in the circumstances.

I nevertheless naturally assumed that, if and when it reached Europe and America, the thing would be handled much better. Better infrastructure, bigger budgets, higher levels of public trust and trust in government, greater medical expertise, better organized, and so forth.

So far, it does not look to be so. Despite having the previous experience of East Asia to inform them, Italy seems to have managed to react little better than chaotic Iran. The death is alarming, the spread seems uncontained, hospitals are beyond capacity. The comparison on each of these points with South Korea, which got the virus earlier, is striking.

Now, even with this Italian example, other governments in Western Europe and the USA seem to have been disorganized and slow to react. The USA apparently has a critical shortage of test kits. It is almost impossible to get tested for the virus even if you have symptoms. Large public meetings and regular flights have mostly continued. Worse, in the US, Britain, and the Netherlands, government sources seem to be actually spreading objectively false information that minimizes the risks.

You may think I myself am overacting. Time will tell. But it seems to me that in Italy, time has already told.

Aside from East Asia, some other countries seem to have taken the virus very seriously and to have responded energetically: Russia and Eastern Europe have, in general, shut borders, and this has been effective so far. Israel has banned all flights.

Why the difference? I had suggested it was cultural yesterday, but perhaps it is not even that. There is not such a big cultural difference, surely, between Eastern and Western Europe.

I think it tells us something about human nature.

The difference is perhaps that Western Europe and the USA have had things pretty good for a pretty long time—since the Second World War and aftermath, say. For most of us, that is now beyond living memory. The governments and people of Eastern Europe, East Asia, or Israel, while they might be doing well at the moment, have known harsher times more recently.

This makes them better at recognizing a real threat, and mobilizing for it.

The Americans and the Western Europeans will find denial easier. Why take measures that might hurt the economy? It’s not as if bad things ever really happen, is it? It can’t happen here.

And, not accustomed to taking hits, any inconvenience in the meantime seems to the average American or Parisian unacceptable. Better to deny and hope it all goes away.

People have a natural tendency to cover their ears to real bad news; bad news that doesn’t just happen to others. To refuse to see either danger or evil when confronted with it. After all, hearing bad news makes you feel bad. Churchill once said: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

He credited his own ability to see the true menace of Hitler to his experience of depression.

Orwell too considered his primary talent to be the ability to admit truth, as most men cannot. He wrote “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” He, too, suffered from depression, due to an abused childhood in a public school.

This reveals an interesting law of nature: the poor are likely to be saner than the rich. Those who have suffered are likely to be saner than those who have been lucky in life. Jesus more than hints in the Beatitudes. The poor and the oppressed are those most apt to keep up the constant struggle to see what is in front of their noses. Circumstances have forced them to it.

I think I have seen this myself, consistently.

It is bizarre therefore that we classify “depression” as a “mental illness.” The depressed are in fact the sanest among us. Great minds are always depressed, as Aristotle or Plato said and knew. It is perhaps an emotional disorder, but it is the opposite of a mental disorder in the common sense.

The Harrowing of Nations

It looks as though my former thesis, that the COVID-19 virus might be God’s plan to overturn some immoral social orders, is not tenable.

As I said at the time, if the virus spread much further than China, Iran, and the EU, it must not be the case.

On the other hand, the virus as it spreads does seem to be a test of the various societies, in more or less the way a war is. How well can they deal with the threat? Those who do not handle it well perhaps will die, and perhaps deserve to die.

China seems responsible for the original problem. Yet we must now balance this with the fact that they seem to have gotten a handle on it. New infections have fallen sharply. The overall rate of infection is actually now higher, if figures are correct, in South Korea.

But South Korea, too, now seems to be getting a handle on it. New cases are down; and the death rate is surprisingly low. Lower than China; lower than anywhere.

Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan also seem to be weathering it fairly well.

By contrast, reports out of Iran and Italy are alarming: high death rates, hospitals overwhelmed, no apparent containment, signs of general panic, an apparent lack of information from governments.

Perhaps we are seeing the harrowing of nations. It is not so much central government control versus individual freedom, either; China exercises tight control, but South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan do not. The government of Hong Kong traditionally does not, is extremely free-market, and currently cannot.  Iran exerts tight control; Italy does not.

It looks more like East Asian social values being contrasted European and Iranian decadence.

We shall see how it goes from here as the virus becomes equally widespread elsewhere. But early signs from the US look shambolic, like Iran and Italy. Early signs from the rest of Europe, other than Italy, also are not good.

Perhaps we are seeing the future. East Asia is ascendant, and “Western civilization” is burnt toast.

Violence against Language

I tend to hobnob with other editors on Facebook, and this meme has come around more than once.

This Orwellian attempt to politicize language always alarms me. Especially among editors, who are in a position to impose censorship on what we get to read, just like Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth.

The use of the passive in this case looks perfectly legitimate. It is entirely likely that the reporter has been given a number for how many women were raped, or how many girls were harassed, and no number for how many men raped or how many boys harassed. It is obviously not the same number. More obviously, it is easy to have a number for how many women are pregnant. It is essentially impossible to know how many fathers are involved.

And there is essentially the same problem for rape or harassment. How do you arrive at a number for how many men rape? You could, if you simply went with the number of convictions for rape, and the number of charges cited in each. Very few men rape. But I wager that is not where the original number came from. It probably came from some feminist source, who wanted to float far higher numbers than this would produce. It probably came from women self-reporting. The figures for boys harassing girls almost certainly did.

So, to get the figures for perpetrators, you could do the same, right? Do a thorough survey, and ask men how many have raped some woman, and boys how many have harassed girls, in the past year?

Does anyone think that number would be accurate? Does anyone thing the two sets of figures would be comparable?

But then, logically, going by self-reporting for women and girls is no more likely to be accurate. We cannot assume that women always tell the truth, and men do not. That’s a deeply sexist view. We are dealing in all these cases with a “he said/she said” situation, with no ability to know the truth.

But here’s the bigger gaping maw of sexism: what about numbers for women raping men, or girls harassing boys? We apparently just start with the initial premise that either that never happens, or if it does, it does not matter. Why do we hear so much about “violence against women,” yet never about “violence against men”? Noting that, in the real world, men are far more likely to be the victims of violence than women. Some surveys suggest this is even true of domestic violence specifically. We are saying only violence against women matters.

What could be more sexist than that?

Get My Brain Out of that Vat!

Plato is no doubt rolling over in his cave.

I have never seen The Matrix. But the basic idea behind the movie seems to have resonated at least on the right: that what we take to be reality is a vast simulation. Everyone talks now of “red pills.”

How do we know we are not living in a vast simulation?

Elon Musk argues that this is probably the case. Here’s his argument, as I recall it:

We can predict that soon our own computer-generated simulations, our virtual reality, will be impossible to distinguish from the physical world. Not to mention our robots and NPCs passing the Turing test.

Now, assume there are alien civilizations, and that technological progress is inevitable over time. Some will surely have advanced beyond ourselves, and will therefore be beyond this point. It seems unlikely we would turn out to be the most advanced in the universe. So they will have already made such virtual realities. So we may be characters in them.

As a matter of fact, absent the aliens, most of the world has always believed this—that the physical world is a simulation. All Buddhists and Hindus believe this. They call it “maya”: “illusion.” Taoists agree. This is what Neoplatonists believed in the West—this world is Plato’s Cave. This is what North American Indians believed before they became Christian—making the idea that they were especially concerned with “nature” and “the environment” the opposite of the truth.

One Hindu concept of the cosmos is Shiva as "Lord of the Dance." What we take for the physical, substantial, world is his deceptive movements to draw our attention first here, then there.

Why don’t Christians and Jews believe it?

One word: God.

As Descartes, for one, explained, if God created this universe, being all-good, he is not going to play any tricks. A clear perception will be a warrant for truth. Hence we end up with things like empirical science.

If you do not believe in a personal God, it all falls apart. You do not know.

But there is a second, lesser sort of Matrix in which we Christians are aware that live. The gospel warns us that the Devil is the lord of “this world.” Earthly power is in his gift, as in the third temptation of Christ. And the Devil is the “father of lies.”

In other words, there is a real matrix when it comes to social opinions—the realm of earthly social power. The realm controlled by the scribes and the Pharisees.

We have already referred to one example: the common belief that the North American Indians had a special concern for nature and the ecology. Utter bollocks, and everyone believes it.

There are many social myths—Francis Bacon called them “idols of the tribe”—which we take as certain truth, which are perfectly false, but serve somebody’s purposes. Such myths can be the glue that holds society together.

No, not that Francis Bacon.

These social truths, matters of “common knowledge,” do not come from God, unless, perhaps, they are from the Bible, and the Bible is his revelation, but are invented by men and women. As it happens, men and women do often have selfish interests and ulterior motives.

I find this is a reliable general rule, a rule for life: when referring to some social or psychological as opposed to purely physical affair, if “everyone” thinks something is so, it is not so.

You might think that this is a matter of general ignorance, and improves with education. Some things, after all, are not obvious, but must be learned. I find the opposite: the better educated someone is, at least in our society, the more likely they are to believe things that are obviously false. “Urban legends” seem to thrive in the academy as though this is their natural medium of transmission.

Freudian and Marxist ideas, for example, which were long ago debunked as science, not only survive but are absolutely unquestioned in the universities, at least outside the psychology or the economics deparments; scientism, the naïve faith that science can explain everything; the dogmatic faith in a series of increasingly dubious assumptions that is global warming; feminism, which became beyond question without having ever been properly debated on its merits; the dogma that homosexuality is innate; and now the doctrine that one’s sex is not, and can be changed at will. The list is very long. It is likely I too still hold some such beliefs, which I have not yet discovered to be either wrong or entirely unsubstantiated. I have spent a lot of years in the academy.

To be educated currently seems to mean to be either vetted for or indoctrinated into the matrix. Perhaps it was always so, but it seems to be coming to a head. There is, as many have noted, an alarming conformity in academic thinking now.

There is also a powerful force now operating in the opposite direction: the Internet. The matrix works on information being restricted and controlled, managed and crafted. The internet makes information unbridled and free.

The two trends may be related. This may be exactly why there is such a growing demand for conformity, and a rapid expansion of the number of points on which one must conform. It all smacks of desperation. It may be because the fabric is visibly fraying, and the gears and pulleys are beginning to show through.

What really happened to Jeffrey Epstein? What really happened in Benghazi? What is the real story of Hillary Clinton’s emails? Why is everyone coalescing so suddenly behind Joe Biden? Why the apparent coordinated suppression of the candidacy of Tulsi Gabbard?

It is easy to see that as lot is going on behind the scenes, even if we cannot know what.

All this only in the sphere of politics. That’s just the tip of an iceberg bigger than the one that took out the Titanic. There are far stranger things happening in the professions.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

An obvious and trivial example of an apparent reaction to the threat of the Internet is the inevitable insistence by teachers and librarians that you must not use Wikipedia as a reference. Actual studies have shown that Wikipedia is more trustworthy than Britannica or other “expert” sources. But it is beyond professional control.

More blatant is the growing tsunami of “deplatforming.” A commentator begins to draw an audience, starts to say something interesting, and suddenly he is gone. Especially on the right, of course, but even, now, Chris Matthews. It seems he was too inclined to speak for himself. He was not sufficiently under someone’s control. He had become an unacceptable risk.

A yet more striking current example is the sudden cancellation of Woody Allen’s new autobiography by Hachette; only a few days after publication was announced.

Perhaps the reader does not know that the charges of pedophilia against Allen have been aired in court, twice, and twice dismissed. That information, it almost seems, has been systematically suppressed.

Yet he is now not to be allowed the right to speak in his own defense. The public must not know his side of it. For some reason, he is a risk.

I had my own experience, with a Canadian online magazine, Convivium. They just loved a piece I had written about the Irish churches of Ontario, and had it slated for publication.

Then they realized I had written Playing the Indian Card. I have good reason to believe that they had never read it. Nevertheless, simply the idea that I had written something saying “everything you think you know about Canada’s ‘First Nations’ is wrong,” was enough to make them drop the piece. They made no bones about this being why. Any serious examination of the history of Canada’s relationship with its “indigenous people” was enough to mark me as too dangerous to be associated with. Even though the piece I had submitted to them was on an entirely unrelated subject.

The atmosphere of suppression, the actual blacklisting, is now far worse than anything in the McCarthy era.

Perhaps, if you are interested, you should buy the book now, while it is still available.

I suspect our descendants will not recall us fondly. I suspect that we will one day appear in the history books in more or less the same light as the Spanish Inquisition, or the witchburnings, or even the Fascists and Nazis.

The good news is that it seems certain the whole current matrix has become so fragile it is unlikely to last must longer.

The Political Spectrum

I put my stock in Locke

I have never referred to myself as a “conservative.” I am not. I am a lifelong liberal.

That used to put me on the left of the political spectrum. But now, everything that is not Marxist is considered “right-wing.”

Since Marx has been positively disproven, that more or less means that anyone who is simply lucid is now “right-wing.” Our politics have become that distorted. 

Marx brothers.

There is something deeply symbolic here about the US Democrats rushing to nominate for their presidential candidate someone who is obviously suffering dementia. There is something symbolic about their almost phobic reaction to a seemingly sincere candidate like Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders in favour of an obvious huckster. Honesty and sanity are clear and present dangers.

But liberalism and conservatism are different philosophies, which used to represent the opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Liberalism believes in the political philosophy of John Locke: democracy, equality, human rights. It wants definite limits on government power. It advocates free trade and free markets. The core idea is free choice: man exists to make moral choices, and human dignity accordingly demands that free individual choice must be wherever possible respected. It is generally opposed to foreign entanglements; it does not like the discipline of military culture on principle, and given human equality, other nations need to be free to settle their own affairs. 

Perhaps the founding philosopher of modern conservatism: Edmund Burke.

While not in opposition to this, conservatism has no special interest in democracy, equality, or human rights. It sees the state as an organic entity, like a family. Like a family, it is the duty of the more capable to look after the less capable, as parents might look after children. This rejects equality intrinsically; it means democracy may well also need to be set aside, and human rights. The rights of a child are limited, even if there are more children than adults in the family.

Conservatism sees no formal limits to the power or involvement of the state. The state is there to help as needed, and should do whatever is required. Nevertheless, it would generally prefer non-state solutions. The state is there to preserve and support the culture, and if the culture is healthy, the state has less need to intervene. A healthy culture means a balance of interests, with respect for traditional institutions which have developed organically.

Conservatism believes in an active foreign policy, on the premise that the state has a duty to do its part to preserve international peace, just as neighbours have the duty to look after neighbours. Again, not believing in human equality, it holds that a healthy and a wealthy nation may have a moral obligation to intervene elsewhere to help a less-advantaged population. It prefers favouring local producers over free trade, and sees no problem with government intervening in the market to pursue national interests.

Sometimes modern liberals brand themselves “libertarian.” I do not use this term for myself, because it implies a rigid adherence to liberal principles, and I see good arguments on both sides. In a given situation, I can be persuaded that the conservative policy is better. And there is something intrinsically wrong with being doctrinaire, rather than debating and considering each situation on its merits.

But what does the modern “left” believe? Like conservatives, the Marxist left has no natural interest in either democracy or human rights. Nominally, it sacrifices both to equality. Yet the Marxist concept of “equality” is actually the conservative idea of class difference: that the capable must care for the less capable as if they were children. The “capable” for Marxists meaning the bureaucrats, the professions, or the “vanguard” of intellectuals.

Classical Marxism would and did oppose foreign entanglements, and modern leftists most often do, although inconsistently. Wars exist, in their minds, only to benefit the ruling class. They are supposedly always about “oil,” by which they seem to mean, more specifically, more profits for some oil company. Apparently ordinary people do not need oil, and are oppressed by it.

Marxists not only see no natural limits on the power of the state; Marxists want the state to aggressively appropriate power from all other traditional institutions. This dramatically distinguishes them from either conservatives or liberals. The premise is that all existing traditions exist to perpetuate inequality and buttress the ruling class. Marxists want the state to aggressively destroy the culture as a whole, on the same premise. The classical idea is, of course, that on the rubble a government-free, truly equal society will spontaneously emerge.

This is all rather like a farmer imagining that, if he kills all his livestock and burns all his crops, infinitely better crops and better livestock will spontaneously appear.

Modern Marxists, or at least the modern left, oppose free trade as well. The premise is that free trade helps the rich and harms the poor. This premise seems perfectly arbitrary in Marxist terms, since foreign workers are working class too, and poor people benefit from cheaper manufactures more than the rich, but this is where it stands currently.

And they are aggressively in support of open borders and large-scale immigration, which seems to directly contradict their stance on free trade.

Nevertheless, this contradiction seems less important than the hope that a large influx of people from elsewhere will degrade traditional non-government institutions and traditions, like church, neighbourhood, manners, or family.

I said at the beginning that Marxism has been positively disproven. I do not only mean the conventional argument that everywhere it has been tried it has led to eventual economic stagnation or collapse, and genocide. It has, but that experiment need never have been tried even once. It was already disproven on its own terms before Lenin detrained at the Finland Station.

Marx claimed a scientific basis for his theories. That means they are falsifiable: Marx made certain definite predictions, and if they did not come true, the theory was wrong.

They have not come true.

Marx predicted that over time, a smaller and smaller group of “capitalists” would become wealthier and wealthier, while more and more people would descend to the proletariat, living on wages for manual labour, and this large mass of the population would become poorer and poorer. 

Despite all the Marx-inspired current talk of “income inequality” in the US, this has not happened. The class of people owning the means of production has instead steadily grown, fewer and fewer people are members of the proletariat, and the proletariat itself has become steadily better off.

Marx predicted that the revolution, and the transition to socialism, was a natural evolution, and so would come first to the most industrialized and developed countries. Instead, Marxist revolutions have consistently been in poorer and less developed areas: Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, here and there in Latin America or Africa. And they have tended to collapse into “capitalism” over time. While Marxist parties have had some electoral success in the developed world, it has been hit and miss, and no evolutionary trend seems evident. If anything, their proportion of the popular vote seems in decline. At the same time that Marxism has been growing in influence on the left, the left as a whole seems to have been shrinking. Two words: Jeremy Corbyn.

Marx predicted that, given the intrinsic structural problems in capitalism, over time periodic recessions and depressions would become worse, until the system collapsed. Instead, touching wood, our recessions and depressions have become less severe since the 1930s.

That being so, why is it that Marxism still holds such power over the left, seemingly growing year over year?

I think Marxism thrives as an amoral alternate explanation of society; a trait it shares with that other amoral asteroid-challenged theoretical dinosaur that refuses to lie down and die, Freudianism. If you embrace Marxism, you are free to reject all “bourgeois” moral restraints.

Put it all together, and modern leftism is both a serious mental illness and a dangerous social disease.

Apocalypse Watch: Tower Collapses

Chinese hotel quarantining coronavirus victims collapses.

Tulsi Gabbard 2024

Why is Tulsi Gabbard still in the Democratic presidential race?

She obviously has no hope of winning the nomination.

It might be, then, to advance her ideas—her pacifist program. But she isn’t able to do much of that, since the party establishment is determined to keep her off the debate stage.

How about this thought? Might she be keeping herself in the public eye in hopes of being nominated for Vice President? Especially in the event of a brokered convention.

Seems to me she’d make a good choice for either Bernie or Biden, were he the nominee.

In either case, she would balance the top of the ticket geographically, West and East, sexually, and in her youthfulness. She checks the intersectional boxes, so important to Democrats, as Biden or Sanders themselves do not: female, Hindu, Polynesian.

For Sanders, she might pull in more moderate voters, while at the same time seeming sympatico. Like Sanders, she is a rebel against the party establishment. She was a major backer of Sanders in 2016.

But she looks like an even better fit for Biden.

Biden might want to pick someone clearly to his left, in order to soothe the Sanders supporters. But Sanders himself is too old, and there is a grudge between Bernie and Warren supporters. AOC is too young to be legal.

Any selection on this basis also risks failing to appease Sanders supporters, who tend to be purists, while alienating the independent vote Biden needs most. The farther left, after all, in the classically cynical political calculation, have nowhere else to go.

He does not urgently need to shore up the black vote—he has been their favourite during the primaries. So there is no pressing need to pick a black running mate.

Tulsi has perhaps the best available crossover potential; oddly in both directions. A lot of independents and even Republicans like her anti-war stance. At the same time, a lot of Bernie supporters like her—see, for example, Jimmy Dore. Putting her on the ticket could also shield Biden from the charge of being a candidate entirely bought and paid for by the establishment. If, that is, he really isn’t.

Gabbard has also shown the one most valuable trait in a VP candidate: she is an extremely effective attack dog. This is the traditional VP candidate role, making the pointed attacks, so that the presidential candidate can look presidential, above the fray. Gabbard ended Kamala Harris’s candidacy in one of the most effective presidential debate exchanges of all time.

Given Biden’s age and health, Gabbard would stand a good chance of taking over during his term, or at least being given much more responsibility than a VP usually has. And she would be the natural successor in four years. Biden is sure not to be a two-term president.

If he fails, as VP pick, she still becomes the frontrunner to be nominated next time out.

I think she might stay in for that.

Apocalypse Watch: Snakes Alive!

Latest sign of the pending apocalypse: a man in Ireland hasbeen bitten by a poisonous snake, for the first time since the days of St.Patrick.

The Road to Postmodern Hell

Friend Xerxes, in his latest column, seems to state the postmodernist position plainly.

It is impossible, he says, to imagine what we have not experienced.

“We – generally speaking -- cannot imagine what we haven’t experienced, even indirectly.”

“Can a caterpillar imagine being a butterfly? Can an egg imagine being an eagle?

Or, in a human context, can a dweller of the steamy Amazon imagine life in the frozen Arctic? Or vice versa?”

Then he goes further:

“Of course, arguments based on reason and logic don’t prove anything either. If they could, science and philosophy would both have ground to a standstill centuries ago.”

The postmodern position is usually given as: “there is no truth.”

Xerxes is stating it etymologically: “we cannot know truth.”

Either way, the claim is self-refuting. If there is no truth, then the claim “there is no truth” also cannot be true. Or, if we cannot know truth, we cannot know that it is true that we cannot know truth.

There are actually many truths that we can know, and irrefutably. We know our own thoughts and perceptions. Descartes was able not only to prove that “I think, therefore I am,” but that he was unquestionably thinking all the thoughts that he was thinking. That gives us a mental universe to work with. 

Cartesian dualism.

Descartes took as model the truths of mathematics. All of math is proofs; all of math is proven. Yet mathematics has not ground to a halt as a result, as Xerxes suggests should happen. We cannot seriously or legitimately doubt that 2 + 2 = 4, nor the Pythagorean theorem.

Science is a bit more complicated. It is true that science can’t prove anything, and does not claim to. But it can disprove things. You propose a theory: say, that disease is spread by perfume smells. Then you devise an experiment to test the theory. If the experiment is well-designed, it can then positively disprove the thesis. This is what Popper calls “falsifiability.” It is the entire business of science.

This gives us real and certain knowledge, of a negative sort. Disproving, by the way, the common claim that “you cannot prove a negative.”

Over time, as a result, the probability of our positive knowledge increases parabolically as well. You can quibble that things like the law of inertia or gravity are not proven, but for all practical purposes, so what? That is as meaningful as insisting that because a cup is not full if it is not filled precisely to the brim, all cups are empty. This is simply an issue of living in a real rather than an ideal world.

On to philosophy. Philosophy can disprove things yet more efficiently than can science—by showing a claim is internally inconsistent, logically fallacious, or self-contradictory. Like the claim that “there is no truth.” It can also efficiently prove things positively: this is what a syllogism does. It is a formal proof.

I have certainly heard it argued that philosophy has in the end proven nothing. It has been argued often by philosophers themselves: Hume, or Nietzsche, or Hobbes. 

To Hume it may concern...

Whenever philosophers do this, however, they are immediately self-contradictory, in just the same way as is postmodernism saying “we cannot know truth.” Were this true, their own writings are of no more value than random grunts. It is easy to refute them.

Having studied philosophies both East and West, it seems clear to me that there are certain inevitable philosophical conclusions, that have emerged clearly and independently in Europe, India, and China. It seems that everyone who is intelligent enough and who makes the effort to think the matter through will arrive at the same set of conclusions about life, the universe, and everything. These are matters of certain knowledge.

One of the great benefits of cross-cultural studies is that it helps throw these basic universal truths into relief.

Among them are the categorical imperative, the foundation of morality: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The purpose of life being the quest for the moral good, for truth, and for beauty. The intrinsic desirability of these qualities. The truth that the soul is beyond its own comprehension. The necessary existence of a divine intelligence. That justice undergirds the cosmos and will not ultimately be denied. And so on.

Xerxes is also wrong to suppose we are unable to empathize with what we have not experienced. This error is surely behind all the current talk of “cultural appropriation” being illegitimate. And the common assertion that “white people cannot possibly imagine what it is really like being black”; or “men cannot possibly imagine what it is like being a woman.”

These claims are, of course, also automatically self-contradictory. For if a white man cannot possibly imagine what it is like being black, it must be equally true that a black man cannot possibly imagine what it is like being white, and so he cannot possibly imagine what a white man can or cannot possibly imagine. And so with the sexes.

Silly wabbit.

But this kind of thinking leads to nasty racist notions too: that other humans are forever alien to us.

If it were true; but of course it is not true. Of course, we all can imagine. This is what imagination means.

I only the other day heard a fascinating scientific datum. For years, scientists here and there have been working with chimps and gorillas, teaching them sign language. We used to think that language was what divided us from the animals. It turns out this is not so: other higher primates can learn to talk. So can some birds, and maybe dolphins.

Yet in the years this has been done, in the years this has been studied, apparently no ape has yet ever asked a question.

It may be, then, that the imagination is what makes us immortal souls: we are able to think of what is not, and so can ask why.

“Can a caterpillar imagine being a butterfly? Can an egg imagine being an eagle?”

No; but that question is missing something, isn’t it? They cannot, because they are not human. But a human certainly can imagine being a butterfly, or an eagle.

If we were indeed unable to imagine experiences we did not personally have, we could have no interest in reading fiction, or watching movies, or listening to stories. And yet they enthrall us. While engaged with them, we all can, and do, to a greater or lesser degree, but often to a very great degree, fully imagine being someone else. Perhaps animals cannot.

Given that it is close to being self-evidently wrong, why is this idea that there is no truth, or that we cannot know any truth, so popular and persistent?

I think because it seems empowering, liberating. If there is no truth, and no right or wrong, we get to do whatever we want. We become as gods. This is pretty obvious, for example, in Nietzsche. He says as much. 

Nietzsche gone mad.

But this makes life only and all about the lunge for power. It makes it bestial. It looks to me as though all these philosophers who pushed the “no truth” gambit led totalitarian places politically. And that is no mistake. Nietzsche was the philosophical underpinning for the Nazis. Many are eager to insist that he was not himself a Nazi, but that is not the point. Perhaps he had not yet thought it through. He was too preoccupied going mad. Which is itself not a good sign. Hobbes argued for the absolute right of kings over the populace, whose only option if they did not like their government was suicide. Hume looks harmless enough, but I think the argument can be made that he bred Rousseau, and Rousseau’s pulling up the tent peg of reality and morality led to the totalitarian aspects of the French Revolution, to the Reign of Terror and Bonaparte. Edmund Burke thought so. 

Hobbes' goblin.

And that is the path down which we, or at least those on the left, currently trundle, pushing or in our handcarts.

Nothing to Sneeze At

Nobody is saying it, so I will.

The death rate from Spanish flu was 2-3%. The death rate from COVID-19 is now estimated at 3.4%.

We are more interconnected now that we were then; it should also spread to a higher proportion of the world’s population.

Unless it mutates into something less deadly, or unless our current information is wrong, this is going to be worse than the Spanish flu.

The Spanish flu killed more people than HIV/AIDS.

Kind of a Good Idea to Promote the Culture

Joe Who?

Some are discounting this little bit of Joe Biden’s victory speech on Super Tuesday, saying that anyone might have made the mistake of confusing on which side his wife or sister were, since they were standing behind him.

But no, that cannot account for it. He also says, “And I’m Joe’s husband.”

That is, he seems at the same time to confuse himself with his wife.

Not normal, surely. The truth is that Biden, at 77, is senile. This is surely going to become apparent, and may get worse, during the campaign.

And if he becomes president, who is in charge?

Female Privilege

Travelling with my young daughter, more than once, some shopkeeper or museum guide has made a fuss over her, spontaneously given her some special treat.

This has never happened to my son.

Our culture is based on female privilege. Girls are always treated far better than boys. Women are always treated far better than men.

This is not some new thing, with feminism. It has always been true. Feminism has only made it more extreme.

So why is it women who have been complaining of being oppressed?

That’s the result of spoiling anyone. They come to expect the treatment. Reread Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.”

The truly abused generally do not dare complain.

Biden's Super Tuesday

Biden.

The Democratic Party establishment seems to have fallen smartly into line to keep Bernie Sanders from winning their nomination. Only secondarily, I suspect, they have thrown the prize to Joe Biden.

They have done this, it is thought, in the cause of electability. That’s pretty much Biden’s only pitch within the party.

I suspect they have the wrong man. I suspect Biden would run worse against Trump than either of the main remaining alternatives, Sanders or Bloomberg.

The political pros usually get one vital thing wrong. They look at the last significant electoral success, and try to imitate it. This means, if they are the party out of power, that they look for a clone of the guy in power, whom they will run against.

The Liberals won with a youthful Trudeau promising “sunny ways.” So the Tories nominated a youthful smiling Scheer.

Always a bad idea, and they always do it. If you like the guy in power, you are going to vote for him, rather than someone who only resembles him. If you dislike him, and are not offered something different, you might just stay at home.

You can trace this through the procession of presidents or prime ministers of the past. Obama was laid-back and restrained in his manner—“No Drama Obama.” Trump is a loud showman. Harper was grey and full of gravitas—so the Canadian electorate went to Justin Trudeau, who promised glamour and excitement. And not to the favoured Tom Mulcair, who was trying to look grey and full of gravitas. Harper, in turn, looked decisive after “Mr. Dithers,” Paul Martin. Obama looked smooth, poised, and articulate after the inarticulate and slightly boorish George W. Bush.

Note that it is more an issue of manner than anything else.

Trump is a clown. Biden is a clown. Trump is a funnier clown than Biden. Biden loses. I think he loses by a fairly large margin.

That doesn’t mean either Sanders or Bloomberg would win, but they would have more upside potential.

If the economy stays good, Trump probably gets the credit, and people will not be inclined to rock the boat regardless.

But what if the economy goes south? It looks as though we may be heading into a world-wide recession. If so, there could well have been an opening for a button-down technocrat type like Bloomberg. There might have been an opening for someone declaring the system flawed and calling for structural change like Sanders.

But do you want to put another clown in charge of an economy gone wrong?

And then, if you have a choice of two clowns, do you pick the prankster type, the one who plays tricks on others and always seems to end up on top? Or do you pick the bumbling clown, who does not seem to understand what is happening around him?

MyTube on YouTube--The View from the Summit

More at

www.gerebernus.wordpress.com

The View from the Summit-- Latest Podcast episode

The View from the Summit



For more, visit www.gerebernus.wordpress.com

What Dogs Dream

As if on cue, this meme just came over the transom into my inbox.

It illustrates the reality that psychologists are generally just making stuff up. All they seem to do is express their personal opinions based on their personal experience, and because they have the “Psychologist” label, people take it seriously.

There is no reason to believe that they have any special insight.

It should be obvious that they can have no idea of the content of a dog’s dream.

Social Science Professions

Don't buy it.

I remember reading somewhere the calculation that, up until about 1924, physicians did more harm than good. They killed George Washington by letting blood. President McKinley died not from being shot, but from the surgeons expanding the wound and fishing for the bullet with dirty fingers. Patent medicines relied heavily on things like cocaine and heroin.

Even today, estimates are that only 27% of what physicians do is justified by any science. The rest is mostly tricks of the trade to reassure the rubes—er, “placebo effect.”

On this slim foundation rests all the immense prestige now enjoyed by the medical profession; and extended, on their example, to so many other professions that claim to be “scientific.”

Most of the rest probably still do more harm than good. I submit that most of them—those based on “social science”—always will. Psychology and psychiatry, modern education, human resources, sociology, social work, modern journalism.

First, scientific methods do not work on human subjects, who are too unpredictable and too conscious of being studied. Studying people as objects is nonsensical, as well as intrinsically dehumanizing.

Second, any profession exists on the basis of a claim of special knowledge not available to the general public. It is therefore essential for such professions to gin up some body of knowledge that would come as a surprise to the uninitiated.

This means that they must from the start reject all conventional knowledge and common sense about their subject—all that we legitimately do know about it.

This makes them systematically harmful. We would be vastly better off if they were prohibited by law. They are actively doing harm, and demanding huge sums of money to do so.

We are seeing proof of this all the time, if we care to look. The Internet is daily demonstrating that the mainstream media, the professional journalists, are less accurate and less reliable than the amateurs, the "citizen journalists." All the studies show that homeschooled children do better than those professionally educated.

My hope for mankind is that these social science professions will soon become casualties of the Internet.

The Viral Future?

It has in recent decades become a commonplace among academics that diseases influence history.

As of course they do.

How might COVID-19 change the world?

I think there’s a good chance it leads to regime change in China and Iran. These governments were already in difficult relations with their people. The virus hits them in the middle of ongoing protests.

It’s not necessarily about how well or poorly they handle the virus, but the sense that God is passing judgement. I have posted on the possibility before. The Epoch Times, which thinks like the Chinese, has posted a video of strange animal behavior near Wuhan—notably large circling flocks of crows. Crows in China are birds of ill omen. They are so feared that they are killed on sight; so that they are rarely seen. It is hard to account for large flocks of crows appearing in the middle of China.

But what about in the USA? The two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination are advanced in age: Joe Biden is 77, Bernie Sanders is 78 with serious recent heart problems. Michael Bloomberg is 78. They are in the highest risk group for coronavirus. As politicians fighting a political campaign, they are going to be constantly in large crowds shaking hands. What are the odds that the Democratic nominee dies before election day?

Many suspect the Pope already has the virus. He is 83 and with half a lung gone. What happens if he dies? How does electing a new pope work in the middle of a viral epidemic? A few hundred old men locked together in a room for days or weeks until they choose someone? If one goes in with the virus, all come out with it, no doubt some on gurneys. And once the conclave ends, they all head to their home dioceses to spread the sickness worldwide?

And, more generally, trust in “experts” and governments is visibly taking a hit. Official sources like the WHO, the Chinese government, the CDC, have been rather consistently shown to be spreading false and dangerous information, while citizen journalists on social media have been more trustworthy.

Governments may always have been unreliable in this way, putting politics before the public health, but now with the Internet they get caught. People are liable to remember.

Jean Vanier Disinterred to Be Crucified

Jean Vanier

There are of late charges of sexual impropriety against Jean Vanier.

The accusations against him were accepted as true by L’Arche, his foundation, “on the balance of probabilities.” This, to begin with, is not sufficient. One has the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. This is especially true for the dead, who cannot defend themselves against such charges.

I think we are morally obliged to discount these reports, so far as they concern the reputation of Jean Vanier, or else be guilty of the sin of calumny.

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert strip, hosts a YouTube channel on which he comments on current events. He recently mentioned that, to his knowledge, anyone famous will have had multiple false charges of sexual impropriety lodged against them. It is automatic: claim that Elvis Presley raped you, and you get to share some of the fame and glamour of Elvis Presley. In the general population, someone is always sure to make the claim.

There is also a certain class of women who are drawn to celibate priests or married ministers, on the premise that, if they can get them to ignore their vows, this is a conquest, proving their desirability. Failing that, claiming to have done so is almost as good.

We have every reason to expect that there will be charges of sexual impropriety against Vanier without their being true. Six, over a long lifetime, would be a reasonable level of static. And we also have reason to believe that, if he was ever inclined to engage in sex, he would have no need to use compulsion or exploit his position to do so. His real experience was more probably having to resist attempts at seduction.

If he did not always resist, okay, he was guilty of fornication. Join the club. Even saints are not perfect, and have never been presumed to be.

The accusation that he was in some cases exploiting an “unequal power relationship” is also unreasonable. Given his international stature, any relationship available to him could be seen as an “unequal power relationship.” So does this mean he is obliged to have none? Nobody of his generation would have thought of such issues in any case: bosses marrying their secretaries used to be a typical romantic tale. Or patients marrying their nurses. To make this retroactively immoral is a violation of natural justice.

Again, the report is that “For some of the women, these relationships were experienced as coercive and non-consensual in nature.” One accuser is quoted saying “Was I consenting? I think at the beginning yes, but as time went on, the more I believe that I was not consenting.”

This is apparently a matter of opinion on their part. “Were experienced as.”

It is therefore plausible that Vanier’s honest understanding throughout was that they were consensual.

He might even have been feeling these women were coercing him. “Were experienced as.”

 Unless there is more than this, to pay any attention to such things is plain calumny.

Decarie: Road Closed

Richard Decarie

The Conservative Party has refused to allow Richard Decarie to run for their leadership.

Decarie has been criticized in the media for public comments that being gay is a choice, and that government health care should not fund abortions. He would surely have had no chance to win, but these are ideas with which the Conservative Party establishment does not want their brand identified.

This is further evidence that the process is being tightly controlled for a pre-ordained result. The elites within the party, whoever they are, do not want things messed up by the voters. It began with the stiff entry criteria, supposedly to avoid as many candidates as they had the last time.

But why was this a problem? Why was it a problem that they had many candidates? What is bad about offering their members a choice?

Someone seems to have gotten to Jean Charest, Pierre Poilievre, Rona Ambrose, and John Baird, in turn, making them some secret offer they could not refuse to clear the aisle for Peter MacKay. For that matter, Andrew Scheer might have been given the same message. His resignation was sudden and unexpected, and came after MacKay signs started showing up at his events. Perhaps someone left a horse’s head in his bed, too.

I did not detect at the time any popular groundswell for the great Peter MacKay. It is not as though he has charisma. It looks more as if he must have powerful friends. Or owners. MacKay does not have a record of honest dealing.

True, the grey eminences also let Erin O’Toole run. But you have to let someone—you need the appearance of a contest. Even the Communists run their dummy alternative candidates. Moreover, in case MacKay stumbles badly, you need a spare.

To me it all makes it highly dubious to vote Conservative federally. They are controlled by special interests, and we do not know who the special interests are. If their motives were admirable, we probably would.

This also makes the Conservatives the very opposite of a populist party, in a time when populism is sweeping the right.

It begins to make them look irrelevant.

The First Temptation of Christ

Tissot: Jesus ministered to by angels.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. When he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was hungry afterward. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” 

But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of God’s mouth.’” 

Then the devil took him into the holy city. He set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,
‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and,‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you don’t dash your foot against a stone.’” 

Jesus said to him, “Again, it is written, ‘You shall not test the Lord, your God.’” 

Again, the devil took him to an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. He said to him, “I will give you all of these things, if you will fall down and worship me.” 

Then Jesus said to him, “Get behind me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and you shall serve him only.’” 

Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and served him.

The reading for the first Sunday of Lent is Jesus’s temptation in the desert, as told in the Book of Matthew.

This is the rite of passage found for males in most cultures at adolescence: Jesus’s Bar Mitzvah. North American Indians would go out to the woods alone and fast until they met their spirit animal. Xenophon tells of Herakles, as a young man, going off into the wilderness and encountering two women, Virtue and Vice.

The idea is that this spirit quest sets one’s life direction. What is your life going to be all about? It happens at about adolescence because this is when we reach the age of reason, and become fully independent moral agents, responsible for our own decisions.

One might think this unnecessary in Jesus’s case: his life course was pretty much already set. But, being fully human, he too must go through such a moment. He too must be genuinely tempted. At the same time, the temptations he encounters represent those encountered by every man.

The most interesting of the three is the second one: to throw himself down from the roof of the temple.

One can understand the temptation to bread; he has been fasting for forty days. One can understand wanting the kingdoms of the earth. But what does he get by jumping off a high building?

The obvious.

What does anyone get by jumping off a high building?

Not, by being borne up by angels, to reveal publicly that he is someone special and God is with him—because the quoted promise that God will save us from striking our heel against a stone is extended to all.

The angels referred to would be bearing him up to Abraham’s bosom.

Now let’s look at the three temptations. What are these three paths open to us at adolescence, as the guiding principles of our life?

If it is to turn the stones to bread, we have decided that life is all about satisfying basic urges: about enjoying food when we are hungry, and drink, and sex. Or drugs, and rock and roll. Maybe also sports and exercise and healthy foods; these are still a matter of satisfying the body. Many do take this path; the path, even if sometimes more upmarket, of Falstaff, of Pumbaa, of Baloo the Bear. It is not coincidental that the last two are animals.

The second temptation is to despair of this life and to snuffing it. Perhaps in hopes of a better hereafter—hence the reference to the temple. A lot of kids do. A lot of kids, even if they do not actually commit suicide, become deliberately self-destructive. If the first temptation is to hippiehood, this is the punk wave, with safety pins and razor blade jewelry. With playing chicken out on the local highway, or with anorexia. If we think here mostly of teenagers, not adults, it is because those who choose this path tend not to live to adulthood.

The third temptation is to live for what the world knows as “success.” Career, social status, power, and so forth.

This, it seems, is the worst of the temptations, for this requires explicitly worshiping Satan.

But all of these are presented as barren, dead ends. The proper path, the good fourth way, as Jesus advises, is to worship God, and to serve him only.

Twelve Rules for Life

Do not invade Russia.

Do not invest large sums in tulips.

If God tells you not to eat a fruit, don’t.

Urinate only with the wind at your back.

Do not rely on French troops to guard your left flank.

Never bet on the villain in a Disney film.

Never marry a woman whose family nickname is “Princess.”

Avoid staff picnics during a zombie apocalypse.

In the event of a nuclear holocaust, get under your desk and put your hands behind your head

.
Avoid land wars in Asia.

Do not lick doorknobs during a coronavirus outbreak.

Never take life advice from a psychologist.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Coronavirus

I guess this counts as a public service announcement.

The Surgeon-General of the United States has asked everyone to stop buying face masks in hopes of avoiding the coronavirus.

This makes good sense. I have been giving my students in China and Korea the same advice.
Face masks do little or nothing to protect you from the virus. It is airborne, and can enter your system at the eye. They are useful mainly to prevent you from spreading the virus through sneezing if you have it.

Accordingly, it is important that masks remain available for the ill, in order to prevent the spread of the disease. Each mask you uselessly buy now risks taking it away from where and when it is genuinely needed.

Second piece of advice: stock up on non-perishable food. People commonly think of such actions as selfish, “hoarding.” This is the opposite of the truth. If you can ensure that you and your family are provided for during a crisis or a quarantine, you will be reducing the pressure on emergency services if the crisis hits. You are reducing the crowding and the possible spread of the virus if it reaches your neighbourhood.

If it does not hit near you, nothing is lost; you eat the non-perishable food anyway, when it suits you. So there seems to be no downside to stocking up on rice and beans. Don’t forget salt and oil.
I keep hearing about people stocking up on water. This seems to me unnecessary. I cannot see how the virus is going to cause municipal water supplies to shut down. Is the virus going to be spread by water? No indication that this is possible.

At worst, this is not going to be all that bad. And for all we know, the virus may mutate into something harmless tomorrow.