¿Entre las líneas, o por el otro lado?

El revolucionario Tedoro exhortando a sus compañeros de cautiverio:

"¡No os rindáis! ¡No deis un paso atrás! ¡Comed la comida que os traigan, pero no hagáis ni una sola concesión más! ¡Son seres malvados! ¡Avergonzadles! ¡Desafiadles! La duda significa una brecha en la armadura; ¿queréis inclinaros para que luego os partan en dos? ¡No cedáis, no cejéis en vuestro empeño! ¡Si el que manda os da permiso para sentarse, quedaos de pie! ¡Si os da papel rayado para que escribáis, hacedlo entre las líneas!"

(Jack Vance: La máquina de matar)

Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado.

(Juan Ramón Jiménez)

A door into Lafferty's mind

I found some pictures of R. A. Lafferty's studio door in this page.

every flat surface not covered by books was covered by collage, of which Ray himself was the creator. When he was moved to a nursing home after a stroke, all his stuff was cleared out of his house, I think so the house could be remodeled and sold. (The University of Tulsa was offered his papers, but shamefully, they don't seem too interested.) The writer and poet Warren Brown managed to save this door from the trash.

Lafferty writing at the center of his vast library, taking bits and pieces from classical antiquity, the christian tradition, and many other sources. Myths, words, etymologies, strange theories of History. Rearranging them in quirky new forms, sometimes difficult to interpret but always a delight to read. That collage is a fitting metaphor. If there's one science fiction author whose work merits annotated editions, that author is Lafferty. I would love to read a study about his use of classical and biblical allusions.

Return from the stars

The beginning of this novel by the late Stanislaw Lem is one of the better depictions of "future shock" ever put to paper. Really top-notch science fiction. The rest of the book, while still interesting, doesn't quite live up to the promise of that exceptional beginning. Nevertheless, the occasional flashbacks to an ill-fated space mission manage to convey extremely well the grandeur and awe of space, in a manner that brings to mind Kubrick's "2001".

Cielo e Infierno

Con el siglo VIII y, definitivamente, el siglo IX las violentas persecuciones religiosas instituidas por los confucianos, de las que también hemos hablado, quebraron la prosperidad de la orden [budista] en China, sin poder aniquilarla de forma total y permanente. [...] Los oponentes más decisivos fueron fueron lógicamente los literatos confucianos. Frente a sus tesis -que el deber y no el miedo y la esperanza de la recompensa y castigo transcendental deben ser la fuente de la virtud, que la devoción para obtener la remisión de los pecados no era expresión de la verdadera piedad, y que el nirvana idealiza la inactividad- los apologetas del budismo replicaron que que el confucianismo sólo mostraba consideración por el mundo actual o, a lo sumo, por la felicidad de los descendientes, pero no por el más allá futuro. Afirmaban, además, que el cielo y el infierno eran el único medio disciplinario efectivo de la virtud humana.

(Max Weber: Ensayos sobre sociología de la religión)

Asimov sobre Sócrates

En primer lugar, permítanme despachar a Sócrates, porque estoy harto y aburrido de esa afectación de que saber que no se sabe nada es un signo de sabiduría.

Nadie sabe nada. En cuestión de días, los bebés aprenden a reconocer a sus madres.

Por supuesto, Sócrates estaría de acuerdo y explicaría que él no se refiere al conocimiento de trivialidades. Se refiere a que hay que abordar las grandes abstracciones sobre las que discuten los seres humanos sin ideas preconcebidas y no contrastadas, y que esto es lo único que sabemos. (¡Qué afirmación más increíblemente arrogante!)

Al discutir temas tales como "¿Qué es la justicia?" o "¿Qué es la virtud?", su actitud era la del que no sabe nada y tiene que ser aleccionado por los demás. (Es la llamada "ironía socrática", ya que Sócrates sabía de sobra que él sabía mucho más que los pobres infelices en los que se cebaba.) Al fingir ignorancia, Sócrates conseguía que los demás expusieran sus puntos de vista sobre estos conceptos abstractos. Entonces planteaba una serie de preguntas, aparentemente propias de un ignorante, con las que conseguía que los otros se perdieran en un fárrago tal de contradicciones que acababan por echarse a llorar y por admitir que no sabían de qué estaban hablando.

El hecho de que los atenienses permitieran que este juego continuara durante décadas y que le aguantaran hasta los setenta años, momento en el cual le obligaron a beberse el veneno, nos da una idea de su maravillosa tolerancia.

(Isaac Asimov: El secreto del Universo)

¡Por el perro! Creo que Asimov tiene mucha razón.

Como también la tiene Matthew Stewart, hablando de los sofistas:

Pues bien, ¿a qué obedece el hecho de que, en las historias tradicionales de la filosofía, los sofistas aparezcan condenados al infierno o al olvido? Cierto es que las doctrinas asociadas a la sofística -el relativismo y el escepticismo- no han gozado entre los filósofos de la misma popularidad que sus contrarias. La mayoría de los filósofos han preferido las morales de inspiración divina y el conocimiento absoluto. Mientras que las calumnias de Platón se basan, ciertamente, en su propia fe de signo opuesto en absolutos divinos, esto no basta para explicar el sino de los sofistas, pues muchos otros filósofos aceptables han defendido las mismas doctrinas impopulares.

El problema, a mi juicio, tiene que ver más con la actitud de los sofistas hacia sus propias doctrinas. Hicieron de la filosofía un medio para un fin. Los filósofos siempre han reclamado que se considere la filosofía un fin en sí mismo. La filosofía, o la vida contemplativa, es felicidad. Es la vida buena, no unas cuantas lecciones que hayan de tomarse en consideración de camino a la vida buena. No ha de venderse en el mercado al lado de las frutas y verduras. [...] Y, sin embargo, los sofistas eran amantes del conocimiento. De hecho, en su desdén por las obtusas doctrinas metafísicas, los sofistas revelaron un sentido de la objetividad y la imparcialidad que debería haberles convertido en los auténticos representantes de la tradición.

(Matthew Stewart: La verdad sobre todo)

Mutilation as transhumanism

There are many science fiction stories about groups of people who voluntarily renounce some limb, organ, or mental faculty in order to achieve a state they consider more desirable than plain vanilla human. The novels of Greg Egan feature voluntary asexuals and autists. In Samuel R. Delany's Aye, and Gomorrah, astronauts are neutered to avoid the efects of space radiation on gametes. Parts of Michel Houllebeq's The Possibility of an Island take place in a future "utopia" where sexuality has been abolished (see also: Postgenderism).

In Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, amputations of limbs are a mark of status, the more the better. The zoanthropes in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun renounce their higher mental faculties to live a life of savagery. The scanners in Cordwainer Smith's story Scanners live in vain are humans whose sensory nerves are cut to allow them to undergo the rigors of space travel. They come to regard their status as noble and desirable, an resent an invention that makes their transformation obsolete. The cyborgs in David R. Bunch's Moderan constantly attempt to reduce their organic parts to the bare minimum.

One man's mutilation is another's enhancement. All of the above transformations could be considered varieties of transhumanism. At least, by the characters who wanted them.

Given that, in the simpler cases, the technology required is just a well sharpened knife, there are historical precedents to those fictional movements. The millenarian russian sect from the nineteenth century called the Skoptzy, for example:

As their title indicates, the main feature of the sect was sexual mutilation. This they called their "baptism of fire." Of this there were two kinds, the "lesser" and "greater seal" (i.e. partial and complete mutilation). In this the Skoptsi maintained that they were fulfilling Christ's counsel of perfection in Matthew xix. 12 and xviii. 8, 9. A terrible operation with similar purpose was sometimes performed on the women. The earliest records of such female genital mutilations date from 1815. Usually the breasts only were amputated, according to the 1911 encyclopedia. Other accounts suggest that the labia were also removed.

(Wikipedia entry for Skoptzy)

The most surprising fact about them is the kind of people who joined:

Nobles, military and naval officers, civil servants, priests and merchants were to be found in its ranks, and so rapidly did the numbers increase that 515 men and 240 women were transported to Siberia between 1847 and 1866 without seriously threatening its existence. In, 187? many trials of Skoptsi took place all over Russia. In 1874 the sect numbered at least 5444, including 1465 women. Of these 703 men and 100 women had mutilated themselves.

(ibid.)

More recently, many members of the Heaven's Gate cult also castrated themselves (science fiction, along with Christianity and New Age stuff, was an important part of their belief system). And then there is the lesbian couple who wanted their child to be deaf like them.

I suspect that, in time, mutilative practices will become central to transhumanism, either by religious reasons, group identity ones, or just plain ol' crazyness.

Bad Ronald

Bad Ronald es una película para televisión de los años setenta, basada en la novela homónima de Jack Vance.

Ronald Wilby es un adolescente inadaptado con cierto talento artístico y una imaginativa vida interior, que vive con su superprotectora madre divorciada. Tras matar accidentalmente a una chica que se burlaba de él, Ronald corre a su casa sin saber qué hacer. La madre, que no quiere separarse de Ronald bajo ningún concepto, propone un curioso plan: esconderle en una habitación secreta de la casa, y fingir ante la policía que se ha escapado.

El plan parece funcionar, pero Ronald, en su aislamiento, va perdiendo su ya de antemano tenue anclaje en el mundo real. Fantasea con un reino imaginario llamado Atranta, identificándose con su noble gobernante el príncipe Norbert. Poco a poco va llenando la paredes de su escondite con dibujos, plasmación de sus fantasías.

La situación se complica cuando la madre fallece durante una operación quirúrgica. Poco después la casa es vendida a una familia con tres hermosas hijas, con Ronald todavía dentro, ya completamente loco. Espía a la familia a través de agujeros en las paredes. Roba comida del frigorífico cuando no hay nadie mirando. Lee el diario de una de las hijas, y la toma por la princesa Vancetta, prometida del príncipe Norbert. Por la casa ronda un fantasma que no está muerto...

El personaje protagonista recuerda un poco al Norman Bates de Psicosis: vouyerismo, fijación con la madre... También a un personaje real: Henry Darger. Y alguna que otra semejanza tiene con Don Quijote de la Mancha: una fantasía hiperactiva, la tendencia asignar identidades imaginarias al objeto amoroso...

A primera vista, y sin haber leído la novela original (hoy prácticamente inencontrable), la historia parece estar un tanto alejada de las típicas de Vance, un autor que normalmente trabaja dentro de los géneros de ciencia ficción y fantasía. Sin embargo, su marca es clara: muchos personajes vanceanos (sobre todo los antagonistas) son estetas o artistas frustrados poseedores de una rica vida interior, llevada a veces hasta extremos casi solipsistas. El Howard Alan Treesong de El Libro de los Sueños es una especie de Ronald Wilby cienciaficcionístico.

¿Con qué propósito escribiría Vance esta historia? Además de para ganarse el pan, claro. ¿Es acaso Bad Ronald una sátira de sus propios lectores? Posiblemente:

... I detest the field [science fiction]. I don't like the people in it. Not the writers, but the fans. The young fans and some of their adolescent attitudes of going to conventions in funny clothes and being Star Trek-ians and getting all these strange societies up. I think I don't want to be associated with those people.

De hecho, esta humilde, efectiva, y sumamente disfrutable película resulta profética en su retrato del friki inadaptado, sexualmente inelegible, que se retrae del mundo real para refugiarse en la fantasía. ¿Cuantos Ronald Wilby habrá escondidos físicamente en sus habitaciones, y escondidos mentalmente en una galaxia muy lejana, la Tierra Media, o en un videojuego? Los japoneses incluso tienen una palabra para este fenómeno: Hikikomori.

Sin embargo, sospecho que la historia es también, hasta cierto punto, autobiográfica. Vance ha mencionado en entrevistas que de niño era bastante introvertido, a la vez que un lector ávido y omnívoro. El peligro de perderse en un mundo de fantasía no le debió ser extraño. Gene Wolfe afirma que su novela Paz, protagonizada por un asesino, es "más autobiográfica de lo que la gente cree". ¿Podría suceder lo mismo con Bad Ronald?

Fragmentos de la película pueden verse aquí, aquí, y aquí. ¡Gracias, YouTube!

Calculators

What a satire, by the way, is that machine [Babagge's] on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!

I have an immense respect for a man of talents plus "the mathematics." But the calculating power alone should seem to be the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest amount of reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three or four calculators, and better than any one of them. Sometimes I have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive apprehension of the relations of numbers. But the triumph of the ciphering hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I can hear the wheels clicking in a calculator's brain. The power of dealing with numbers is a kind of "detached lever" arrangement, which may be put into a mighty poor watch. I suppose it is about as common as the power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare endowment.

(Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table)

Caracoles

Cuando camino de vuelta a casa bordeando el parque y acaba de llover, me encuentro con caracoles que han abandonado el césped y se adentran en la acera. Muchos han sido pisoteados por algún viandante previo; las conchas rotas permanecen como recordatorio de sus infaustas expediciones.

El caso es que semejante escabechina me parece completamente innecesaria. A veces incluso siento la tentación de coger a los caracoles que me voy encontrando, y volverlos a echar al césped. Después de todo, ¿qué se les ha perdido en la acera? Están mucho mejor entre la hierba húmeda, creo yo.

Sin embargo, ciertas dudas detienen mi misión salvadora. ¿Es realmente inútil para los caracoles el pasearse la acera? No sé, a lo mejor el pavimento contiene alguna substancia que necesitan y no se encuentra en la tierra del parque. En ese caso, mis buenas intenciones resultarían contraproducentes.

Esta mortandad de moluscos, ¿no creará una presión evolutiva que conduzca al desarrollo de un instinto para evitar la acera? ¿Cuántas generaciones de caracoles deben morir aplastadas hasta que surja una variedad sensata, sin impulsos suicidas? La evolución darwiniana es un dios ciego y cruel que sólo otorga sus dones a cambio de incontables muertes y sufrimientos. Debería ser declarada ilegal, o al menos políticamente incorrecta. Como escribió un tipo, de cuyo nombre no me acuerdo, que fue citado por Dawkins en El Gen Egoísta: "Nature, red in tooth and claw".

En Ciudad de Clifford D. Simak los perros, que han heredado el mundo tras la desaparición del hombre, han sido condicionados para ser vegetarianos. Esta delirantemente utópica imagen de la crueldad natural domeñada es lo que más recuerdo de la novela. Supongo que tiene inspiración bíblica, en pasajes como "el lobo y el cordero serán apacentados juntos, y el león comerá paja como el buey".

En fin... como siga así terminaré convirtiéndome al jainismo.

Clerics don't use swords

I had always thought that the weapon restrictions for the cleric class in the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game were completely arbitrary, but apparently they have some historical justification. Take for example Odo, Bishop of Bayeux:

Mounted on a white horse, and wearing over a white albe a coat of mail, "wide in the body, but with tight sleeves," he rode wherever the battle raged most fiercely, and, wielding a baston, charged with his knights wherever aid was needed, and did signal service that day. (Roman de Rou)

In the Bayeux Tapestry he is depicted in accordance with the above description. Both he and the Duke are armed with "bastons," which are nothing less than formidable rugged clubs, and over the head of the bishop are the words, "Hic Odo Eps baculum tenens confortat pueros," illustrating a critical period of the battle when the varlets who had the care of the harness took fright and began to abandon it. Odo, "the good priest," as Wace calls him, observed the disorder, and galloping up, exclaimed, "Stand fast! stand fast! move not a foot! Fear nothing, for please God we shall conquer yet!" very probably enforcing his exhortation with the "argumentum baculinum," of which he was so powerful a master.

As far as the bishop is concerned we may believe that his fighting with a bludgeon in lieu of a sword or a lance was in evasion of the edict of the council of Rheims, A.D. 1049, prohibiting the bearing of arms by the clergy; but the war-club was a not unusual weapon at that period, and seems to have been the precursor of the iron mace of the Middle Ages.

No mention of his character level or choice of spells, however.

Dawkins? Or Vance?

Here is a little passage from a book:

It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living - flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on. But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.

And here is another passage, from a different book:

Consider the class of all possible objects, the number of which is naturally very large: infinite indeed, unless we impose an upper limit of mass and certain other physical qualifications. Thus imposing and so qualifying, we find that still only an infinitesimal fraction of this class of objects can be considered life-forms... Before we have even started the investigation we have exercised a very stringent selection of objects which by their very definition will show basic similarities.

One of the passages cited above comes from Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. The other comes from Jack Vance's The Star King, a very entertaining science fiction novel written in the sixties. Which is which?

Underground Weber

Max Weber began his studies of rationalization in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he shows how the aims of certain Protestant denominations, particularly Calvinism, shifted towards rational means of economic gain as a way of dealing with their anxiety about whether they had been saved. The rational consequences of this doctrine, he argued, soon grew incompatible with its religious roots, and so the latter were eventually discarded. Weber continues his investigation into this matter in later works, notably in his studies on bureaucracy and on the classifications of authority. In these works he alludes to an inevitable move towards rationalization.

...

Weber described the eventual effects of rationalization in his Economy and Society as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" (or "steel-hard casing") of rule-based, rational control.

(Wikipedia entry on Rationalization)

Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is DESIRABLE to reform man in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that man's inclinations NEED reforming? In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be a benefit to man? And to go to the root of the matter, why are you so positively convinced that not to act against his real normal interests guaranteed by the conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous for man and must always be a law for mankind? So far, you know, this is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a couple of words myself. May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of LES ANIMAUX DOMESTIQUES--such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvellous edifice of that pattern which endures for ever--the ant-heap.

...

Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.

(Dostoyevsky: Notes from the Underground)