Friends Of The Zoo - DEI In The Monkey House And The Sad End Of A Social Justice Warrior

Bob Muzelle watched the apes, orangutans, and howler monkeys do their acrobatics in the Monkey House of the National Zoo and thought, 'Here I am among them'.

Bob was lamenting the Trump victory and the executive orders which in one fell swoop did away with a decade worth of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.  Gone were efforts in government, schools, and corporate America to favor the black man and help restore him to his proper place atop the human pyramid; to champion the new age of gender fluidity, and to honor and promote gay men and women.  Trump, the social troglodyte, the bullying retrograde, the...

Here Bob shook his head in disbelief and moral angst.  How could this have happened?  How could a carefully crafted, just, and righteous enterprise be so summarily dismissed, tossed aside as if it were half-eaten muffins, detritus, trash?  The black man deserved more, much more; and the work to restore him to his native forest sublimity was not yet done. 

A great ape came ambling over to edge of the cage and smooched his lips against the bars, eyeing Bob - or so it seemed to him - with ironic envy.  An intelligent, sentient, marvelous animal trapped in a plastic environment - plastic trees, plastic rocks, a rope swing and a semi tire.  This is where Bob's treasured DEI had gone - dismissed, forgotten, and only an item of curiosity and indifference.

It hadn't always been this way, for he and his colleagues had watched the DEI movement grow and prosper.  Black faces were everywhere you looked - in every television ad, in every boardroom and government office, in hospitals and universities.  Yes, the great majority of African Americans were still selling dope; and ho's, pimps, grills, and bling were still at the heart of ghetto ethos; but progress had been made.

A vigorous affirmative action program had brought scores of disadvantaged black students from the dankest, darkest slums of Washington to his son's tony Upper Northwest private school. Yes, an unfortunate number of these young people were sent back to Anacostia for theft, assault, and sexual intimidation; but that was to be expected - a necessary part of progressive integration.  Now the school had cashiered its DEI director and was returning to its historical legacy of educating Washington's best and brightest. 

The gay man, spat on, dishonored, and dismissed, had been promoted as the harbinger of a new sexual age. The end of restrictive and punitive heterosexual orthodoxy was in sight when Bob first turned his attention to the needs of the sexually under-respected. Gay men and lesbian women were seen everywhere, proud and elevated; and the emergence of transgenders was the icing on the cake.  The revolution was well underway; but now, thanks to Donald Trump, they were once again tossed aside in favor of outmoded and irrelevant straight men and blonde, blue-eyed, sexy women.

The Inauguration could have been called Straight White Day for all the bouncy, toothy bimbos headed for the West Wing behind Emperor Trump. A disgrace, a slap in the face to those who had overcome prejudice and scorn to finally see the light of day and bask in it. 

An orangutang swung his long arms and looped himself up a branch on a plastic tree, peeled a banana and, and threw the peel at Bob - or at least so he thought given the down and desperate mood he felt that day; for forget all the black and gay people suddenly dismissed and forgotten, what about him? His position as CEO of Americans for Social Justice, a small but not uninfluential advocacy group, would soon be dissolved in the lye of Trumpism.  Donations would dry up, political support on the Hill would vanish into thin air, and he would be on the street. 

A Rhesus money screeched at him, pissed out the bars of the cage, did a J Fred Hicks impression, and swung back up into the faux treetops.  Everything was metaphor that day, as clear as the bright blue sky of May. 

LaShonda Evans, his deputy - a high-shelved, bullying black woman recruited from the ranks of Black Lives Matter - saw what Bob saw, the demise of a carefully constructed, promoted, and ideologically pure movement, but was unmoved.  It was time to head back to the inner city where she came from, rejoin her sisters on the street and get down with things instead of wasting her time up here with an ofay, whitey Jew boy.  She had ridden the DEI horse long enough, pasture time for him and Panama Red on MLK Avenue for her. 

What surprised Bob the most was the dispatch with which DEI was sent packing.  One would have expected at least some residuality, some lingering vestiges of good; but no sooner was Donald Trump in office than DEI doors were shuttered and locked, and thousands of social justice advocates left on the curb.  Why not a RIF, a reduction in force, rather than wholesale dismissal?

Because the whole country was sick and tired of the charade, the noxious pretentions of gender spectrum, black-only sanctimony, that's why.  Sick to death of in-your-face swishy gay men, Bernal Heights tough girls, and bald black men on television hawking everything from peanut butter to equities.  Tired of being called racists and misogynists, backward swamp fools, Bible-thumping irrelevancies, nothing but a scouring would do, and at the first ragged lines of unemployed racial touts leaving Washington, cheers went up from coast to coast. 

Asians repopulated Harvard and Berkeley.  White-only soap operas returned to prime time television.  News anchors and reporters were white girls from Omaha and chiseled-jawed cowboys from Montana.  Attitude disappeared from CVS, Hate Has No Home Here lawn signs came down, rainbow flags went unsold, and calling-a-spade-a-spade nomenclature returned.  America, like it or not, was returning to its integrationist roots and losing the failed notions of identity along the way.  It was a new time, a heady time. 

 

Bob left the zoo where he had wandered long enough, and nursed a Bud at the Blarney Stone across the street.  As he mused and looked idly out the window, all he could see were white people, lily white people, blonde people, straight people, and the anxiety returned, hopelessness in the place of hope. 

'Another Bud, please, Wild Turkey back', he said to Mac, the bartender, a man who after seeing legions of discouraged progressives down his drinks, knew what was what, and gave Bob a double on the house.  

Why Is Africa Still Paleolithic? - Culture, Said The Wise Man, Culture

Most African nations achieved independence int the early Sixties, and they have been in a downward spiral ever since.  They are sinkholes of poverty, misrule, corruption, and venality with no signs of development despite billions of dollars of Western foreign assistance.  

While China, South Korea, and India were all underdeveloped, poorly governed, and desperately poor countries only thirty years ago, they are now economic powerhouses, have raised millions out of poverty, and have become major players on the world stage. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam are not far behind. 

What are the reasons for such persistent African underdevelopment? Many liberal critics have blamed colonialism, a system they say which subjected millions, exploited the continent's wealth and resources, and created a culture of dependence and serfdom.  Yet the colonial powers left Africa over sixty years ago, more than enough time given the Asian example for significant development.  

 

China under Mao had been turned into a subsistence economy, beleaguered by pestilence and famine, and ruled by a brutal, uncompromising dictatorship.  It was little more than a Paleolithic society, cowed, penned, and beaten into forced labor camps, miserably inadequate communes, and deformed, socially engineered communities.  

Yet after the death of Mao and the rise of reformist, Western-oriented leaders, in a remarkably short time China has become arguable the most influential world power.  Its cities are models of engineering and architectural genius.  Its software and hardware industries dominate world trade.  Recently using a brilliant, unconventional model, has jumped to the forefront of Artificial Intelligence computing. 

India before the leadership of the reformists Rao and Vajpayee in the early 90s was a Soviet client state which adopted Communist economic ideologies which did nothing to improve the lot of a rapidly increasing population, kept individual private enterprise in irons, and guaranteed economic stagnation and popular dissatisfaction.  When Rao turned his back on Sovietism and embraced the liberal economic policies of the West, the pent up demand and classic entrepreneurial energies of the country were released, and in but a few decades joined the commonwealth of developed nations. 

So Africa, like China and India, threw off or was relieved of an archaic system of governance; but in the ensuing years did nothing with its newfound freedom.  The 'colonial excuse' is no more a legitimate excuse for decades of Africa poverty than is 'racism' for the perennial underperformance of black Americans.   India, China, Korea, and Vietnam have shown that countries can evolve quickly and well from a penitential past. 

'The forest', say other observers, the dense equatorial jungle which covers much of Africa is the principal factor of underdevelopment.  Africans because of circumstances of nature and evolution happen to live in a harsh, often impenetrable environment.  Development is virtually impossible under the conditions of an oppressive jungle. Europe and the Middle East, thanks to climate and geographic situation, have been far more able to develop the great civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, the Nile Valley, and Rome, and if Africans had been more favored, they would have progressed equally. 

However, much of Africa is veldt, savannah, and Sahel - dry, open regions watered by major rivers.  Societies which could have prospered on the banks of the Niger never did.  Timbuktu was once the center of Arab learning and its libraries the envy of Alexandria, but Niger, Mali, and Burkina went nowhere.  The few African empires - Gao and Ghana - flourished for a time in these potentially productive regions, but left nothing behind.  No architecture, infrastructure, or public works. 

India has overcome environmental impediments to development - extreme heat, drought, and irregular rains - and grown to control them.  China has developed every one of its climatic zones, mining the best for wealth and productivity, and leaving the deserts - at least for the time being - alone. 

Finally and after all liberal justifications have been exhausted, and racial sensitivities finally dismissed as thin-skinned idealism, culture has come to the fore.  There is something powerful and ineluctable about Confucianism and its pervasive incorporation and influence in Chinese life which gives China the moral center that other societies lack.  The image of the driven, ambitious, proud, and disciplined Chinese is not folly.  In both China and the diaspora, Chinese are among the most productive members of society.  India's combination of deep Hindu faith and boundless entrepreneurial energy - both cultural expressions - are at the heart of its renewal. 

 

Tribalism, however, the heart and soul of Africa, has no such developmental implications. It was and still is endemical parochial, insular, and narrowly focused.  Its worldview, encompassing the secular and the divine like other societies, never extended beyond its forest enclaves.  There are no Notre Dames in Africa and no Hinduism, perhaps the most complex, nuanced, intellectually philosophical of the world's religions

Chinese development was principally due to the reforms started by Deng Xiaoping and enthusiastically endorsed and expanded by his successors; but there is no doubt that the cultural infrastructure of the country was the foundation on which these more practical changes was built.  A culture built around Confucian principles of respect for elders and tradition, wisdom, loyalty, discipline, and trustworthiness more easily coalesced around newly-enunciated programs of national reform.  A culture which had millennia of ‘authoritarian’ Mandarin rule would not find the centralized programs of the Politburo intolerable, especially since the economic changes implemented promoted economic development.

The experience of Japan is no different.  The same rapid economic progress occurred when the Meiji leaders decided in 1868 to catch up with the modern world.

Lawrence Harrison, one of the first outspoken advocates for considering culture as an important factor in economic development recently wrote the lead essay for a conference on Culture and Economic Development sponsored by the Cato Institute. In it he said:

The "Confucian" countries (more accurately the countries strongly influenced by Chinese culture, which also embraces, in addition to Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship) all share substantially in the universal culture of progress: education, achievement, work ethic, merit, and frugality are all highly valued in the East Asian societies. Their economic success contradicts Weber's analysis in The Religion of China in which he asserts that rapid capitalist development is unlikely in China in large measure because of the absence of anything like the Calvinist "tension" caused by uncertainty about being of the "elect."

Many observers attributed the stagnation of the East Asian economies (Japan excepted) at mid-twentieth century to Confucianism, particularly to the influential role played by the Mandarin literati (Mao a prototype) and the low prestige that attached to economic activity in the Confucian scheme of things. But all that was necessary to release the powerful education/achievement/merit/frugality undercurrent to perform its economic magic was encouragement from the political leadership, in the cases of South Korea and Taiwan stimulated by security concerns. The trigger for the magic in China was Deng Xiaoping's 1978 pronouncement, "To get rich is glorious," effectively marking the end of Mao's Marxist revolution.

Harrison goes on to disaggregate ‘culture’ and suggests, based on his and others’ research that there are a number of characteristics which characterize successful cultures, whether as nations or communities living abroad:

Some economists have confronted culture and found it helpful in understanding economic development. Perhaps the broadest statement comes from the pen of [Harvard economist] David Landes: "Max Weber was right. If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference." Elaborating on Landes's theme, Japanese economist Yoshihara Kunio writes, "One reason Japan developed is that it had a culture suitable for it. The Japanese attached importance to (1) material pursuits; (2) hard work; (3) saving for the future; (4) investment in education; and (5) community values."

 

Perhaps the more interesting research was carried out by Harrison and his colleagues at the Fletcher School at Tufts University (Culture Matters Research Project) to see how these general categories correlated or were associated with certain cultural factors, such as religion:

The data roundly validated Max Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Protestant countries do better than Catholic countries in creating prosperity. To be sure, the averages for the Catholic countries are depressed by Latin America’s slow development, but even when one looks only at First World democratic-capitalist societies, Protestant countries do substantially better than Catholic countries with respect to prosperity, trust, and corruption.

More broadly, the analysis of religions suggests that Protestant, Jewish, and Confucian societies do better than Catholic, Islamic, and Orthodox Christian societies because they substantially share the progress-prone Economic Behavior values of the typology whereas the lagging religions tend toward the progress-resistant values.

Harrison cites the Nordic experience as an example of the importance of religion and culture to economic development:

All five Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland—have a Lutheran background, even though few today are churchgoers. Lutheranism is the source of much of the Nordic value system that has produced high educational levels, extensive welfare programs, and high quality entrepreneurship symbolized by Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Volvo, Saab, and Ikea. The compatibility of economic efficiency and social spending in the Nordic context is apparent form the 2006 World Economic Forum ratings.

The Economist recently observed, "High taxes and generous welfare safety nets need not undermine competitiveness…Scandinavian economies are ranked high in the league…" (Sweden was number two in the world.)

Timur Kuran and Anantdeep Singh of Duke and University of Southern California, respectively, studied the question of Islam and economic development in India  where Muslims are a significant minority, but lag far behind Hindus in per capita income. (Economic Modernization in Late British India: Hindu-Muslim Differences 2004).  Kuran and Singh cite two principle factors behind this lag –  the waqf inheritance system and Shari ’a Law.  

The traditional inheritance system which channeled money through inefficient family structures, inhibited the flow of financial resources to modern institutions; and while Hindus were investing in banks and other financial institutions and using their profits for further growth, Muslims did not, and their growth was stagnant.

Kuran and Singh also cite Muslim adherence to Shari ’a law which kept them out of the mainstream of British civil, contract, and criminal justice. Kuran identifies the absence in Islamic law of the concept of a corporation and two institutional bottlenecks that once seriously hampered economic growth in the Muslim world: the Islamic law of inheritance, which inhibits capital accumulation, and the waqf system, which locks vast resources into unproductive organizations designed to deliver social services. 

Thirdly Kuran and Singh cite Islamic education as an obstacle to development – i.e. a religion-based educational system cannot possibly expose students to the more general learning of the modern world.

For years, the discussion of culture as a determining factor was verboten, largely because of relativist, Marxist-influenced academicians who insisted that all society was a question of economics, institutions, demographics, and control of the means of production.  These theories were co-opted by Political Correctness advocates who said that to criticize a particular culture was to deny its inherent value.  Since all cultures are equal, there must be more secular answers to questions of economic and social progress than religion.

Wrong.  Perhaps now, in the death throes of woke and with the ascendency of political and social conservatism, phenomena will be looked at objectively and dispassionately.  Such observers can well start in Africa. 

The Folly Of International Development - Pulling The Plug On Doing Good

Fitchley (Fitch) Bingham wanted a good ride and found it as an international development consultant, economic advisor to Third World countries mired in poverty, poor health, and destitution.  He had no particular service motive - the fate of the world's disadvantaged was a result of cultural legacy. venal kleptocracies, mismanaged governance, and blighted Big Man rule - and so he chose his profession for the adventure, romance, and pleasures it afforded.

His beat was Africa, sent by various United Nations, American, and Western European aid agencies, to do good - i.e., to oversee the implementation of the generous grants given in return for political loyalty, oil, gas, and rare earth elements. 

The countries themselves had no interest whatsoever in actually implementing the programs financed by foreign donors, and siphoned off most of it to offshore bank accounts in Aruba and Grenada.  Fitch understood the game, and how totin' privileges were at the heart of development financing.  Aid agencies looked the other way as monies disappeared, ground was broken but nothing built, salaries for no shows continued on the books, and cheerful support for democracy by the worst offenders of it resonated in Western capitals. 

Alphonse M'bele was perhaps the worst of the worst - a shamelessly corrupt tyrant of a small but not insignificant African nation which because it sat upon billions in mineral wealth was the sweetheart of every nation with gift money to spend.  M'bele knew he could do no wrong, built five-star hotels and sponsored Michelin-rated restaurants, welcomed foreign dignitaries to formal state dinners at his palace, and took every dime and either spent it on Lambos and Ferraris, homes in Rimini and St. Tropez, or sent it to safe financial havens.

 

M'bele led a good life and Fitch was the beneficiary of his largesse.  The two men were peas in a pod, both sybarites, souls living the good life in what had been called 'a shithole with oil'.  Fitch was privy to the best and worst of M'bele's rule.  He enjoyed the pleasures of his harems, filled with tawny Fulani women, high cheekboned, elegantly tall, stately Nigerians, and Zanzibarian queens; and saw what power entailed.  The forest gulags, swamp cages, and underground torture cells were a hard sell, but given the rampages of Genghis Khan, the slaughters of the Crusades, the barbarism of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, nothing extraordinary.  History has no moral gatekeeper. 

His American friends and family were impressed with his commitment to the world's poor.  While they defended aggrieved wives, sued landlords, and cared for the marginally ill, Fitch braved malaria, kidnapping, assault, and devastating brain fevers to help.  Little did they know that his life in M'bele's capital was a round of assignations, sumptuous dinners, and gin fizzes by the pool.  Of course he filled out the proper forms for his Western handlers, reports on performance, progress, and to-do needs, and quarterly reviews of loan repayments or promises thereof; but knew that it was no more than whistlin' Dixie. 

His job was to keep development money flowing into M'bele's coffers, his access to his harem unobstructed, and life after hours as happy and as uncomplicated as possible. 

One of the good things about dictators, a colleague once wrote, was that they kept order.  Port-au-Prince under the Duvaliers was an idyll - the best French restaurants, lively clubs and bars, an easy camaraderie, and little danger; and life under M'bele was no different.  

Now, Fitch was no different than any number of aid workers who knew about Papa Doc's brutality, inhuman prisons, and summary executions; but felt that doing good would be at least an anodyne to such misbehavior.  Dinner at the five-star Petionville Cote Cour, Cote Jardin restaurant while Haitians were beaten to a pulp in Baby Doc's dungeons was quite acceptable. No one ever expected an American aid worker to suffer like a slave. 

 

A colleague of Fitch's, cut from a different cloth and obsessed with a moral conscience, objected when his non-profit company increased their support to Burma under the authoritarian, punitive regime of the colonels.  Even at a time when minorities were being rounded up and imprisoned, and when the army was consolidating military rule, the company kept pouring in 'humanitarian' resources.  Fitch saw this as a self-serving, shameless support to a dictatorship which could use the foreign assistance as window dressing for its compassion and concern.  The same was true in the Horn of Africa where regime after regime brutalized its people, took generous Western aid, and siphoned it into arms and materiel. 

American development assistance does more for the doers of good than the recipients.  It feels good to 'make a difference' even though no difference is made.  Helping others is a higher order of moral action, and one must persist despite the orneriness of beneficiary governments.  Thousands of young Americans have spent years in Africa's shitholes under the impression that their contribution is acknowledged and used wisely while not one red cent is spent where it was intended. 

So given this endemic corruption, the fallacy of third party assistance, and the overwhelming lessons of history, Fitch had no problem whatsoever spending luxuriant nights on tropical beaches with President M'bele's consorts. 

All good things must come to an end, mused Fitch as he read new President Donald Trump's executive order to stop funding American foreign aid, to shutter federal offices responsible for it, and to end an era of feel-good waste and intellectual fraud.  

For a moment, he wondered what he would do next, but his fortunate dual citizenship with an EU country, bought as insurance and a passport to continued work in the Third World, would serve him well.  Although the EU was far less idealistic than the Americans when it came to foreign assistance, its liberal governments could not bring themselves to pull the plug.  He would remain employed, well paid and well taken care of. 

Personal histories aside, the Trump orders are the right thing to do.  If corrupt governments like M'bele's are forced to borrow on international capital markets, they will do so carefully.  Diversion and misuse of loan monies would surely lead to cancellation and denial of future financial consideration.  The Trump edicts are the first step towards this policy.  M'bele and his fellow African big men will grouse, whine, and complain, but the end to the folly of the old system if surprising was not unexpected. 

M'bele saw the handwriting on the wall, cashed in his chips, and decamped to his villa in San Remo along with half of his African harem.  He would live well, with no regrets, sorry to see America come to its senses, but happy in his well-earned retirement.  

Robotic Dogs For Shut-Ins And Virtual Women - The Allure Of The Fantastical And Unreal

A number of years ago a French friend, Emmanuel de Longueville Bourbon, an aristocrat from one of the country's finest families, a Viscount, resident of a magnificent 14th century chateau in the Auvergne, and a well-known historian, told me about his fascination with poupées gonflables, inflatable, life size sex dolls, anatomically correct and made to order according to customer taste and preference.  

While he had not purchased one, he had visited Le Sex Shop, a small store in Belleville owned and managed by an unlikely couple from la France profonde, an older gentleman and his demure wife who by rights should have been scything and plowing, but who had the foresight and entrepreneurial spirit to become small business owners in an up-and-coming trendy neighborhood of Paris. 

The rent was affordable, the product Chinese and inexpensive, and the demand high.  At first it was the tony crowd from the 7th who bought dildoes and leather ironically to decorate and show off their retro-revolutionary tastes; but then more serious customers for whom the old traditions of la fille ainee de l'Eglise - cinq-a-sept liaisons, mistresses, and cool sexual secrecy - felt outmoded.  

These men looked to San Francisco and the Folsom Street Fair, an open air sexual cavalcade where every sexual desire was met with satisfaction.  Before long Le Sex Shop was doing a land office business. 

It was with the wholesale purchase of poupées gonflables from Thailand that the business took off. The owners bought the property next door, appointed it with kitsch modern irony and heavily sexed accoutrements and placed the best-made dolls as showpieces, the jewels in the crown of sex paraphernalia.  

In those days, explained my aristocratic friend, made-to-order was in its infancy.  Special orders could be placed, and the Bangkok factories could indeed reconfigure enough to offer a modicum of diversity, but the selection was limited - sloe-eyed Thai women, sylph-like Scandinavians, and busty, caramel-colored Fulani and not much more. 

 

My friend was fascinated by the phenomenon.  Would the customers for inflatable women be loners, sad sacks, of marginal interest to any woman? Would they be traditional self-pleasurers who simply wanted to add a more palpable dimension to their act? Or might they be true fantasists, men for whom imagination was more than enough to endow the plastic dolls with spirit and sexual energy? Men who wanted women, had the occasional real one, but were far more at home in a created world of sexual fantasy?

Emmanuel was well known to the owners of the shop - they had been serfs in the old days of his ancestors in Auvergne and their descendants had maintained a dutiful and respectful friendship with the family.  When he asked them if he could observe the trade and try to answer some questions about demographic distribution and type of purchase, they readily agreed and accepted a generous gift to help them restore the outbuildings of their farm. 

Emmanuel was surprised at the eclectic mix of customers - all white, respectable Parisians, but from every arrondissement, family background, and profession.  There were no Africans - true to form they were regular Lotharios whose sexual energies beggared those of any white European and so without need for anything but the real thing. 'Getting their rocks off' daily was the crude American way of putting it; but for all the rest, especially Algerians who, unable to afford multiple wives and having been taught about the sexual plague attendant upon white prostitutes, turned to plastic. 

The owners were not entirely happy having to deal with this class of unwanted immigrants, so built a back room, decorated it like a pasha's harem, and received them with tea, hookahs, and lovely saleswomen. 

Emmanuel never got any real answers except that there was definitely a demand for what would later be known as virtual reality; and as the market became more and more sophisticated and the dolls more and more lifelike and tailor-made, demand increased. 

Many years went by.  The owners of Le Sex Shop retired, and Emmanuel repaired to his chateau; but he never lost his interest in artificial sex.  From his reading of Freud and especially the French neuro-psychologists LeBrun and Matrice he knew that fantasy was at the heart of sexual satisfaction.  As much as normal, healthy males delighted in their assignations, their real pleasure was satisfying deep-seated, persistent sexual fantasies; and now that virtual reality was a real, purchasable commodity, the market for fantasy sex would be unlimited. 

In a virtual world in which brain-computer interface is seamless, dreams, fantasies, and hidden desires become real.  The distinction between 'reality' and virtual reality disappears.  Sex with La Duchesse de Nantes in the Palais de Versailles is not only possible but attainable, configured with the right music, scent, and views. 

 

Even now in virtual reality's embryonic phase, men strap on goggles and headwear, click on the fantasy they prefer, and travel for an hour in marvelously embroidered sexual affairs.  Soon the interface will be solely electronic and the new world of unreality will become the norm. 

Which led Emmanuel to robotic dogs.  The District of Columbia city council, concerned about the welfare of its senior citizens, many of them shut-ins in desperate public housing estates, earmarked a substantial sum for robotic dogs, companions to these poor, lonely Washingtonians.  Thanks to revolutionary advances in lifelike design, the dogs would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.  

Artificially intelligent programs would enable them to come when called, sit up, roll over, and fetch.  Their anatomy would be lifelike, and only minimal maintenance (water to assure wet noses and tongues) would be required. They of course would be clean and odor free. 

Despite his years of studying virtuality, Emmanuel was nonplussed.  The dissolution of perception was incredible.  The old folks gave them water and 'food', played with them, walked them around their apartments, talked to them, and loved them as though they were real.

When years ago long before virtuality reality and artificial intelligence were even imagined, Emmanuel had written his first treatise on the virtues of an 'unreal world', and how we would quickly and easily abjure any notion of bricks and mortar for the unlimited, indescribable world of fantastical invention.  We would all be happy living in a virtual world, happier than we ever had been thanks to the satisfaction of every desire, wish, and dream. 

He had been roundly criticized and laughed at. There could be no replacing a real pot au feu, Brigitte Bardot, or a Mouton Rothschild '68.  Taste, feel, smell were part and parcel of the human experience and could never be only figments of the imagination or tantalizing bits of virtuality. 

Of course Emmanuel was as right as rain.  Powerful AI tools, the explosive advances in artificial reality, and the imminent complete electronic interface between mind and computer, assured the coming of a universal virtual world. 

Woody Allen in his early movie Sleeper a comedy about time travelers to a distant future, created giant chickens and celery and robotic dogs.  'Arf, arf', barked the electronic dog as it grabbed our hero's pant leg.  Such impossibilities are not that farfetched, said Allen who when asked to comment on the DC robotic dogs, only said "Arf, arf" in his now familiar New York Jewish accent, waved, and sat down at Katz's for a pastrami on rye. 

 

AI, Virtual Reality, And The Post-Human Generation - The End Of Life As We Know It

Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

Since the human genome was completely sequenced, the identification of specific gene configurations linked to human characteristics and behavior has become routine; and the engineering of some of those sequences to modify or eliminate them has proceeded quickly.  It will not be long before all genetic sequences will have been identified, codified, sorted and catalogued, and available for modification. 

Even more impressively such genetic engineering will be able to replace unwanted genes with more desirable ones. Once that happens, parents will be able to purchase the genes of beautiful, talented, brilliant celebrities and create the infant of their choice.

At the same time, engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

Genetically engineered human beings, living in a perfectly virtual world where physical reality is meaningless and irrelevant, will be of a new race, a post-human race.

‘Post-human’ is the term scientists have chosen to describe the life form that will result thanks to scientific modification.  The term, however, is not quite accurate.   Although as genetically-modified beings, part-organic and part-non-organic, we will certainly not resemble the creatures we now are, we will have simply evolved, albeit it through a more deliberate, focused an efficient means than Darwin ever imagined, into a more modern, capable, resilient, and powerful life form.  

What currently defines human beings – cognitive, intelligent, sentient, imaginative, spiritual, and creative – will still be appropriate and meaningful.  We simply will have become more intelligent, imaginative, and creative than ever before.

The implications of this engineered evolution are profound.  First, we will no longer be retarded in our mental and spiritual evolution by the inefficient use of our brains.  When a mind-computer interface (i.e. once decoded, human brain impulses will be able to be read by the computer and vice-versa) has been completed, the range of our mental capacities, however limited in the past, will be limitless.  Imagine a Google search without a screen or keypad.  The mind will not only have access to all information available in real time, but all past information that has been digitized.  

Not only will we have access to this information, but we will be able to use it however we want.  The distinction between fantasy and reality will disappear; and we will no longer be tethered by what is but what might be or what might have been.

When the mind is linked to the computer via electronic patterning, DNA manipulation, and biochemistry, the new virtual reality will contain images, sounds, fragrances, and stories of all of history, and we will be able to enter this world, select the period in which we wish to live and the people we choose to accompany us – the girl down the street or the Duchess of Nantes.

We will write our own scenarios and our own poetry.  A man will walk through the gardens of Versailles with the love of his life, sit at court with Marie Antoinette, listen to chamber music, and wear powdered wigs and high, buckled stockings.  He will make love in the bedroom of the dauphin, look out the window as the summer sun sets and smell the last breath of lilacs from the formal garden. 

He will not be aware that this is a virtual reality, for it will be so meticulously created through a combination of one’s own imagination and the historical record, that it will exist in its own space.  He like the rest of us will willingly abandon reality, leave the dross and sludge of real life behind, and enter a virtual world which we will create, and travel in it with the woman of our choice whether real or imagined.

Who would not exchange this virtual world for the old, shopworn, hackneyed, and predictable real one?  No one.

The second important implication of this rapid evolution will be Man’s complete control of his environment.  No amount of global warming, Ice Age cooling, or variant climate change will be of any consequence.  Just as agriculturalists are genetically modifying plants to be resistant to drought, pests, and soil depletion; so will human engineers be able to modify our genome to adapt to current environmental conditions.   Cities will not have to be changed to accommodate global warming.  Human beings will change. 

The ability to thrive in water, to breathe different compositions of air, and to live well in either colder or warmer climates will be easily programmed.  Environmentalism will die as a movement, and human modification will be the focus of all attention.

On a recent BBC World Service program, a group of space scientists were gathered to discuss these and other aspects of the post-human era.  “What about the human soul”, the moderator asked, wondering whether or not these post-humans would still be human.   

None of the participants were particularly troubled by the question, since they all had assumed that the soul was no more than the particular configurations of DNA which resulted in varying degrees of insight, intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity.  Post-humans will be no different, they all agreed.  Only their individual genomes will have been altered to produce a very different human reality – in other words a different human soul.

“What about God?” would have been the next question had time remained; and indeed the subject is essential.  Religious conservatives will certainly object not only to tampering with God’s creation but playing God; but equally faithful but less doctrinaire believers will only conclude that God’s hand is miraculous and all-powerful.  Everything that happens on Earth or anywhere in the universe was caused by him.  He simply set the ball rolling.

Secularists will be the least distressed.  There is no God to be offended.  Evolution, whether happening the old way or the new, is simply a neutral, value-free progression from past to present.  There is no purpose to evolution, and the only reality is change.  The concept of  anicca - impermanence is an undeniable and inescapable fact of human existence from which nothing that belongs to this earth is ever free – has long been at the heart  of Buddhism.

There are, not surprisingly, legions of naysayers.  The human race has shown itself to be nothing but corrupt, venal, and destructive; and there is no way that a Utopian vision of a post-human generations will ever come true.  We will find some way to fuck it up.

These, however, are the same people who complain about the genetic modification of plants and animals, steps they believe that will surely lead to eventual famine.  Unknown viruses will reduce the newly-susceptible corn crop to stubble, kill all the livestock in Nebraska, and release twisted, artificially-created pathogens into the environment.   These critics ignore the many benefits of increased yield staple crops which take little water and need no pesticides or fertilizer.  Modern environmentalists are a very American blend of religious fundamentalism, idealism, and conservatism.

The outcry is even louder against designer babies a clear distortion if not perversion of God’s will.  Once parents can choose from a catalog and pick the child they want (Michael Jordan’s athletic ability, Marilyn Monroe’s seductive beauty, and Einstein’s intelligence), the human race will become little more than Barbie clones and Hollywood automatons.

The train has left the station, of course, and genetic selection will soon be common.  In fact one day soon human nature itself will be engineered and may no longer resemble the aggressive, self-protective, territorial, and self-interested combination of genes that has driven human history.  What we will replace it with is a legitimate question; but only one fact is important.  It will be replaced with something else.  That something, however, will have no permanence.  There will be no 10,000 years of predictable human behavior.  ‘Don’t like it?  Don’t want it? Change it’ will be the mantra of the future.

Francis Fukuyama was ridiculed for all the years since the publication of his essay The End of History in which he predicted that the fall of the Soviet Union would usher in a new age of universal adherence to liberal democratic norms and the prosperity and peace that would accompany it.  No one could have be more wrong; and the danger of futurism is that although history is fueled by the same previously ineluctable human nature, it always has surprises in store.   Both DNA modification and mind-machine interface can easily be corrupted, co-opted, and used for evil ends.  The post-human generation could end up worse than the human one.

The point is not to stop engineered evolution even if we could.  A new ball has been set rolling, and there is no way that it can be stopped.   ‘Human beings’ in 500 years will be unrecognizable from those living today.  They will neither be better or worse, but simply and inevitably different.

“Things are not what they appear to be: nor are they otherwise” – Surangama Sutra.