“Maybe,” I said, “if Galileo and Newton had died of whooping cough in childhood, physics would have been delayed enough so that the splitting of the atom would not have come about until the twenty-first century. That whooping cough that never was might have saved us.”
Rappaport accused me of falling into journalism: physics was ergodic in its development, and the death of one or two people could not have influenced its course.
“All right,” I said, “then we might have been saved by the emergence, in the West, of some other dominant religion than Christianity — or, millions of years earlier, by a different formation of man’s sexual nature.”
Challenged, I took up the defense of this thesis. It was no accident that physics had arisen in the West as the “queen of empiricism.” Western culture was, thanks to Christianity, a culture of sin. The Fall — and the first one had been sexual! — engaged the whole personality of man in melioristic pursuits, which provided various types of sublimation, with the acquiring of knowledge at the head.
In this sense Christianity favored empiricism, though, of course, unwittingly: it opened the possibility for it and gave it the chance to grow. Characteristic of the East and its cultures, on the other hand, was the category of shame — quite central — because a man’s inappropriate action there was not “sinful” in any Christian sense, but at most disgraceful, and mainly in the external sense: having to do with the forms of behavior. Therefore, the category of shame transferred man, as it were, “outside” the soul, into the realm of ceremonial practices. For empiricism, then, there was simply no place; the chance for it disappeared with the deprecation of substantive action, and instead of the sublimation of drives, their “ceremonialization” was provided for. Vice, no longer the “fall of man,” became detached from the personality and was, so to speak, legally channeled into a separate repertoire of forms. Sin and grace were replaced by shame and the tactics of avoiding it. There was no penetration into the depths of the psyche: the sense of “what is proper,” “what ought to be,” took the place of the conscience, and the finest minds were directed toward the renunciation of the senses. A good Christian could be a good physicist, but one could not become a physicist if one was a good Buddhist, Confucianist, or follower of the Zen doctrine, because then one would be occupying oneself with the very thing those faiths deprecated in toto. With this as a point of departure, social selection gathered the entire “intellectual cream” of the population and allowed it to spend itself only in mystical exercises — yoga, for instance. Such a culture acted like a centrifuge; it cast the talented away from the places in society where they could initiate empiricism, and stoppered their minds with an etiquette that excluded instrumental pursuits as “lower” and “less worthy.” But the potential of egalitarianism inherent in Christianity — though it came into conflict with class structures, though for periods it yielded to them — never altogether disappeared, and indirectly from it sprang physics, with all its consequences.
“Physics — a kind of asceticism?”
“Oh, it is not that simple. Christianity was a mutation of Judaism, which was a ‘closed’ religion in that it was intended only for the chosen. Thus Judaism was, as a discovery, something like Euclidean geometry; one had only to reflect on the initial axioms to arrive, by extrapolation, at a more general doctrine, one that under the heading ‘chosen’ would put all people.”
“Christianity corresponds to a generalized geometry?”
“Yes, in a sense, on a purely formal level — through the changing of signs in a system that is the same with regard to values and meanings. The operation led, among other things, to the acceptance of the validity of a theology of Reason. This was an attempt not to renounce any of the qualities of man; since man was a creature of Reason, he had the right to exercise that faculty — and this finally produced, after a due amount of hybridization and transformation, physics. I am, of course, oversimplifying enormously.
“Christianity is a generalized mutation of Judaism, an adaption of a systematic structure to all possible human existences. This was a property of Judaism, purely structural to begin with. One could not carry out an analogous operation on Buddhism or Brahmanism, let alone the teachings of Confucius. So, then, the sentence was passed back when Judaism arose — several thousand years ago. And there is another possibility. The main problem of this world which every religion must confront is sex. It is possible to worship it — that is, to make it positive and central to the doctrine; it is possible to cut it off, to shut it out — neutrally; but it is also possible to see it as the Enemy. This last solution is the most uncompromising, and it is the one Christianity chose.
“Now, if sex had been a phenomenon of less importance biologically, if it had remained a periodic, cyclic thing only, as it is with some mammals, it could not have possessed central significance, being a transient, rhythmic occurrence. But all this was determined some one and a half million years ago. From then on, sex became the punctum saliens of really every culture, because it could not simply be denied. It had to be made ‘civilized.’ The man of the West always felt it an injury to his self-esteem that inter faeces et urinam nascimur. . . a reflection that, by the laws of Mystery, put Original Sin in Genesis. That is how it was. Another kind of sexual periodicity, or — again — another kind of religion, might have set us on a different road.”
“To stagnation?”
“No — just to a delay in the development of physics.”
Rappaport accused me of “unconscious Freudianism.” Having been brought up in a puritanical family, he said, I was projecting onto the world my own prejudices. I had not freed myself, in fact, from the vision of everything in the colors of Damnation and Salvation. Since I considered Earthlings to be damned root and branch, I transferred Salvation to the Galaxy. My curse cast mankind into Hell — but did not touch the Senders, who remained completely good and without blemish. That was my mistake. In thinking of them, one first had to introduce the notion of a “fellowship threshold.” All intelligence moved in the direction of more and more universal generalization, which was only proper, because the Universe itself approved that course. He who generalized correctly could control phenomena of increasing scope.
An evolutionary awareness — understanding that mind was the result of a homeostatic “mountain climbing” against the current of entropy — made one embrace, in fellowship, the evolutionary tree that gave rise to sentient beings. But one could not encompass with fellowship the entire tree of evolution, because ultimately a “higher” being was obliged to feed on “lower” ones. The line of fellowship had to be drawn somewhere. On Earth, no one had ever placed that line below the fork where the plants parted company with the animals. And in practice, in the technological world, one could not include, for example, the insects. If we learned that for some reason exchanging signals with the Cosmos required the annihilation of Earth’s ants, we would certainly think that it was “worth” sacrificing the ants. Now, we, on our rung of development, may be — to Someone — ants. The level of fellowship may not necessarily extend, from the standpoint of those beings, to such planetary vermin as ourselves. Or perhaps they had rationalizations for this. Perhaps they knew that according to the galactic statistics, the Earth type of psychozoic was doomed to techno-evolutionary failure, so that it would not be so horrendous to add to the threat hanging over us, since in any case “we most likely would not amount to anything.”
I present here the gist of that vigil on the eve of the experiment, not a chronological record of the conversation, which I do not recall that precisely. I do not know when Rappaport told me of his European experience — the one I described earlier. It was, I think, when we had finished with the generals but had not begun to seek the cause of the impending denouement. Now I said to him more or less the following:
“Dr. Rappaport, you are even worse than me. You have made of the Senders a ‘higher race’ that identifies only with the ‘higher forms’ of the Galaxy. Why, then, do they endeavor to spread biogenesis? Why should they sow life if they are able to carry out a policy of expansion and colonization? Neither of us can go, in our reasoning, beyond the concepts accessible to us. You may be right that I localize to Earth the reasons for our defeat because of the way I was raised as a child. Except that instead of ‘human sin’ I see a stochastic process that has driven us into a dead end. You, a refugee from a country of victims, have always felt too strongly your own innocence in the face of extermination, and therefore you situate the source of the catastrophe someplace else: in the domain of the Senders. We did not choose this ourselves — they did it for us. Thus concludes every attempt at transcendence. We need time, but we will not have time now.