Stanislaw Lem - His Masters Voice

“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.

“I have always said that if only there were a government wise enough to want to pull all humanity out of that hole and not just its own, we might eventually climb out. But funding from the federal budget has been readily available only to the seeker of ’new weapons.’ When I told the politicians that we ought to launch a crash program in anthropology, build machines for the simulation of socio-evolutionary processes, using the kind of money they put into their missile and antimissile research, they smiled at me and shrugged. No one took it seriously, and at least now I have the bitter satisfaction of being right. We should have studied man first — that was our proper ordering of priorities. But we did not, and now what we know of man is not enough. Let us finally admit that this is the case. Ignoramus et ignorabimus, because now we do not have the time.”

The good-hearted Rappaport did not try to argue with me. He led me — I was drunk — to my room.

Before we parted, he said, “Don’t take it so much to heart, Mr. Hogarth. Without you things would have turned out just as badly.”

Donald would plan the experiments as much as a week in advance, four runs a day. This was the maximum of which the improvised apparatus was capable. After each experiment it would suffer partial destruction, and repairs would be necessary. The repairs went slowly, because the work had to be done in protective suits — on material radioactively contaminated. We got under way after the “wake” — or, rather, he did; I was only a spectator. We knew now that the people from His Master’s Ghost or the Alter-Project were coming in eight days. Donald originally intended to start first thing in the morning, because he wanted his people, still engaged in the bogus research that he had assigned them, to cover with their cannonade the unavoidable roar of the explosions, but, having everything ready late the evening before (in other words, while I was working out endless variations of global Armageddon at the computer center), he did not wait.

Actually, by now it did not matter when Nye — and, after him, our mighty protectors — found out. Fallen into a troubled sleep after Rappaport left me, I awoke several times and jumped up with the impression that I had heard the boom of a detonation, but it was a dream. The concrete of the buildings had been designed, way back when, for more than such explosions. At four in the morning, feeling like Lazarus, I dragged my aching bones out of bed and decided — since I was unable to stay in my room any longer — to dispense with the rest of our “conspiratorial” cautions and go to the laboratory. We had not planned it this way, but I simply could not believe that Donald Prothero, having everything ready, would quietly turn in for the night. And I was not mistaken: his nerves, too, had their limit.