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Stanislaw Lem: One Human Minute

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Stanislaw Lem One Human Minute

One Human Minute: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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In three scathingly humorous reviews of not-yet-written books, Stanislaw Lem brings us insights into the life of the 21st century. “One Human Minute” summarizes the activities of every person on earth during a single minute. “The Upside-Down Evolution” depicts a battlefield devoid of human activity, where synthetic bugs—synsects—vie for supremacy. “The World as Cataclysm” unfolds the universe as a crooked roulette wheel, where cosmic catastrophe prevails over orderly evolution. All reflect the speculative imagination and dark humor that have made Lem a grand master of the science fiction genre. "It is exhilarating to watch Lem building his argument… a splendid performance by a powerful mind." — Robert Silverberg,

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So one cannot accuse the authors of misanthropy; at the most, one can point to the limitations inherent in their method. The originality of One Human Minute lies in its being not a statistical compilation of information about what has taken place, like an ordinary almanac, but rather synchronous with the human world, like a computer of the type that we say works in real time, a device tracking phenomena as they occur.

Having thus crowned the authors, the critic from Encounter proceeded to trim the laurels he had bestowed as he took up the Introduction. The demand for truth, which the Johnsons wave like a banner in order to defend One Human Minute against charges of obscenity, sounds fine but is unworkable in practice. The book does not contain “everything about the human being,” because that is impossible. The largest libraries in the world do not contain “everything.” The quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual’s ability to assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power. It is no accident that in the chapter on mental ability in One Human Minute there is no I.Q. information for eminent statesmen. Even the ubiquitous Johnsons were not able to subject those people to intelligence tests.

My view of this book is undramatic. One can approach it in a thousand ways, as this article shows. In my opinion, the book is neither a malicious satire nor the honest truth; not a caricature and not a mirror. The asymmetry of One Human Minute, its inclusion of incomparably more shameful human evil than manifestations of good, and more of the misery of our existence than its beauty, I attribute neither to the authors’ intention nor to their method. Only those who still cherish illusions on the subject of Man can be depressed by the book. The asymmetry of good and evil would probably even lend itself to a numerical comparison, though the Johnsons somehow did not think of it. The chapters on vice, felony, fraud, theft, blackmail, and computer crime[1] are far more extensive than the chapters devoted to “good deeds.” The authors did not compare such numbers in one table, and that is a pity. It would have shown clearly how much more extensive evil is than good. Fewer are the ways of helping people than of harming them; it is the nature of things, not a consequence of the statistical method. Our world does not stand halfway between heaven and hell; it seems much closer to hell. Free of illusions in this respect — for some time now — I was not shocked by this book.

II

The second edition of One Human Minute has been expanded by its publisher to include several new chapters; therefore, a fresh discussion is in order.

This time, the book opens with a picture of the world as mankind’s habitation. Such data can be found in any encyclopedia, but when they are converted to per-minute quantities, they undeniably produce a greater impression than do the dry, abstract entries in a reference book. It is indeed curious to realize that there is always a storm raging somewhere on Earth, and that the number of lightning bolts is constant: six thousand per minute. One hundred strike every second, and that means perpetually, month after month and century after century. We also learn here that the Earth covers 1,800 kilometers in the course of a minute of orbiting the Sun. In the same short interval of time, the combined weight of the cosmic “debris” falling constantly on the Earth’s surface amounts to thousands of tons. At the same time, our planet loses a considerable amount of its atmosphere, which, stirred by the movements of barometric high and lows, by cyclones and tradewinds, and also heated by the sun, creates its own “tail” stretching for many thousands of miles; the Earth loses, as a result, an enormous quantity of gas. New gases, however, constantly escape from the Earth’s depths; the oceans also emit them, partly as water vapor; and so on. The book, then, commences in the style of popular science. The figures reveal at once the vastness of the planet in relation to its inhabitants and the incredible minuteness of the planet in relation to the universe. But it is all, as I said, a laborious extract of natural-history textbooks.

Some of the chapters previously described have been enlarged by the authors with data now of a humorous, now of a macabre cast. Man as executioner, oppressor, and killer of his own species was presented to us in the first edition. Now we see what a predator he is, or, if you will, what a parasite of the entire biosphere — that is, the animal and plant kingdoms. Almost nobody sitting down to a steak or chop feels any pang of conscience; we do not even think that in our complicity with the butchers we are like one who aids a killer in the disposal of the victim’s remains. In order that the thought should never come to mind and interfere with our consumption of tasty morsels, all languages — without exception — have created a separate vocabulary which gives us special consideration. We pass away; animals can only die. And, of course, every dictionary of hunting jargon unfailingly exonerates all that is synonymous, in every legal language, with premeditated murder, since a hunter goes into the woods with a loaded weapon for the express purpose of killing. One Human Minute goes to the heart of the matter, cutting through these pharisaical subtleties of our vocabulary, for it gives not the names but the numbers of the victims. Every minute, it turns out, mountains of animal corpses fall at our hands, and the same mountains of corpses, in the form of roasts, are chewed by several billion human teeth per minute. These are like images from Gulliver’s travels to Brobdingnag, where a lady giant’s enticing smile might be a scene out of Jaws, with the shark opening its monstrous mouth. As we know, the brain of a live monkey eaten raw from the opened skull with a spoon is a sophisticated Chinese delicacy; and though it is unlikely that the quantity of brains consumed per minute in this way could have been established with much accuracy, one does find the figure under the heading “Exotic Dishes."

To the eternally shooting geyser of semen this edition has added the river of milk that flows from the breasts of women all over the world into the mouths of infants.

The human disfigurations that are set apart in a separate chapter — no doubt for more powerful effect — are a silent, natural expression of our fate. It is as if whoever set up this table — these armies of the blind and deaf, these millions of bodies deformed from birth and by their very number proving how little Nature truly cares about the individual human being (yet in all religions and nearly all philosophical systems we try so hard to preserve the human dignity of the individual), and these separately (pedantically) enumerated infirmities of old age — it is as if the author of this table wanted to compare the aged with rusting wrecks or derelict machines, which, though slowly disintegrating, preserve for a while their original contours.

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