#35: The "That would make US just like THEM" Argument

When I was a boy in the Bronx, the streets were a tough place to be. Not as tough nearly as today’s inner city slums, but it was certainly possible to come home showing signs of having been roughed up. My dear late mother once asked me what had happened and I replied that I had gotten “beat up.” “Did you fight back?” she asked. “yes,” I replied, “but he was much bigger than me.” “Ah,” she said, “and did you wait for him to turn his back, and hit him with a brick?” I was aghast. I was saturated with “boy’s books,” many of them British, and what she was suggesting was outrageous. Not Queensbury, not cricket, not fair play!

“Of course not!” I almost shouted, “that would have been UNFAIR.”

My mother, the Holocaust survivor, smiled as she continued preparing dinner and said quietly, “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about fighting.”

Sport is one thing, fighting is another.

There should be an annual award for the stupidest argument used to support a self-destructive policy. It could be a spin-off of the Darwin Awards. There could be an index based on just how stupid the argument is and how large and negative the consequences of the policy it supports. An example some might propose, I suppose, might be the fabled “Domino theory” used to support America’s entrance into the Viet Nam war. But the Domino Theory was not stupid, it was just, as it turned out, false. Viet Nam did turn commie, but the other states in the region continued in various other forms of despotism of their own unique devising. No, I would give this year’s award at least to the “that would make us ‘just like them’” argument.

“That would make us ‘just like them’.”

What the hell does that mean?

Well, it means, for one thing, that we have to fight “fair,” while the other side gets to do whatever it chooses. The other side can maim, torture, and video tape what it’s doing, pretty successfully undermining our own public willingness to combat it. We, on the other hand, must be driven by extreme rectitude and fastidiousness and must subject our every action to the most demanding moral and legal review.

If we do not handicap ourselves in this way, well, then we “become ‘just like them’.”

Is this not the most mind-bendingly stupid piece of fatuous smug self-indulgent Norwegian/French crap you have ever heard? If not, it is certainly in the running.

For one thing (and only one thing) it is simply not true.

If torturing terrorists for information, for example, “made us ‘just like them,’” then we would suddenly be chopping off criminals’ hands, stoning women in the streets, banning alcohol, persecuting religious minorities, and living under shariah “law”. For these are the thing we would have to do in order to be “just like them.” We have a long, long way to go before we become “just like them.”

Of course, this is an enthymeme and its concealed assumption is the famous one with which I started: it is the Domino Argument. Once, it is argued, you have “soiled yourself morally in one thing,” you have embarked on a road of no return. Torture one terrorist and the next thing you know, you are doing a bloody rampage through the streets of Chicago! (Hmmm, I never thought of that. Maybe it’s because we tortured a terrorist that we’re seeing the bloody carnage in our urban centers. That’s an argument our “progressives” haven’t noticed yet, I must draw it to their attention. Abu Ghraib actually caused minority violence in our urban centers. )

The move is a very tempting one, I admit. We smile knowingly at Lord Acton’s dictum, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That’s an application of Domino. You start with one cigarette, next thing you know, you’ve got terminal emphysema. Start with one whiff of Mary Jane and the next thing, you’re a dying crack whore. To paraphrase Chairman Mao, “A thousand mile journey to hell starts with a single step.” Yeah, yeah.

Sure, if you’re dealing with a physiological addictive substance, starting by itself can get you hooked; but when extended beyond the biological, the principle becomes a mere metaphor. This move is staple in the repertoire of the Excusers, namely the reduction of ALL human activity to the level of the biological. The compulsive philanderer now has an “addiction”; he’s no longer an out-of-control horny toad, he has an illness and we should pity, not despise, him. It was a reprehensible disposition, but since Slick Willy was discovered to possess it, it became acceptable among the “better” people. The compulsive liar is an “addict,” the compulsive thief, you guessed it, another “addict,” the serial rapist, child-molester, all addicts. And addiction is an illness, not a character defect. Poor addicts. Thank God we have Oprah and Doctor Phil to educate us on these matters.

But the pragmatic decision to inflict pain and discomfort on a terrorist in custody in order to gain information from him, that is not biological, it is not even a “disposition.” It can be the most practical and even the most moral expedient available at the time. If it were not, our enemies wouldn’t be using it themselves. Of course, those psychos actually enjoy doing it, but that’s not the point.

The point is that only an idiot goes into a fight with one (or both) hands tied behind his back by his own choice.

Now, you’re saying to yourself, that’s pretty obvious. But I must appeal once again to the progressive’s most fundamental principle, his AXIOM (see Post #21: Who Are You Going to Believe, Me or Your Lying Eyes?):

If it looks OBVIOUS to the non-academic, non-intellectual, it IS, and HAS TO BE … FALSE! Prima facie Obviousness is the hallmark of the False. Counter-intuitiveness is the reliable indicator of the True.

I said that only an idiot goes into a fight with a voluntary handicap, but that’s not entirely true.

It’s rather an idiot, or a person ideologically damaged in judgment, or …

Someone who has a political dog in the fight. (See Post #19: Cui Bono And Two Other Money Questions)

If you’re betting on Brutal Bart to win the match, it sure pays for you to convince Simple Simon to enter the ring with his hands tied behind his back. Tell him that nice fighters don’t use their fists, even if the other side does. If he’s really stupid, tell him that fist blows actually don’t work. If you say it often enough, he might come to believe it. That’s been the mantra on torture: Only stupid uneducated people think torture works, real educated experts will tell you that it actually doesn’t. Duh!

The “we don’t want to be like them” crowd includes, really, two populations, the simple-minded and brain-washed ideologues, on the one hand, and the internationalist socialist “intellectual” fifth-columnists, on the other.

The bottom line of the “we don’t want to become ‘just like them’” crowd is that they want to handicap the U.S. in its to-the-death struggle with 13^th C vicious religious psychopaths. But why would they want to do that? The answer is, sadly, not counter-intuitive: they hate the traditional American culture.

They blame that culture for everything they think is wrong with the world and they do so because they have been taught to do so. They have absorbed an entire world-view from decades and decades of left-leaning scribblers, school-teachers, and academic poseurs drowning them in socialist rhetoric.

The only antidote to this poisonous concoction is a return to a mind cleansed of their counter-intuitive “theoretical” clap-trap, a return to a mind that trusts it’s own instincts, to a mind that repays verbal rubbish with instant and penetrating contempt.

We are in a fight, not a gentleman’s game of croquets on the lawn. In a fight, the objective is to win. In a game, perhaps it’s how you play it that’s important; in a fight, it’s not. It’s whether you win or lose.

#34: A Taste for the Sacred

We’re all familiar with the standard set of five senses. We understand them to be sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. But our way of speaking also suggests other senses as well. For example, we speak of a “sense of humor.” Is there really a “sense” of humor, or is this merely a metaphorical extension of the physical sense of “sense”? The fact that we often encounter people with very different senses of humor or, more compelling yet, people who have no sense of humor suggests that there is indeed a responsiveness that is peculiarly adapted to specific scenarios and circumstances. If not a “physical” sense, then certainly something very much like a physical sense. If one asks precisely what the sense of humor is, the answer is both simple and unsatisfying. The sense of humor is the disposition to respond with pleasure to a perception of funny objects, circumstances, or scenarios. “Funny?” you might respond, “is this not a circular definition of humor?” I don’t think so; not any more than a definition of vision as the perception of shaped color is circular. One has to understand the primitive undefined notion of color before we can understand the notion of sight. Similarly, we must understand the primitive undefined notion of “funniness” before we can understand notion of humor.

Humor is not alone in this respect. There also seems to be a sense of the beautiful and ugly, which is usually referred to as the “aesthetic” sense. This is not to say that all people identify the same things as beautiful and as ugly, but merely that most people consider some things to be beautiful and other things ugly; that is, they understand the meaning of the words “beautiful” and “ugly.” Following this line of thinking, we may wonder whether there are yet other “senses.” One very interesting candidate is the “religious” sense, perhaps it can be called the sense of the “sacred.”

While there is little dispute that human beings have a sense of humor that is quite distinct from, say, the aesthetic sense, there is less confidence these days, it would seem, on the existence of a sense of the sacred. The sense of the sacred has been subject to various attacks, but the most successful, I think, has been the attack of reductionism. This attack maintains that there really does not exist a distinct set of affective states that we can call “religious” or “sacred,” but that the ones we might think are such are actually something quite different. I have illustrated this attack in the past by reference to Bernini’s famous statue entitled “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa.”

St. Theresa of Avila (1515-1582) was a Spanish nun who was subject to a variety of visions and experiences, most notable among which was the appearance to her of an angel carrying a fiery spear with which he repeatedly penetrated her heart. Rather than describe her states, I’ll let her speak for herself:

“ I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...”

The Baroque sculptor Bernini used this passage as his inspiration in creating a representation of the encounter. Needless to say, one of the first features of the statue to strike the viewer is the expression of extreme ecstasy on the face of Theresa.

Now Bernini created the statue between 1647 and 1652, long, long before the world had ever heard of Sigmund Freud. There is no doubt in my mind that what Bernini was after was a depiction in marble of peculiarly religious ecstasy; yet, in this secular, post-Freudian time it is admittedly difficult to look at the face on the statue and to be aware of her description of her experiences in her diary without thinking, perhaps she was not really experiencing religious ecstasy, perhaps she was actually having a sexual experience, a sexual ecstasy, which she had to transform in her mind in order to resolve inner conflict. In this very, very modern story, Theresa simply cannot have a religious ecstasy because, after all, there is no such thing; if she is having any ecstasy, it must, therefore, be sexual (because that’s the only one our psychologists feel comfortable with).

But the bottom line is that this is just a “she said”/”he said” dispute; she says she’s having a religious ecstasy, he (our modern psychologist) says she is having a sexual one. In this dispute, it would seem that she is in a privileged and unassailable position. After all, she is the only one with direct access to the fact under discussion, her affective state; he is making his pronouncement on the basis of a theory that is largely a priori. Using one of my favorite lines again, the psychologist is asking Theresa, Who are you going to believe, me or your lying self-awareness? Denying Theresa her distinctively religious experience has to rank right up there with telling a person eating chocolate that they are actually tasting strawberry. No, the psychologist tells the chocolate eater, you are tasting strawberry. Yeah, right.

Clearly, there have always been and currently still are people who believe that they have distinctively religious experiences. Are there such experiences?

As I say above, the only person in a position to judge is the person having the experience. If even one person says, I’ve experienced religious ecstasy and I’ve experienced sexual ecstasy, and, honey, believe me, I know the difference and when I’m having which, then the reductionist is finished. But there is more indirect evidence as well. Surely, we are aware that religion has existed all over the planet, arising as it were spontaneously in every primitive human development known to us today. Surely, all those people were not simply sublimating their sexual needs and wants. I don’t want to suggest that there are no complex interactions between the sexual and the religious, but why shouldn't there be? I’m only suggesting that there is a distinct domain of experience that seems to be hard-wired into the human frame just as securely as the capacity for laughter, the capacity for pleasure in ornamentation, and the capacity for sexual pleasure.

None of this has ANYTHING to do with “the existence of God” or the “truth” of ANY religious teachings.

All I am arguing is this simple thesis: there is a fundamental human appetite for a distinct experience that I am calling “the religious” or “the sacred.”

II

If this is true, which I do think it is, it helps to explain some common contemporary phenomena.

The curtains of the European 17th C tent opened slightly and the governing theologians of the time saw the camel’s nose of modern science snuffling between them. They had already heard the camel snarking and farfling around the outside in the late 16^th C, but now they really saw the nose of the beast, and, to put it mildly, they did not like what they saw. Well, folks, they lost most of that war, they should known: that camel was coming in, one way or another. And now, it’s fully here, at least in the West. And the sad truth for the descendants of those long dead pre-Enlightenment religious governors is that the narrative told by the camel really beats the hell out of theirs. I'm talking evolution, just for starters. I still think there are problems of detail, but you can't beat it for a compelling story. Oh, there are rear guard actions all around from the Christian community, but story-wise, it’s really all over but the shouting.

But story-wise is not the only-wise.

We noticed that different people have “different senses of humor” and that different people enjoy different art. People disagree about “tastes” in all of these arenas, but what remains in each case is it’s distinctive appetite.

And people are very plastic as far as the “objects” of each of these senses are concerned. People can be taught or trained to enjoy new and disgusting foods; they can be taught or trained to laugh at stupidity of all sorts; they can be taught or trained to think of almost anything as “beautiful”; and, as the long list of perversions testifies, people can be taught or trained to find just about anything sexually fulfilling.

There’s a lesson in this.

When modern science has made tales of the supernatural religiously indigestible, the appetite remains. And when that appetite fails to find its food in the supernatural, it turns itself towards the natural.

The religious appetite brings with it an entire context. The appetite needs a narrative that involves sin and redemption, it needs an ultimate object of worship, it needs sacred intermediaries who are themselves objects of worship, it needs rituals, it needs festivals, it needs liturgy, and, above all, it needs an over-arcing narrative.

This is what the modern Eco-system nature worship is all about, this is how it has come about. Of course, there are the huge special interests, both political and economic, who are the drivers of this thing; but it could not move forward without the grass-roots movement, and this movement has as its main-spring the peculiarly religious appetite.

The religious appetite does not only explain the global warming scam, which is what it is. It also helps to explain such phenomena as Royalty worship, as in the case of Princess Diana, of Oprah worship, and of fan-ism in general.

What is the ultimate root of the religious appetite? What is its evolutionary advantage? One can speculate about these things, but I suspect we can never do more. The religious impulse and appetite seems as surely and securely a part of us, however, that we can expect to see one group or another capitalize on it for as long as human groups congregate on earth.

#33: The Assault on National Identity

To this day, I still have the image of an armor suited Balboa, his hand up shielding his eyes, looking out over a huge, sunlight expanse of blue ocean and saying, “I think I’ll call it ‘the Pacific’.” The image comes from the history primer I had at P.S. 28 in the Bronx back in the early 1950s. I also remember saluting the American flag and reciting the pledge of allegiance, and singing such songs as ‘the Star Spangled Banner’ and ‘America the Beautiful.” Of course, we also learned not only about George Washington and the cherry tree, but also about Abraham Lincoln, “Honest Abe,” his emancipation of the slaves, and, believe it or not, about George Washington Carver and his peanuts. In general, patriotism wasn’t exactly in, it was more assumed. I quite liked it as a child, still do.

I now know that it’s unlikely that Balboa actually said what was written in quotations marks under the picture in the primer, and certainly he didn’t say it in colloquial early 1950s English. He probably wasn’t even shielding his eyes in just that way. George apparently didn’t chop down the cherry tree. I learned a lot of things that may not have been true or, at best, only half true. Maybe Stonewall Jackson wasn’t exactly as he was represented, nor Daniel Boone, nor William Travis, nor James Bowie. Maybe even the battle at the Alamo was not as we learned it back then. It’s possible. But to be honest, I don’t care. But apparently others do.

I don’t think my life was damaged in any way by my having been taught these things; I actually think it was enhanced. But there are others who do not share this view. I have just read that there is a quite general movement afoot across the United States in the grade schools to “correct” the teaching of history to children. Right now, it is Christopher Columbus who is the target of the “correctors.” While these “correctors,” for example, charge Columbus and his crew with bringing smallpox to the “new world,” they fail to point out that he very likely also brought syphilis to Europe from the “new world”. Apparently, they are so committed to “truth in history” that a special focus on the faults of all American heroes is now necessary, though their virtues are of little or no interest. In all fairness, however, I should add that this rule has its exceptions. Some notable ones are Abraham Lincoln, F.D.R., all of the Kennedys, and, of course, Martin Luther King, who are astonishingly clean and free of flaws. All the others, though, need to be (politically) “corrected”. God forbid that American children should grow up believing that the founding fathers were indeed great men! This one had slaves (duh! What a surprise that is – it was the late 18^th C), that one had a mistress, that one fathered an illegitimate child. They were no heroes, they were flawed and evil. But, worst of all, they were WHITE MALES and we all know what that means! And the America they created is equally flawed and evil, and it is all because of those damn WHITE MALES. If there is anything good at all in this terrible country, it is because throughout it’s evil history there were also (abused and marginalized always) people of color and women and the little children. Whew! If it weren’t for that, we’d really be doomed and double-damned now. Thank God (whoops, sorry, Thank the Ecosystem) that we have the people of color, the women, and the little children to save us. But wait! Those little children are the future, and some of them at least potentially male (though their “sexual orientation” remains for them to choose!). Those little children have to be told the truth about their history. But why? Apparently, the teachers of our schools have found a sudden appetite for history that is “true.”

The “true history” explanation is not very persuasive. First, it makes very little difference in the life of a little boy if he believes falsely that Washington was a wise heroic visionary. I actually still believe that he was, false wooden teeth and all! And, second, the same ones who would push these desperately important “truths” onto the little children are those who also have maintained, when that was convenient, that there really isn’t any historical truth at all – that history is the narrative chosen by “the victors” (that’s code, by the way, for … er ... White Men!). So what’s really on the agenda, eh?

I don’t think it’s a mystery. The objective is to erode the sense of national pride, to undermine the foundations of a national identity. A nation is united and unified by a common language, a common iconography, and a common fund of stories, a common and commonly accepted mythology. All of these have come under attack.

Arguably, the earliest signs of this movement came with the introduction of the idea of a universal international language: Esperanto way back in the late 19^th c. It’s expressed intention was to foster the brotherhood of man. Very nice, but it also would have had the effect of removing one piece of nationalist glue. In more recent times, American blacks have tried to argue that their “dialect” is itself a language and should be taught and used in schools: Ebonics. And now it is quite common to hear of the U.S.A. becoming a bi-lingual country with Spanish as the second tongue. Anything at all, as long as it serves to further tear the fabric of the nation.

And what are the icons? They come mostly from Christianity. It was Christians who made the country in every way. It was Christians who invented, who conceived, who fought for and defended the country. Every day we hear the legaloids, the “intellectuals” practicing anti-Christianity under the guise of an even-handed assault on “religion.” But there is no equivalent assault on the religion causing the real havoc of our time. I’ll give you a hint: it ain’t Buddhism! No, the only assault is on the religion that has most matured through the centuries. But other icons include the media figures of the twentieth century who have to varying degrees been adopted as symbols of the nation.

The American cultural narrative has been consistently under attack by the mass media, ranging from the majority of Hollywood producers through to the news-as-entertainment shows. And some would claim that the “serious” news shows hosted by the likes of Jim Lehrer are not entertainment – I would beg to differ! Those shows cater to the semi-literate liberal middle class who watch them for what I would call “flattertainement” – while they watch those shows, all their critical faculties go into a numbed stupor as they allow a moist warm flow of sanctimony, sophistication, and superiority wash over them. The Left wing television news “intellectuals” have the American equivalent of the caché of royalty for the liberals of the two coasts. Like royalty, just their bare attention flatters the recipients. It is to vomit.

This attack on children’s history is only the latest blow in the assault. It was not so long ago there was the hullabaloo about Jefferson fathering a child by one of his slaves. Columbus had already been assaulted numerous times in the past: he was not the first one to “find” America, he was not a nice man, he brought smallpox, he did this, he did that. Blah, blah, blah. The Iwo Jima photograph was staged and the poor Indian in it, Ira Hayes, died a drunk. Oh, and Truman was a bastard, he dropped the bombs. Churchill was a son-of-a-bitch, he carpet-bombed the Germans. And we don’t like Thanksgiving, it celebrates the abuse of Aboriginal Peoples, Halloween is demeaning to children, Christmas is just a pagan holiday under a new name, and by the way, there’s no Santa Claus. An excellent example of this trend in the movies (I avoid the pretentious term “cinema”) was the ecstatically received “Broke Back Mountain” in which those mythological heroes of twentieth century America, the “cowboys” of the West were “outed.” Yes, the Leftoids chortled gleefully, yes, yes, yes! Those heroes you worshipped, Hopalong Cassidy, Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and many, many others, they could have been queer! And, and, and … some of them were! Yeah, that’s the ticket, the actors, they were QUEER. And you thought they were so manly. Take that, America! Queer, queer, queer!

One can easily see the Left’s adulation of homosexuals as part and parcel of this process. Bringing down America means bringing down the actual builders of this country, and those builders, apologies to Betsy Ross and Laura Secord, were men. So, just as the Left beavers away at finding the warts on the Founding Fathers, undermining them and undermining their achievements, they seek to undermine the male ideal that was admired and so often exemplified in the heroes of the American past. Just as they want to say that the Columbus we celebrate is a fiction, the Washington we celebrate a fiction, the Cowboys we celebrate are sometimes also fictions: they are not the men we thought they were: they were actually gay. And, they love to continue leeringly, neither were those other men so many admired as manly: Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, and so on, and so on.

America has a powerful culture that was invented by a most remarkable assembly of men. That culture is expressed in a set of remarkable documents dating from the time of the revolution: the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and, perhaps it could be argued, at a much lesser level, the Federalist Papers. The statesmen of those times have rarely been equaled, never surpassed. The closest anyone has come to their stature was Winston Churchill. That initial foundational culture has acquired layers of rich additional material through the many decades it has now been in existence. It includes Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, ragtime piano, the songs of Stephen Foster, the novels of Herman Melville and Washington Irving, among countless others. But it also now includes the entire narrative of the American West, interpreted not only in pulp publications of the late nineteenth C, in the novel, but also in the movies and on television. The new “correctors” in our schools are intent on teaching the coming generations that most of these stories were “lies” and where there actually is truth, there was also evil.

The objective of the Left Fifth Column within our schools and universities is to diminish all those sources of American pride, to diminish the men (who were admittedly white) who created the country and its theory, to diminish what they wrote. The term that used to be used in describing the activities and narratives of predecessors of the “correctors” was “anti-Establishment,” but placing a new name on something ugly doesn’t change it, as placing lipstick on a pig doesn’t make it beautiful. “Anti-Establishment” is anti-American culture and values, and the only alternative out there, face it, is internationalist Socialism. And the reason the anti-Establishment works as it does in the schools and universities is clear: the country’s narratives, some of them true, some of them fable, are part of the cultural glue that maintains the land as One. Socialism is ab initio and in essence internationalist, and this entails an unremitting war on its part against cultural identities everywhere.

The Leftist termites within the house politic understand with a clarity no longer shared by the citizenry at large the truth of that well worn adage: United we stand, divided we fall.

If their erosion of the cultural mythology is allowed to continue, if they are continued to be given a free hand with the children of the country, then they will produce a bleak, brain washed, passionless, childless, hopeless population of worker ants herded to a new altar by government truncheon-wielding brown-shirts. Civilized man will have returned to his animistic roots, worshiping shrubs and trees, the earth and the sun, led in his prayers by the new high priests, the likes of Al Gore and Michael Moore and their inevitable successors.

One single new Socialist world, united in its worship of the inanimate universe. Its history rewritten, it will increasingly, in Camus’s perfect phrase, have neither the memory of a lost home, nor the hope of a promised land.

O, brave new world.

#32: The Road Not Taken -- All For The Best

I have always had a fascination with adventurers, using this word in a non-gender-specific way since a number of the individuals I’m thinking of were women. I recently read the biography of Josiah Harlan (1799-1871), who traveled to Afghanistan and managed, for a very brief time, to have himself made king. Other figures that come to mind are Two-Gun Cohen (1887-1970), bodyguard of Sun Yat Sen and, among the women, Lou Andreas Salome (1861-1937; one of my favorites), Emily Hahn (January 14, 1905 - February 18, 1997), and, perhaps, even Marlene Dietrich (27 December 1901 – 6 May 1992). There are many, many others, but these are the ones who spring to my mind.

These figures prompted a kind of nostalgic envy in me. In particular, I was envious of their apparent lack of practical fear or anxiety. Having grown up as product of the second world war and living in poverty well into my late twenties, I was myself always preoccupied with practical security, which meant always making the most conservative decisions and avoiding risk. The consequence, however, of my history making me obsessively risk-averse was that risk-taking in others acquired an almost erotic aura for me, making them romantic motivational enigmas. What, I couldn’t ever help asking myself of them, what exotic and amazing thoughts and emotions must be drifting through their wonderfully unencumbered, utterly free minds? Surely, I thought, these people had somehow miraculously escaped the burdens of practicality and planning.

Would Harlan have ever asked himself whether he shouldn’t try for work in a haberdashery (they had those then) rather than risking valuable time and life on a trip to Afghanistan? Would Two-Gun Cohen have said to himself, “Is this really a good job for a nice Jewish boy from London?” Would Lou Salome have ever considered just settling down with Paul Reé and having four children and a nice gemütliches life? And would Emily Hahn have considered giving up her monkey for a solid bourgeois existence back in St. Louis? And Dietrich? She seemed to have it all, both adventure and security, so I couldn’t really ask any question about her. But in her early life? Might she have chosen some other path than her film career?

The answer in all of these cases is an emphatic no! And just as they couldn’t or wouldn’t give up their bohemian, risky lives, so I could never have embarked on an adventurous life of my own. The uncertainty would have made me totally crazy. And so they amazed, puzzled, and enticed me by what seemed to be their inexplicable freedom. But were their inner lives actually as free as my fantasy made them?

Of course, we can’t really know. Salome and Hahn both wrote a good deal, so I suppose one could form conjectures from those writings, but I admit they would hardly count as knowledge.

But I ask the question because I recently made the re-acquaintance of a woman who took on the romantic aura of an adventuress when I was an undergraduate. I won’t describe what it was about her and her life and her choices that made me think of her in this way, since that might serve to identify her, which I don’t want to do. Suffice it to say, I have always remembered her as young (she was, then), fearless, adventurous, and very attractive. Needless to say, I was excited to have “rediscovered” her some 50 years later and was looking forward to being dazzled, to having my youthful romantic image of her validated.

Alas, this was not to be. What I found, sadly, was a lonely woman of around my own age. Of course, she couldn’t help having become old any more than I could. Neither, I suppose, was it her fault that she was lonely. In fact, nothing I found about her could properly be said to be her fault. But interacting with her from the standpoint of almost seven decades of life threw water on the idea that there was anything mysterious or remarkable going on within her mind. A twenty year old faced with a pretty girl is more than willing, say even eager, to attribute to her an extraordinariness she doesn’t possess. And this isn’t her fault at all, it’s just nature’s way of making sure the species continues, whether for good or for ill.

I also found a readiness to anger that wasn’t entirely stable, a vulgarity I would never have expected from one of my romantic adventuress ideals, and a totally surprising lack of rationality. In brief, this woman really failed to live up to my expectations. I can’t and don’t fault her for this, she has no obligation to live up to anyone’s expectations than her own. But I do draw a moral from the entire unappetizing experience. It is this.

We form beliefs inevitably about two regions outside of our immediate experience, the future, but also the past. We call those beliefs about the future “predictions,” but we have no common name for the ones about the past. Some philosophers have coined the word “retrodictions” for those beliefs. What I am interested in here are the retrodictions we think of as autobiographical. I am interested in the beliefs we have about our own pasts.

Now, while predictions are notoriously difficult to make, many of them do have the advantage of ultimately being corrected by reality. “Truth is the daughter of time,” the saying goes, and what it means is that sooner or later we find out what the truth is. Unfortunately, this expedient is not available in any direct way for our retrodictions; reality does not inevitably correct our autobiographical beliefs. This is bad enough, but it gets worse. Because of the fact that there is no mechanical, automatic corrective for false autobiographical beliefs, those beliefs can, and do, gradually change under the pressure of our individual needs and wants.

In general, we tend to improve the people and the events of our pasts, but not necessarily. The point is not that we do precisely this or that, or even that we change our memories at all, it is that simply discovering an alteration is a very difficult and unreliable process in itself.

Yet, there are circumstances in which reality asserts itself even with our distant memories, and re-discovering this old classmate brought this fact to my attention.

Our judgments when we are mature are far more informed and far better than when we were young. Consequently, it is a good exercise to meet with people who were witnesses to our earlier lives and review the ancient (and perhaps altered) perceptions we formed so long ago.

Interacting with this old classmate reminded me that there were forces working on my perceptions at that time that made them less than accurate, a very good thing to realize, after all is said and done.