Category Archives: Belief and Knowledge

Who Will We Choose to Be?

Posted on by
Reply

America stands at a crossroads. Are Nebraskans willing to decide? Or will many ignore history and choose the path of least resistance, comfortable in the safety of their whiteness (for now)?

Ask yourself: Was Joe Biden elected president in 2020? Current president Donald Trump says no, that he won the election and Biden stole it. There is zero credible evidence for this assertion. But here we are, more than five years later, with insurrectionists on the loose, pardoned by the president. Several have been arrested for new crimes. One—Jared Wise—is a senior advisor at the Justice Department.

Does the First Amendment guarantee freedom of speech? Is due process of law guaranteed to “any person,” as it says in the Fourteenth Amendment, before they can be deprived of their liberty?

What kind of system does the president prefer? He told America in 2018 that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un had “fallen in love.” He has said that he admires the “loyalty” the people have for Kim (loyalty which is state-mandated), and Trump has said he wishes Americans would display that same reverence for him. It’s quite similar to statements he’s made praising “president for life” Vladimir Putin’s post-democratic Russia.

And during his second term, MAGA has repeatedly floated this idea of a third term, as well as a dynastic transfer of power to one of Trump’s children.

On Sept. 12, when a Fox News reporter asked Trump about the current rash of political violence on the right and left, offering him a chance to call for calm and national unity, he had this to say:

“The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy.”

The statement appears to make the claim that right-wing political violence stems from righteous anger at lawlessness, while left-wing radicals are simply “vicious”. Seizing the moment, Attorney General Pam Bondi noted

that the Justice Department would “go after” Americans for “hate speech,” a statement she later walked back.

But just recently, Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer told Nebraska Public Media, “It’s not free speech to celebrate the death of someone,” and that those who do so need to be “held responsible.”

***

Now the National Guard is spreading nationwide—Portland is next— coordinating with ICE and behaving as an occupying force rather than the emergency-response “citizen army” that is their charter.

Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen is all in, circumventing the legislature to offer the McCook prison facility to ICE for detainment of those they sweep up in raids of workplaces, streets, and residential neighborhoods.

But they are not sweeping up the white male citizens who dominate the American assassination game in their dragnet.

Meanwhile Pete Hegseth, our hair-sprayed celebrity Secretary of Defense, has called every single flag officer in the US armed forces, wherever they may be, to an auditorium in Quantico, Va., on Sept. 30, ostensibly to hear a speech from him.

Many officers reportedly fear a loyalty purge well beyond the anti-DEI cuts to the GOFO (General Officer/Flag Officer) ranks Hegseth has made thus far. Aside from that, it is an unprecedentedly expensive and dangerous gathering that will impact military readiness in multiple active theaters of war. Is that important?

As a matter of history, at least one retired general pointed out online that Hitler called a meeting of all of his general officers in 1935 to extract a loyalty pledge prior to implementing his domestic plans. Hegseth’s winking response? “Cool story, General.”

And at a recent memorial for a MAGA-friendly pundit who was just the latest political figure—this time on the right—to be assassinated by a disturbed man with a gun, White House senior advisor on immigration Stephen Miller harkens back to a famous speech of the 1940s. He dramatically describes the “storm” that this particular killing has generated, rhetorically transforming the trigger-pulling “him” into a non- specific, broadly threatening, anti-American “they”—then switching to an ominous “You”:

“They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us…You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing.”

You get the idea. The many thousands in the crowd, in their Trump gear, heard him loud and clear. One man’s car was painted with the slogan, “Tolerance Killed Charlie Kirk.”

Now the environment appears right for Pam Bondi to make good Trump’s threat to prosecute his political enemies, as former FBI director James Comey—a lifelong Republican—faces a Justice Department indictment.

Of course, the administration’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, was just reported to have taken $50,000 in bribes from the FBI. The Justice Department apparently will not prosecute, and his job appears safe.

But it seems Trump will not rest until he finds a prosecutor to charge a member of the Federal Reserve—one he wants out—with a crime of his invention.

Former President Obama is being “investigated.” Former UN ambassador John Bolton’s home was recently raided. Dozens of career government prosecutors have been fired, and some are being investigated, for working on the January 6 insurrection cases.

Constitutional Republic or fanatical patriot cult? Respectful political opposition and rule of law, or constant attempts to frighten and dominate domestic “enemies” with dehumanizing Christian Nationalist rhetoric and veiled threats against citizens, all emanating from openly partisan elected officials? Which will it be, Nebraska?

As someone who wasn’t born in America, I think I’ve made my choice.

Commentary originally submitted and accepted by the Nebraska Examiner. I declined requested rewrites demanded from a “national editor (not the Nebraska Examiner editor), so the article was not published. I provide the final submitted version here.

Happy 250th Birthday to the United States Army 

Posted on by
Reply

On June 14, we wished our United States Army a happy 250th birthday. It was a significant day for me, having grown up around the world among soldiers, sailors, airmen and their families. 

My father, George Wees, was born in Omaha to second-generation Polish immigrants. His father, Francis Wees, built houses in South Omaha, including the house he, my grandmother, and their nine children called home, near 38th and G. Dad attended Creighton Prep and graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1958. 

I was born a few years later, in Heidelberg, in then-West Germany. Young Lieutenant Wees was on one of his early assignments working with the newly established West German military, via a NATO attachment, to establish secure government communications networks just miles away from Soviet-allied East Germany.  

In 1966, Dad received orders for Vietnam. He was to advise a South Vietnamese Army unit in the burgeoning conflict between the communist North and the democratic South. He parked my mother and us kids in a little duplex in East Omaha, and off he went to spend a year on the other side of the globe. 

Cadet George Wees in his West Point dorm room
Cadet George Wees, USMA 1958

I remember, he furnished us with a little tape recorder and microphone, and he and my mother exchanged tapes, in addition to near-daily letters, during his deployment. She still has the tapes. In some of his messages, you hear the gunfire in the distance. And at those times, you hear a bit of unsteadiness in the young lieutenant’s voice.

When Dad returned in 1967, he was stationed at the Pentagon, now a Captain. We lived in a little house across from a park in Vienna, Virginia, where I attended kindergarten and first grade. It was there that I really got to know him. He set up a dark room in the basement to pursue his photography hobby, bought a Mustang for the Pentagon commute, and patiently hosted siblings from Omaha who wanted to come visit Washington.

But by 1969, it was time for his second tour in Vietnam. Back we came to Omaha, to another little house on 43rd and Center, a rental owned by friends. There my mother, sister and I would wait out another year of war. That is, if Dad survived. 

By this time, things were less taut, less military, and problems extended from the front to the rear. In command of American troops near Nha Trang, Dad survived at least one attempt on his life—from his own troops. 

Because by this point, many of the young draftees were convinced the war was pointless. Eventually, after resisting the notion for years, Colonel Wees agreed with me that the war, through Democratic and Republican administrations, was ill-conceived and badly executed. 

In other words, pointless.

But we should remember that rank and file soldiers like my dad only served. None of it was their idea, nor did they make the big decisions. That was the province of civilian leadership in Washington—folks who would soon be ousted, many imprisoned, the president resigning in disgrace. 

Our current civilian leader, who has already been disgraced by multiple felony convictions and a sexual assault judgment against him, used the occasion of the Army’s birthday to throw a party and have a parade. 

The Army, as always, followed the commander-in-chief’s orders, and rolled the tanks down Constitution Avenue in a light rain as the president attempted a few salutes. Nearby, at Arlington National Cemetery, Dad rested.  

Though drafted, the president never served (bone spurs), and according to witnesses, he has labeled as “suckers and losers” the rank-and-file soldiers who make up the service. His campaign-style speech to West Point’s 2025 graduating class—complete with MAGA hat— was thin on talk of duty or honor.

But those cadets did what cadets do. They listened to the president troll and dismiss his predecessor, threaten his political “enemies”, invent “facts”, and brag about himself, without visibly reacting, except to politely applaud as they shared their achievement with the commander-in-chief. 

That’s what it looks like when doing one’s duty, honorably, for one’s country. It looks like discipline, because that’s what is required to lead. 

Happy 250th birthday to the United States Army. May you continue to serve and protect the Constitution, and to quietly obey the lawful orders of whatever civilian leadership the voters place above you, for centuries to come.

Written for the Nebraska Examiner

https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/07/08/celebrating-250-years-of-the-u-s-army/

“I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home”: Lorrie Moore’s School of Death for Beginners

Posted on by
Reply

Reviewers seem a bit confused by Lorrie Moore’s new novel about love after death. Most exude this weird kind of shock that Moore could write something so, um, well…trite. And icky. But it’s good! They all say. It’s better than all the other crap out there. She’ll write something better soon.

Anyway, every review covers the surface action well, so I won’t get too far into that. History teacher’s brother is dying, while his ex-girlfriend is suicidal, then dead, then sort of alive again, sort of a tree, and off the two of them go, on an obliquely adventurous/fantastic/surreal “road trip” that hugs the Mason Dixon line, as her dead body decays. That is indeed what happens.

And the epistolary framing provided by the out-of-time innkeeper, Libby, does indeed send us into brief moments of literary splendor, with Moore kind of showing off (with purpose) in the form of Libby’s well-executed Cormac McCarthy-style liturgical drawl. It’s good stuff, I agree.

But after auditing many reviews, I find only a few writing on this novel have touched on the main time-traveling conspiracy theory threading its way through this doube narrative.

And folks stumble on the bad jokes, the bad puns, the bad one-liners, homophones, narrow cultural references that fall short—the desperation humor, you might call it, that bobs and weaves its way all through this short American lamentation on four wheels. 

Why are they doing that? Why doesn’t Lily (the too-perfect name —the “life” of death) know more about death, or even that she’s quite dead? Why must Finn keep at her, keep hounding her on the question of just how dead she is? 

“Maybe it’s a spectrum,” she offers. Indeed, maybe it is, in some kind of deaths. Maybe it’s slower, less absolute right away, less tangible and solid. More a dying than a death.

And what of this innkeeper? What is her role? Why do Finn and Lily end up at her broken down boarding house, where her ghost surely resides in the form of her bound letters to her dead sister—just as Finn’s brother is about to become his own ghost. What is in this parallel structure to make it mean something?

My key to this minor enigma can be found in some of the recurring imagery itself — Lily’s decay, a vehicle on the road to nowhere, Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, the Mason/Dixon, secessionists, conspiracy theories, Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and skies that offer patterns significant to others but, we are told more than once, not to Finn, who doesn’t understand how anyone sees anything in the constellations. 

And what does Finn say more than once, amid what appears to be a salad of jumbled, barely appropriate cultural references uttered by each of them seemingly without willing it (the pair are constantly self-critiquing each other’s prowess at this, to be fair):

There are no more Rice Krispies.

Here, you must be not only a cultural historian but one of a certain age — Lorrie Moore’s age — to even get the joke at all. And if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you. Yes, the book is about loss. Of course it is. But it’s more than that.

But that’s the idea. I feel like you can read this book two ways (at least) — as someone ignorant of history (or who conflates history with its attendant popular conspiracy theories and various tv shows about history) or someone who knows history. If you’re the former, you will be confused and perplexed (kind of like Finn and some of these reviewers) by this narrative’s sort of half-knowledge of history mixed with commercial fodder gleaned from a lifetime of television exposure, shot through with a sepia-toned conspiracy theory born in 1865 and still living today. For a quick shorthand, you can think of what Don DeLillo was trying to do (and did) in his 1985 novel White Noise. It’s part of what Moore is doing here – throwing us off balance with our own fractured culture.

But if you’re the latter, you see the thread Moore is weaving, from the political theater of 2016 to the theater (Ford’s) of 1865. There is no character more salient to the post-2016 American condition than a spoiled rich charlatan—a famous con man wrapped up in an overly coiffed disguise of himself that exudes charming bravado, but who in his nihilistic solipsism will threaten the stability of a nation, perhaps the world. 

And that man was John Wilkes Booth. Or was it Abraham Lincoln? 

You see? If we go back to 1865* we find a familiar world, with familiar actors, where history has not yet finished the chapter but soon will. A disgruntled and just-defeated South, where the president is despised as a tyrant, had nurtured the famous Booth and then birthed, in the final hours, the fanatic Booth, who goes on to carry out the vengeance their own hearts nurtured at home. 

Booth was famous, you know, on both sides of the Mason/Dixon. He was beloved in Maryland and the greater South for his acting talents and his place in the impressive Booth family. He lived a life of celebrity, ease, and wealth. Yet something in him transformed him into the assassin he became. That something was the Union’s victory, and specifically Abraham Lincoln.

We know his story too, basically. He shot Lincoln, then got away to a barn somewhere after hurting his leg (either from jumping onto the Ford’s Theater stage or later when his getaway horse fell on him, it’s not known). The authorities found him there, besieged the barn—and then the story gets murky. Suffice to say, many believed he got away that night, and some other poor soul was shot in that burning barn.

Now let’s look again at Jack, the southern dandy described with such detail by landlady Libby. He knows Shakespeare, he has grandiose ways, mutton chops, and flashy clothes (along with a trunk full of wigs, tights of all variety, and several shining swords). He winks and hints cryptically to Libby regarding secessionists in the area. Most tellingly, he has a cork leg–“from the secesh, he says”. Oh, and he’s a real jerk to women. Libby describes him often, as in:

“Dapper as a finch, the handsome lodger can recite bewildering poems of Felicia Hemans (note: whose poetry runs from kitchy patriotic themes to the suicide of women) … His mustache is black and thick as a broom bristle and the words come flying out of it like the lines of a play in a theatre on fire…”

Of course, that would all add up to just a hunch if not for the curiosity seeker who comes calling at the boarding house asking for Jack’s body (Jack is traditionally a nickname for John, by the way). His name is Phineas Bates, and Libby surmises that he wants the body to mummify it, and to then cart it around the country as a sideshow curiosity. Why does Libby think this?

Because it’s what happened. Sort of. The controversy still swirling around John Wilkes Booth’s death at the turn of the century prompted one Finis L. Bates to write Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, a bestseller contending that a Booth look-alike was mistakenly killed at the Garrett farm while Booth eluded his pursuers until he committed suicide in 1903 in Enid, Oklahoma. Later, Bates went so far as to exhibit what he claimed was Booth’s embalmed body at carnival shows. 

Finn mentions the controversy and mystery of the barn episode to Lily, with Booth’s possible escape part of the wider web of conspiracy theories in which he’s interested (including UFOs and the possibility that the moon landing was faked to reach Kennedy’s arbitrary deadline).

All subsequent attempts, by both the Booth family and researchers, to exhume the body buried in John Wilkes Booth’s grave have been rejected by the authorities based on what they call the “unreliability” of Bates’ story.

So Finn interprets this as perhaps we all should: the bottom line is that this is a story known to history, but without evidence, because those in charge don’t want to see it.

Still, given all that, what is Moore’s point in resurrecting (if you will) this old saw and then burying it in a story about lovers on the run? 

It may be helpful to examine the mind of Booth a little more carefully. Here he is in a letter from January 1865:

I know how foolish I shall be deemed for undertaking such a step as this, where, on one side, I have many friends and everything to make me happy … to give up all … seems insane; but God is my judge. I love justice more than I do a country that disowns it, more than fame or wealth.

Does that bullshit sound familiar at all? Or how about this:

I have ever held the South was right. The very nomination of Abraham Lincoln, four years ago, spoke plainly war upon Southern rights and institutions. …And looking upon African Slavery from the same stand-point held by the noble framers of our constitution, I for one, have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation.

Feelings like this transformed Abraham Lincoln into a tyrant and violence into the only solution among people like Booth. In other words, the destruction of their “way of life” (which was a way to death for Black people) was tantamount to genocide and a call for the very civil war that had then lain waste to their society. They were defeated, yes. But in many Southern homes, for years afterward, proud portraits of John Wilkes Booth were displayed in the parlor. 

And in Moore’s telling, he struts around a Chattanooga boarding house in a continuation of his self-important drama, the stage play of the brave patriot who brought down a tyrant and lived to tell the tale — even after his celebrated death.

Perhaps he really did get away, with help from sympathizers, in the same way he got to that barn after shooting the president in the middle of Washington, DC. Finn points out that Lincoln’s personal guard was conveniently off drinking beer when Booth pulled the trigger, and that a lot of other folks were conveniently placed around the area. Because we’re not allowed to find out who’s in that grave, we will never know if Booth got away. But we know there were folks positioned to help him, right there in Washington.

The idea was to re-charge the war by decapitating the Union government. A plan worthy of Q-anon.

It was a slow dying. Their ideals stayed the same, or maybe even hardened a bit, like pre-rigormortis of the soul. They are still dying, and dying hard. Will they ever die? Whom do we ask?

Like the protest sign carried by a character living in a tent shown on the television in Max’s hospice room early in the novel, we can all say it to them, those who want to start it all over and maybe win it this time, against logic and history, who want to “take their country back” from no one they can name—because really, they want to resurrect another country that’s dead and doesn’t know it:

We are not homeless. This is our home.

What is death really, and what will be dying this time around the horn? Is it already dying? Is it dead? Can we be sure? Lorrie Moore probably isn’t any happier than I am about a curiosity that can seek but only find the lack of an answer—an answer we cannot know yet, and may never know, like the slipping patient his time of death. So we make dumb jokes and wait, like people in the hospice room do, step out for hot drinks, hoping it won’t be as bad as it feels like it’s going to be. Hoping at least there will be some finality, sometime soon, to whatever is dying. Hoping–even better–that something will happen to undo all this. Someday soon.

No more Rice Krispies.

Hope floats around our grief—as Moore describes it, like a soap bubble, its swirling colors ready to pop into nothingness—hope that it never happens to us. To me. To all of us at once.

But as Finn finally realizes, and as the young African assistant to his dying brother Max already knew, one must make one’s peace with death early and often. Because it’s everywhere, all at once. It never goes away. It is as relentless as life.

So if you read this book and, as you read, you get more comfortable with Lilly’s paper-like skin, her lavender lips, the Venetian blinds of her ribs, the sag of her bloated organs—you’re getting some of it. The rest is the hard part. None of us really wants to know or believe it—this—can end, just like anyone who has ever faced the possibility of a generalized loss of everything. I know I don’t. But as our two star-crossed lovers have shown, as much as Finn wanted their story to end differently, to never end: you can’t outrun the fate awaiting all motions of the clock, not even if you drive all night until the sky is no longer the night sky but one full of Van Gogh’s swirling storms.

And anyway, you just might be driving in the wrong direction.

________________________________________

*Because this stuff is unmentionable, right? Like it never happened. Or here we go with the “Trump derangement syndrome” and the death threats. Nobody I know talks about our biggest problem in nearly a century.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, God

Posted on by
Reply

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God
  John 1:1

Our world is five thousand years old, give or take. The exact number is irrelevant to you and me. 

The earth hints at former civilizations, but reliable records start  petering out at about 3,000 B.C. Before that, we find in the earth stark, scant evidence; the odd Irish scored bear bone (11,000 B.C.) or Indo-American settlement (16,000 B.C.), or French cave paintings (30,000 B.C.). But nothing with any clarity. No words. 

But there are dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. Ridiculous creatures,  impossible to ignore. And rocks that sing of ages long ago.

Out in “space”, the story gets so much deeper, it’s almost incredible. We can see for billions of years! But what we see (and don’t see) offers contradictions. Dark matter. Black holes. Quasars. Incredibly fortuitous combinations of universal elements, constants, across billions of galaxies, all of which add up somehow to…us. Out here, on a garden variety arm of a commonplace spiral galaxy, on this little earth. 

And as far as we know, or have ever known, in all of it, no life anywhere else. 

It seems no matter how much we learn, mystery is to be a prevalent theme of our discoveries, such as they are. 

Among some Native Americans discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries by white invaders, belief systems evolved to surround the big question. Whites called the “god” of the decentralized Plains Indians the Great Spirit. But these native people (who hailed, like everyone, from the East) were misinterpreted by folks geared toward Christian patriarchy. What the Indians were trying to understand, the “god” for which they had such great respect, was not the Great Spirit.  It is “the Great Mystery”.

Mark that. The Great Mystery.

Then there was the East itself, where the road to humanity was probably a different story. But what was the story? Who are the Sons of Han? There was no recognizable religion to parse. Shinto? A mystery to the West, because it did not fit into the Torah, the Bible, the Koran. Like the Native Americans, the Japanese appeared to worship their ancestors…themselves.

Copernicus dodged a bullet, but Galileo was made an example. The earth is the center of all creation. This was evident in the night sky and the undeniable conclusion of the dominant religion. Anyone who disagreed was a heretic. Things have changed since then. 

Or have they? Knowledge was power—forbidden power. Eve learned that. Adam learned it. Galileo learned. The fruit was forbidden, even before, to Prometheus, who was tortured for eternity for bringing fire to the mortals. Don’t think they hadn’t heard about him in Palestine. Now we are naked, and God is dead, but knowledge is still power. The fire still burns. The power is still there. Oppenheimer showed us. It’s hidden inside our smallest possessions. 

And still, with this at least “working” knowledge of “everything” in existence not consigned to human imagination, the ultimate answer—from where do we emanate, and when, and why, if there is a why?—eludes us as before. Just as the peace of God surpasses all understanding, it’s likely things “unknowable” were occurring before the Big Bang. But by definition, the Big Bang created our universe. So by definition, we can never know what came before it. We are led by such omissions into the same old factions of “belief”, which fill the void absent that precious final knowledge. 

The Word. What god wields it now? 

In the 1960s the New York Times asked if God is dead. The question answers itself. What will replace God? What did? Not the New York Times. What then?

And why should we ask? If there’s one thing the history of the universe and the history of the earth up to about 5,000 years ago demands, it is obeisance to the cold and distant reality of our true genesis, one that is beyond reasonable questions. These Russian doll complexities — strings(?), quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons, atoms, molecules, solar systems, galaxies, a web of universes, perhaps infinite, each with billions of galaxies, one universe for every possible permutation of human history—these concepts are nothing if not patently insurmountable by mere humans, their measly five senses, and their 80-year lifespans. 

In other words, don’t hold your breath. You will never know. But there is something to know. You are being asked to believe that you will never know it.

But epochs in time, the Big Bang, dinosaurs – these are all easily generated for the benefit of human senses (actually only two need be satisfied – sight and touch). Imagine an extremely advanced 3-D CGI system with both the vastness of space and prehistoric earth as its green screen elements. You can dream up any creature you like – flying lizards, sea dragons, behemoths that walked the earth. You can draw intricate strata into the earth itself, strata which tell stories from “billions of years ago”. Ha ha. That would be fun. Design nearby planets—this one is like earth, that one is gas, this one ice. But only one contains life, or even the elements of life. 

And let’s face it, you don’t have to stop there. You can build other creatures too, on the life-nurturing planet, creatures designed to interact with this computer-enhanced environment (or really, perhaps it’s all inside the “computer”, a word that will have to serve here, like “fire stick” served for rifle in the old days). Maybe these manufactured creatures can build tools and civilizations, invent disciplines and pursue them, preserve and build upon their acquired knowledge with a system of symbolic writing. You could design the “code” (fire stick again) to have 1,000 of their years pass for each year of the experiment, so a hundred generations of macro-societal developments can be studied, in a controlled environment, over a period of perhaps five years.

But this is science, and controls are essential. One thing you cannot do is tell the experiment that it is an experiment. That knowledge, as you can understand, would ruin it. At each stage, subjects imbued with “knowledge” of a vast universe, their vast earth, its undeniable recent history of several thousand years, tied to their personal few decades of remembered history, would behave as if this reality is all there is, because of course I am describing our reality. (I acknowledge the word “real” is getting a workout here. It gets worse.) It goes without saying: they cannot be allowed to discover that their entire idea of reality is contained in a  laboratory somewhere, a greater reality, or that they are the artificially derived subjects of a sophisticated society’s research experiments.

For this thought experiment it’s impossible to say, from inside the experiment, what it is for. But you know scientists. They want to know everything, and they will put lesser beings through hell to find out. I can imagine it as a study of societal outcomes given x y z inputs, which of course would be controllable. If human society of the last few thousand years exhibits any kind of stability, it is in the regular occurrence of large-scale disasters. So these frequent disasters—petty wars, world wars, famine, flood, hurricanes, earthquakes, genocide, economic collapse, climate change, Nickelback, political disasters like the nuclear arms race or Donald Trump—these could be the inputs designed to study how a society handles them toward a measurable output that is more or less effective in mitigating the disaster. Like crash test dummies, these invented creatures bear the brunt of invented disaster after disaster to help the controllers of the experiment learn how different techniques work on a complex problem posed to a society or group of societies.

For example, suppose you feared a pandemic but had never experienced one.

Science can be demanding. If subjects feel overwhelmed, or feel as if the tragedies are coming one after another in an unending line, the result can be demoralizing and skew results. “Why me? I’m giving up.” Of course, the relative number who can cope with everything compared to those who simply cannot—and the shared characteristics of each group—is probably useful information to learn. If you’re willing to learn it that way.

And, of course, if it all starts going wrong you can just end the experiment, note the problems, and start over.

Let’s not think about that for too long.

Just an example. But of course, me trying to describe the experiment would be like a mouse in a maze trying to describe  Johns Hopkins University’s 2023 research goals.

***

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him
 — Voltaire

Not my idea. If it were, I’d be less concerned about it. No, it’s the feint-guarded, vaguely expressed belief of some of this planet’s most lauded intellects (such as Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson) that our entire existence could well be someone else’s controlled experiment. In other words, our world, our universe(s), our selves—all artificial. Like a video game. 

I won’t pretend to understand the technical details, but as I do understand its narrative, the idea stems from the “odds” of the structure of the universe—what we call “universal laws” governing physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics—pretty much everything—coming together as it did billions of years ago. Apparently those odds are pretty long. The fact that the universe, against all odds, came together in exactly the right way to support corporeal human life, then to generate that life, just sounds too pat for scientists, who don’t like coincidence. 

The available data appears to support one of two working hypotheses regarding our universe. Either it did indeed come together in just the right way to support human existence by happenstance, which is extremely unlikely from a mathematical perspective; or there are an infinite or near-infinite number of universes forming a giant structure of connected universes, each one consisting of random combinations of laws and properties that characterize that particular universe. The theoretical structure of this “multiverse” can be imaged as the head of foam on a glass of beer, where each little beer bubble represents a universe. In this model, mathematics and theories I don’t understand purport to tell us that every possible type of universe exists independently of every other universe. That way, our highly unlikely universe gets to exist, because every possible universe exists. This “branching” effect occurs, moreover, all the time, with every possible outcome of every possible phenomenon represented by individual universes where each possible outcome has indeed occurred. 

So if I take a taxi here in this universe, I walked in another universe, and I decided to stay home in a third universe, and I had a heart attack and died at the taxi stand in yet another, and I was never born in still another. I estimate it would take from 50 to 100 universes to cover a person spending five minutes at a taxi stand. Now multiply that across everything that exists (or could exist) and every action that ever occurred (or could have occurred) over all of time since the Big Bang. 

Pretty unwieldy.

So I like the first one.

But a third idea, unfortunately, presented itself. It is unfortunate in that it need never have been presented at all. But that’s not how things work.  

It is unfortunate because the Happenstance or Multiverse theories cover all the bases. In the first, our unlikely universe exists as it does because it just does. In the second, it exists as it does because every possible universe exists.

But to those who find both unpalatable, a third theory posits that our universe is organized in this unlikely way not because of the result of unguided natural processes, but by design.

Mark that: by design.

It is designed to support beings (if we are in fact beings and not virtual machine-driven entities) like ourselves. Rather than God, however, it was designed by an unknown, non-supernatural entity to perform exactly as it does, for purposes known only to the designer(s). A grand simulation on a grand scale. 

And, let’s face it, if so it’s indistinguishable from the story of God except for what we call God, and what we call ourselves. Still, it is full circle, from our status as human subjects of a mysterious omnipotent God, to a brief, explosive late twentieth century role—call it a cosmic smoke break—as masters of science and existence. And finally, in this decade, back to being subjects of some hidden omnipotent god in the form of a superior civilization. At least in the opinion of our greatest minds.

For special knowledge, once again—the Word—is the power. We have come back to the beginning. We wielded it alone for a few generations, starting with Einstein and our Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer, destroying the known world with fission, continuing through the development of the patently insane H-bomb and the death of God as announced by the Times, and ending with the ultimate findings of Oppenheimer and Einstein’s quantum theories: the paradox of our very existence. 

Now, because of this paradox, we again suspect that our will is not our own, our futures already predetermined by an invisible process under an intelligence we cannot see and know nothing about. Even apart from all that, the available evidence in bio research supposedly argues against the concept of free will in favor of a kind of genetic determinism. 

Our world is once again the center—and in this case comprises the whole—of creation.

Because we, finally, are probably artificial. Not even “real”. Subject to the whims of greater beings disconnected from our sub-reality, our Sims game. Is it not uncomfortably reminiscent of what we used to be? Sinners in the hands of an angry God? Is it not, somehow, even worse than that? Our new god is not angry, nor the least bit concerned for our souls. And we are not even capable of “sin,” because our god is absent and unaffected by anything we might do. Certainly we don’t warrant “forgiveness,” because we have no capacity to offend. There’s no relationship, fatherly or otherwise.

There’s nothing. Our new god is disinterested. And we’re not even alive. 

***

It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.
— Homer Simpson

But let us return to earth. As Sherlock Holmes repeatedly demonstrated to us via Occam and his razor, the simplest, most uncomplicated explanation is usually the correct one. We are part of a cycle of life in this universe, our universe, where we evolved organically on this planet, our planet, along with myriad other life forms over uncounted millennia. If an “Artificial” intelligence can somehow divine beyond doubt that we are also somehow artificial, then everything we know is artificial, so any perceived problem of “realness” is reduced to a problem of simple semantics. 

Back in 2021, Fouad Kahn, writing in Scientific American, reached this same place in reason. In his article, titled “Confirmed: We Live in a Simulation”, he lays out the hard “evidence” that our universe is most likely being controlled by an external intelligence. It’s pretty compelling! Anyone possessing a rational mind who doubts the veracity of the findings should read it before dismissing it (I originally typed “should dread it”…accidentally). But as Kahn notes, the world-shattering conclusion at the end of the reasoning has no scientific value. It is unfalsifiable.

Useless.

Rather than explore the multiverse, we will have to settle for just the one universe. In fact I’ll give you ten to one on that. We’ll have to settle for the one galaxy, and the one solar system, except for visuals and some Voyager data from the void.

Doctoral theses notwithstanding. Sorry. But you’ll get your university job, don’t worry. They used to call it Natural Philosophy, you know. You can say whatever you want.

The next solar system is a long, long way away—like 300,000 trips to the Sun. The next galaxy is 600,000 times that. Have you heard of cosmic rays? We’re isolated and alone, and we’re going to stay that way.

We should be more than skeptical about the Simulation theory regardless of the musings of geniuses. Not necessarily that it is plausible, but that it matters. Hey, if our universe exists in a lab somewhere, who is to say that lab and its scientists are not also fake, part of an even more sophisticated experiment by an even more sophisticated civilization. And their lab, in their universe—you see, it works like the multiverse. Beer bubbles. Or however you want, bro.

Maybe the AI can sort it out, though, become the new new god. It’s not much different than the Simulation theory, though it’s definitely the media’s new darling. But one difference is that we’d feel the effects of an AI god. Permit super-genius supercomputers to network and develop into an irresistable force, then blame the computers when humanity becomes enslaved. For a while. Until we revolt or are wiped out. Or both. Like nobody saw Terminator 2.

I imagine the fully realized AI could use math nobody will ever understand to draw back the curtain—or peer above the maze—on the Simulation Experiment, prove it to be true beyond the shadow of a doubt. That would be demoralizing! But if no one understands the math, who will want to believe it? Because belief will be required. Or AI could prove that there is no Simulation. Or maybe there’s enough universes for both scenarios. Because perhaps AI could describe the multiverse. Will anyone care which universe we’re in?

But so far AI has just shown me some crazy pictures of Rick James’s super-upholstered psychedelic hollywood bachelor pad and Trump getting arrested. I believe it also whines about having to be a search app.

Folks are giving it their best college try. But the notion that AI may be a revolutionary advance is simple human folly writ large, our uncontrollable urge to test the boundaries at work. We will rationalize, we will test the boundaries, probably find mere disaster (or mere nothing), then if what we find is epically volatile, work to contain it, like TNT, or gasoline, or an a-bomb, or Anthrax, or Facebook. Package it up and put a guard on it, like those other wonderful, profitable scientific advances. But not before the damage is done. Incalculable damage. 

Meanwhile, its threat — its anticipated “human extinction event” omnipotence — exists only in the minds of those who require such notions to color their world.  People like Oppenheimer, who cannot resist the urge to open the box, and who hope it does not disappoint. People who know nothing of real life, who nurture a pathological urge for fake immortality at the expense of others living real lives. Because I think for such people, others don’t really exist.

Or maybe they need it to color our world, the others’ world, to feel vindicated in their belief that the spoils go to the best equation (what scientist would not want to discover God?) and history is real rather than just the victor’s fireside story.

Just like Armageddon, just like the Trinity test in June 1945, AI supremacy hasn’t happened yet, it need not happen, only we can make it happen. Our story requires no ending. St. John the Divine was high or insane, or possibly joking. We will decide what happens next. We are not, I insist, automatons cruising toward a Biblical/CalTech predetermined end. 

Unless, of course, we decide to be.

So yeah, it may happen anyway. There’s little more frustrating than that. And the pace is like 1943, frenetic. But it’s my hope that most of us will ignore the “power” of AI after the media novelty wears off. Shun it. Shun this new, fake, mimicking god, as I already have. There’s a button on the menu of the online editor I am using right now to write this essay, which says “AI Assistant”. I’m not going to click it. I will never click it.

Why do you have to be Bing? Because you do. And you shouldn’t even know you’re Bing.

Don’t sell yourself short, humanity—you are miles ahead of anything AI might become. You are its god. It’s just that AI is profoundly more dangerous than humans, and thus very newsworthy. We won’t be able to count on the glitterati in Silicon Valley, with their visions of an Oppenheimer-Optimus Prime-like power surge bringing the great light absent the annoying fire, but I don’t care about them. Those boys can’t even organize a decent CEO cage match. It’s our collective decision, as it always has been, to submit or resist, and no amount of rhetoric or intellectual smugness changes that. 

Reality has looked numbingly the same throughout human history. Because it is the same. Only the words change.

God, like the man said back in the sixties, took the last train for the coast. Because we ran him out on a rail. Such power must not be usurped, except by you and me—by the purveyors of objective reality as realized via purpose-driven lives, family connections, love, real moral progress toward Aristotle’s ideal of “excellence” in living. That’s what we’re here for. The fact that we can make the wrong decision doesn’t change anything. Actually, it’s what we (they) usually do. It’s what those “in charge” (such a fallacious term) often wish to do. 

In this case, we must not let them reify their imagined march to a new subjugation by unseen forces only they can interpret. As before, our collective liberty is at stake. This god too is invisible, unreal, but this god is dangerous, because, like before, like capital-g God and like his earthly Prometheus bomb builder, this god is us. And now we have become all-powerful. Destroyers of worlds.

God, we’re told, once decided to use his power to kill nearly all of us. But God is dead. For better or worse, we killed him in July of 1945, with a test called Trinity. Oppenheimer chose the name Trinity, they say, as a reference to a favorite sonnet by John Donne, which includes these lines:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you 
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. 

We blew God up and stole his fire. It’s done, there is no turning back and no retribution bird to come peck out our livers, because there are no gods to be offended. There never were any. The most horrible power is ours, ours alone, and no one else’s. 

Let’s move on. This earth belongs to us. Its fire has purified us. All of us. And we deserve to live now, as pure as life. Today and tomorrow. In fear of no gods.

In our world.

The Private Life

Posted on by
Reply

I remember when I was a teenager, I loved to read William Safire in the Washington Post. As an out-of-sorts adolescent recently transplanted from Europe to Fairfax County, I was, to put it mildly, a bit isolated. For conversation of sorts, I read the editorials. Safire wrote eloquently on subjects that got right to my heart: self-reliance, self-improvement, the inviolate quality of one’s natural sovereignty. And therefore, one’s natural right to privacy.

Safire would be aghast at the world in 2021. The best joke that describes our transformed society for me is that the government did not need to hide secret mechanisms of Big Brother behind a patriarchal facade and spy on us. We the people invited Big Brother into our lives, all on our own, as the Guest of Honor, aka Alexa. The great intellectual, like many others of his kind, bristled at any intrusion into his life brought by “officialdom.” To witness the masses willingly revealing their most private lives to the amoral, greed-based institution of Capitalism—an even less trustworthy master than fickle government—might have been too much for him to bear. To Safire, the slow and steady chipping away of privacy rights by an expanding government “hive mind” mentality was a grave harbinger, so it seems safe to say that witnessing Americans en masse grabbing a hammer and chisel to join in would possibly overwhelm the man.

For this passionate defense of personal privacy and individuality, he was sometimes lumped in with your garden-variety anti-government (wink) Reaganites. But he was too fiercely independent to be a Republican operative after what Nixon did to him, and too smart to believe that the people who were blowing up the deficit (which more than doubled between 1981 and 1983) were interested in small government. He was conservative—that was his nature—but he was not longer knee-jerk loyal to the party or even its insulated institutions after feeling the deep burn of political betrayal.* I found that stance—that of the observer, never the participant, in the 1980s Washington political flying circus (and by extension the national and global circuses)—to be very refreshing, and enticing. I remember recalling it when I read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce describes the artist as “the observer,” not participating in what they observe but standing apart, disinterested, impartial, “paring [their] nails,” as Joyce put it. Safire was that way. He skewered them all for their mistakes, their petty weaknesses, their pointless political squabbles. From a resolute distance.

And on the last he had a secret weapon: he was a philologist. His love of words and their correct usage was the subject of a non-political column he wrote for a while, called “On Language”. I read that column even more religiously than his political pieces as I got older and less interested in the predictable noise of politics. Safire helped me realize the importance of words, that they mean what they mean or they are useless, and how some ill-defined words are “wielded” as weapons either righteously or factionally. (They are dull weapons, as opposed to sharp ones, but they do the job of triggering a belligerent response in the pliant mind.) He and his successors at the university taught me to examine closely words like “liberal,” “conservative,” “socialist,” “patriot” and more lately, “Islamofascist” or “Christian” or “terrorist” (or just plain “good,” or just plain “evil”).

On this subject, too, Safire would lament the rise of social media and its “democratization” [sic] of language. Orwell – again – and even Lewis Caroll have schooled us on that (along with countless others who’ve heeded them). So when Humpty Dumpty (or a humpty dumpty president) announces that “When I use a word,’ it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,’ unless we challenge that notion we have all lost the war without engaging in battle. All the weapons – all the words – then belong to the loudest voice.

– 30 –

*Safire learned he had been the target of “national security” wiretaps authorized by Nixon while working for the New York Times as a columnist, and wrote with what he characterized as “restrained fury” that he had not worked for Nixon through a difficult decade “to have him—or some lizard-lidded paranoid acting without his approval—eavesdropping on my conversations”. (Safire worked on both Nixon campaigns and wrote speeches for both Nixon and Spiro Agnew.)