said Ralph. He was a biologist with a brilliant career behind him and, possibly, an even more brilliant one ahead. His new strains in grain, his Chlorella research had caused our anxious forecasts in the sixties about a coming mass starvation in the mid-seventies to be reversed into worries about how to get rid of huge food surpluses in the seventies.
"That. too, was just an accident," insisted Ralph, "and a temporary one. Over the long haul, there will be shortages, starvation."
There was a chill in his voice. You wondered: Bitterness? Cynicism? Or just light banter? Obviously, Ralph was not a happy man, though you couldn't pin him down. He was always on the move. If bitter today, he might be bitter-sweet tomorrow, semi-sweet the day after.
Opposite him sat Fred, an astrophysicist who, like most physicists, enjoyed playing mind games.
"If you and I are accidents, Ralph, then so is the whole wide world. Is this a cause for humility -- or pride? "
Fred had known Ralph as long as he could remember and played the role of comforter or teaser. He saw in his friend a whimsical archetype who passed through all the stages of human development represented in history, not just once but again and again, in rapid repetition. This, held Fred, was the pattern for academia in modern America. No rest. Constantly on the way, up or down. A product of the deductive educational process.
"The insects might have won, you know," said Ralph. "By a mere accident, the ants lost out."
"And you are sorry?"
"I sometimes worry whether the ants would have done a better job, with their togetherness, their discipline. Maybe they would have been more deserving of inheriting the Earth."
"You are a biologist. Have you seen how the ants punish the undisciplined?"
"They kill them. While among us, the disciplined are being killed by the undisciplined."
"We grant life to our protesters."
"And let them murder us."
"Not all of us, Ralph. You and I are still around."
"So we are, Fred, so we are. But 10,000 of us will be murdered this year says Don Lunde of Stanford. More of us were murdered between 1970 and 74 than were killed through the entire Vietnam war. We have a murder epidemic in this country now. Twice as many are put away now than twenty years ago."
"And why? Professor Lunde sees the reason in the vast number of unemployed. I feel in my bones he is right. If I were given the boot, and thought I would never again work, never again see a pay check-as the unemployed always fancy-I'd feel like murdering a few people too."
"You defend those murderers?"
"Silly! I think they are almost as bad as we are, when we condemn to death and then cold-bloodedly murder defenseless prisoners, after we first have insulted them."
"Almost as bad? You mean when we, supported by law, execute criminals, we are worse than murderers?"
"A little worse, yes, in that we do it even without passion and without the slightest risk to ourselves, We need not even see the guy, or the gruesome procedure. What is worse: We do not really know if he has done what we say he has done."
"He will have been duly tried, won't he?"
"And so? In law we have something called circumstantial evidence. It means that with our faulty human reasoning some of us say this person is guilty while others, every bit as able, say he is not. We call this "justice". So isn't killing through "law" just a bit worse than an average murder?"
"What would you do, Fred?"
"First of all, employment for every willing hand, all his life, without interruption, at wages that will keep goodies running as required or desired and keep money fairly stable. . ."
"A tall order, Fred."
"No, Ralph. It is a less tall order than what you do as a matter of course in your laboratory, and which later is being repeated in the factories. We all tend our little store and pay no attention to our common employment and economy situation, which is well within the power of Americans to manage."
Ralph has gone a long way since this trifling dialogue. He still feels he may be just an accident, but this no longer bothers him. He still remembers that the insects might have won, but far from worrying about that, he now tries to make the best of man's "accidental" victory.
Sounds easy? It took a lot of doing! There was his career and his wife. He loved both, and both gave him trouble. He loved his wife with a passion as well as a tender depth. He wanted so much to please her, to satisfy her. His wish was blazened by his passion into a raging storm. The raging storm blew his mind into every part of her mind and heart and, like little searchlights, these bits of his mind picked up her messages and then he knew her, knew what she was, what she wanted, knew it without knowing that he knew. So he pleased her and he satisfied her.
His original theories in biology were not believed by his associates, so he had to invent and carry out a broad, comprehensive set of tests through which he found, not his original theories, but something much wider and better. He also found the recognition of his erstwhile detractors.
His mind and heart had now become accustomed to deep, even passionate probings. As he had probed his wife, so he probed the minds and attitudes of his friends and colleagues. He learned to know them, know their secrets. He pleased them and satisfied them.
He did not stop there. He began to wonder about life then, wonder why his mind had that power to probe and search-and find. It seemed like a miracle. It seemed so because everything and anything a man does not understand, he calls a miracle. Then, if he is a scientist he is not permitted to accept miracles. He must reject what he cannot explain.
Ralph had learned not to reject. First, he tried to understand. What he could not understand or explain, he shoved into a spacious attic in his mind marked "judgment suspended". He did not want to emulate Vanevar Bush, called America's greatest scientist at the time when he proclaimed that jet engines had no future, either in military or civilian aviation. The very adjective "great" made Ralph shudder. Einstein had come and gone and still scientists pretended to look at a world outside them and independent of them, and measure it. They still failed to see that they existed in and with this world, never apart from it, and could only measure their own individual relation to it. The apparent identical trend in some of our simple everyday experiences deceive the unwary.
Biologist Ralph, concerned with the feeding and survival of his species, was conducting a crash-study of Chlorella, a highly nutritious algae, and his path crossed the Chinese who had brought this art further along than anybody else. Born and raised in what has been called a WASP environment: White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant; Ralph wondered and marveled at the Chinese attitude toward life, termed SYNCHRONISTIC by Western psychiatrist Carl Jung, as contrasted to the Western CAUSAL concept. Dr. Jung elaborates, saying the Chinese look at and accept the world and life in their natural state, with all the complexities, and try to unravel the riddles from there, while the West tries to reason all and everything into a system of cause and effect. "Actually they can do that only in artificial laboratories where certain factors have been removed in order to obtain confirmation of the I natural laws' we imagine we have 'discovered'." Dr. Jung goes on to say that many physicists of the West now appear to have embraced a synchronistic rather than a causal concept.
Ralph also noticed a difference in languages. The Western languages he knew were built on opposites: Good-evil, black-white, clean-dirty, strong-weak, while the Chinese languages, and particularly Mandarin, evaded such sharp contrasts, as if those speaking these languages were more polite and also more accurate observers who saw the fine shades.
His get-together with the Chinese became a turning point in Ralph's life. He had learnt to know the people most different from his own. He used to say that the Chinese had become for him his passport to humanity and, he added, to the Creator of humanity. Where could you see the Creator except through his creatures?
This was a startling and somewhat embarrassing discovery, for this Creator of the Chinese would then obviously also be the creator of himself, of his body, mind, heart, soul-whatever soul was. So he, Ralph, with accoutrements, was made by the same Creator and was just as important as any Chinese, including the FIRST?
While Ralph has made this exciting trip from a crude and hazardous view of himself, society and the ants to a substantial though still tentative self-respect, others are fuming: What does such finery matter when we are going to starve to death from overpopulation anyway?
Are we?
Yes, if we wish to, though of food and energy sources there is no end in sight, except to those who insist on seeing only one type. From Melbourne, Australia, comes a relevant book on "Practical Statistics" (and its follies) by Russell Langley. His first chapter is about false percentages, fictitious precision, misleading presentations, incomplete data, faulty comparisons-all daily ingredients in our news menus, tending to hide the recent changes in the food picture: New strains, new sources, and the resolution into regional differences of our once apparently unchangeable population trends and policies. In some areas, the rise in population was drastically curtailed unassisted by any drive, such as in the United States. Other countries have empty areas to fill, economic goals to reach that require increased population rise, such as Brazil, Bolivia, Kenya, Tunisia. In the latter country this author had some experience, heading a United Nations Mission.
Dr. Karl Brandt, former Director of Stanford University's Food Research Institute and former Presidential Science Advisor, has written continuously about this, long before it became popular, and recently sighed, "I feel like writing a book, 'This Underpopulated World of Ours'."
He elaborated, "What many, if not most, nations need to make full use of resources and achieve a higher living standard is not fewer workers, but more."
Finally, he and his co-workers have been vindicated after hard work against ignorance and arrogance, applying the science of yesterday to our society of today.
May it be true, as some think, that to every need tirelessly presented and solidly backed, there is a response, a fulfillment? Do modern humpty-dumpties not dare to climb walls? Is that why they never see what is on the other side?
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