Reverse-engineering the Prophet

Certain details of Mohammed's life were considered too embarrassing for Muslims to be included in his official hagiography. This article asks the question: what could they possibly be, given that the book unabashedly credits him with almost every possible crime and character flaw? It comes up with a surprising and very plausible answer.

 Richard Dawkins famously described the God of the Old Testament as the “most unpleasant character in all fiction”. Among the Divine character flaws, Dawkins lists “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. In God’s defence, it should be noted that He wasn’t all these things all of the time. His character depends on which of the Old Testament’s many authors we are looking at: His so-called prophets. It is commonly assumed by atheists that belief in a single God draws on early childhood imprints of an all-powerful father figure. Yet the prophets of monotheism, God’s designers, are a special case, in that many of them - Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, to start with - did not know their real fathers. As well as being an emotional deprivation for the growing child, in tribal societies this was also a source of shame and opprobrium from his peers. Furthermore, his guardians may not have treated him with the tenderness they would give their own sons. The budding prophet’s defence strategy in this powerless situation must therefore consist of inventing an invisible father figure to protect him from the slights of others, and invert the feeling of shame into one of superiority. In addition, he needs to defend himself against the abusiveness or cruelty of the stepfather by deflecting it towards others (other tribes, sinners, or unbelievers). Finally, to be effective, the imaginary being must outrank his real earthly guardians, and by extension, all authority. His childlike awe of that stepfather’s total power over him is projected into the property of omnipotence accorded to the divinity. In this light, Jesus’s claim to be the son of God makes perfect sense to a psychoanalyst, although “step-son” may be nearer the mark. God the stepfather In this struggle to create and forge belief in an invisible protector and ally to fortify the stunted self, the quality of goodness simply does not enter the equation. In fact the stepfather’s mean side becomes magnified and turned into the weapons of the prophet’s vengeance on the world. In this simplified picture I use the figure of the stepfather to stand for the sum of the deprived child’s early experience of adult and peer power. While we cannot necessarily identify the individual wielders of that power, it should be theoretically possible to “reverse-engineer” books of prophecy and make novelistic surmises about a prophet’s early life. Naturally, in most cases, the lack of independent corroboration would render this work unverifiable and liable to be dismissed as fanciful musing. But one outstanding exception would be the prophet Mohammed, whose bowdlerised biography, variously known as Siraat-rasuul-allah and As-siraat al- nabawiyya, or here simply as the Sirah, offers tantalising glimpses of his early life. In addition, many of the rants in the Koran itself sound like verbatim quotes from a raging parent figure. As for Mohammed’s vision of God, we shall have to assume it is a composite of various parental figures, as he never knew his own father and had several guardians in quick succession at a very formative stage in his development. His Allah is certainly just as unpleasant as the God of the Old Testament, if not more so, and it is not easy to decide which of those unpleasant traits were directly borrowed from the Hebrew Scriptures and which are products of Mohammed’s own fancy. One example of the Divine capriciousness is a theme which runs through the Koran of the Hell fire which awaits the unbelievers. But who are these unbelievers, and why do they not believe? They are the ones whom Allah has not rightly guided and “Allah guides whom He pleases to the right path.” (That quote comes from Koran 2.213, but recurs in various forms throughout the book). So in fact it is Allah’s fault that they do not believe in the first place, and yet one of the main themes of the book concerns the “painful punishments” that await them. Did He create unbelievers just for the fun of torturing them? He certainly seems to savour their pain, adding some gothic details: 22:19 “… for them will be cut out a garment of Fire: over their heads will be poured out boiling water” 23:104 “… The Fire will burn their faces, and therein they will grin, with displaced lips” 44:45 “Like molten brass; it will boil in their insides,” 4:56 “Those who reject our Signs, We shall soon cast into the Fire: as often as their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for fresh skins, that they may taste the penalty: for Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.” If we were in any doubt about Allah’s perverse nastiness, there is the Hadith about Allah telling Adam that of every 1000 souls, 999 were due for Hell fire (Bukhari 6:60:265). So the first conclusion we would draw from looking at this portrait of a vicious parent figure is that its author, if it was indeed Mohammed, was subject to some child-rearing practices which we tend to regard these days as outmoded, and which are certainly discouraged by the social services in most advanced countries. Some of the specific traits peculiar to his case include: - extreme fear of mockery or criticism, to the point that laughing at anything at all could be construed as an insult; - aversion to nakedness (gymnophobia) - apart from wanting all women covered up, he even banned his male followers from urinating in a standing position, which would involve raising their robes; - an obsession with female genitalia with some forty references to gardens under which (rather than “through which”) waters flow; - concern for the welfare of orphans, in particular the protection of their inheritance rights; - the obligation to submit, without protest or cries, with bending over as a sign of submission; - the ever-present threat of graphically described sadistic punishments, with nowhere to hide either one’s inmost thoughts or one’s physical self; - sedulous braggadocio, vaunting of power and superiority with hyperbolic imagery. Childhood abuse Mohammed’s ninth-century hagiographer Ibn Hisham edited his work from earlier sources, removing the parts of Mohammed's life story which could be “embarrassing to Muslims”. This tradition has naturally given rise to much surmise about what could possibly be more embarrassing to Muslims than the fact that their leader was a lying paedophile and incorrigible philanderer and rapist, a treacherous warlord and physical coward, a corrupt thief and robber, a mass-murderer, a slaver and a heartless sadist, who may have been cuckolded by Aisha in revenge for his swiving the glamorous Jewish captive Juwayriyah. That Mohammed is a walking compendium of character flaws is copiously illustrated by the stories which Ibn Hisham thought fit to include, so what on earth could he have felt obliged to suppress? The clue came to me after reading countless stories of rape victims being stoned to death while their attackers walked free in Shari‘ah hellholes such as Somalia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, (just try Googling “rape victim stoned”). Muslims who have not been corrupted by Western morals seem quite sanguine about raping, as has recently been shown in countless reports from the front lines of the so-called Arab Spring. “Rape jihad” against non-Muslims occurs in all countries where Muslims and Kuffar live together, from Sweden to Sudan, and serves as much as a tool of humiliation as a sexual outlet. The only thing Muslims would find embarrassing is the shame of being a victim. Upending the widely held but quite unsupported belief that paedophilia is a universal taboo, Lloyd deMause, founder of the Institute and Journal of Psychohistory, in his article The Universality of Incest outlines all sorts of institutionalised pederasty, including the widespread practice of farming out one’s children to others for the purpose, sometimes in the context of a mutual exchange. It may seem unbelievable to today’s loving parents that people could even dream of treating children in this way, so a brief sketch of deMause’s hypothesis might be helpful here. His researches into all sorts of offbeat sources have shown that childhood in antiquity was very different from what it is today. Only very recently, and only in more enlightened family lines, has it evolved from a nightmare of violence, neglect and sexual abuse to something approaching child- friendly. Lloyd deMause describes six stages in this evolution, ranging from the Infanticidal Mode (Antiquity to Fourth Century AD.) and the Abandoning Mode (Fourth to Thirteenth Century A.D.) to the Intrusive Mode (Eighteenth Century) and today’s socializing and empathic modes practised in the better kindergartens. Obviously many families are behind their times; but a few lead the way forward. Sixth century Arabia was probably behind the times according to the deMause chronology with female infanticide still rampant. In that phase of child-rearing history, it was obviously not the little dead children who made history, but their traumatised siblings. And in the grown-up world, male to female population ratios of anything up to 160:100 were an incitement to conflict over females, especially in a polygamous context. As for boys, it was a fairly common practice among city-folk to hand them over to wet-nurses from birth, and the Sirah mentions a fair where Bedouin women would tout their services to mothers in exchange for cash. Mohammed’s mother Amina was cash-strapped, and the woman who took Mohammed in after some hesitation, could well have been motivated by the boy’s good looks and the possibility of making money through the all too common practice of renting little boys out for pederasty. Parents at the time could not have been totally unaware of this and presumably turned a blind eye. One of the reservations of fathers who sold an unwanted daughter into a life of sex slavery concerned not the sufferings of the child, but the eventuality that one might one day find oneself in bed with her without realising it. This line of reasoning is perfectly normal where morality is hedged with taboos rather than founded on ethical principles of do-as-you-would–be-done- by. At any rate something traumatic did happen to Mohammed while in the care of that Bedouin woman. It is recounted twice, the first time by Halima, the wet-nurse: It was not longer than a month after our return that his milk-brother came running to me and his father, saying, “That Qurayshi brother of mine, two men dressed in white garments have taken hold of him and have thrown him on the ground. They ripped open his belly, and are squeezing him.” I and his foster-father hastened out and found him standing apparently unharmed but with his countenance quite altered. We questioned him, and he said, “Two men dressed in white garments came to me, who threw me down, opened my abdomen and searched in it for I know not what.” We returned with him to our tent, and his foster-father said to me, “O Halima! I fear something has happened to the boy. Carry him to his family ere the injury becomes apparent!” … and the second time in more hallucinatory language – and with more befitting tableware – by Mohammed: Whilst I and my milk brother were pasturing some animals in the rear of our houses, two men came to us dressed in white garments and bearing a golden platter full of snow. They took hold of me, opened my belly, extracted my heart, split it open and took out of it a black lump of blood which they threw away. Then they washed my heart and belly with snow, until they had purified them. Then one of them said to his companion, “Weigh him against ten of his nation.” And he weighed me with them, but I proved heavier than they. Then he said, “Weigh him against one hundred of his nation.” And he weighed me with them, but I proved heavier than they. Then he said, “Weigh him with one thousand of his nation.” And he weighed me with them, but I proved heavier than they. After that he said, “Leave him; for if you were to weigh him against his whole nation, he would outweigh it.” Later, the apostle of Allah was in the habit of saying that there was not a prophet who had not pastured sheep. When they asked, “You too, O messenger of God?” he answered, “Me too!” Whatever we are to make of this story hinges partly on the exact meaning of ةقلع (‘alaqah – translated as “lump”, but normally meaning “leech”). It could be an echo of the alukah of Proverbs 30:15, one of the most enigmatic verses of the Bible: The horseleech hath two daughters, crying Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things that never say “enough”. (Proverbs 30:15). The two daughters, the Womb and the Grave, suggest that the horseleech is identified with Ishtar, the goddess of Love and Death 1 , or Al-Laat in the pre-Islamic Arab pantheon. Some commentators identify it with a night-demon. Not to be missed either is the echo of the two men in shining garments who stood by the Holy Sepulchre after Jesus’s resurrection (Luke 24:3) and reappeared as he rose into heaven: They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them (Acts 1:10). They are also reborn as a cinematic cliché: the two men in white coats who come to cart overwrought characters to the lunatic asylum 2 . In fact the whole passage reads like a heavily embroidered screen memory borrowed from earlier scriptural sources, with the only clue to what really happened being the reaction of the foster parents, anxious to cover up the injury to the boy. Which they clearly succeeded in doing with this fable. 1 in The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953) Robert Graves and Joshua Podro, p.209 2 I have restored some of the story teller’s repetitive style to the translation of the passage. In his psychobiography of the Prophet, Understanding Muhammad, Ali Sina interprets this as the onset of Mohammed’s temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a rare disorder which in his diagnosis was at the root of all of Mohammed’s quasi-religious experiences. We certainly need some rare disorder to explain Mohammed’s extraordinary career, something empowering. The pattern of run-of-the-mill childhood abuse can explain his lacklustre adolescence, his later embitterment and violent paranoia that he presumably shared in similar measure with his followers. But he certainly had exalted moments of great inspiration, beautiful in their confusion, even though as we see in the above passage with the gold platter and the weighing machine, it all rather went to his head. In today's climate of anathematizing of paedophilia, it is hard to imagine a culture in which it was not only rampant but actually preferred to such adult pursuits as homosexuality. Lloyd deMause quotes from Louis M. Epstein: Even the Jews, who tried to stamp out adult homosexuality with severe punishments, were more lenient in the case of young boys. Despite Moses's injunction against corrupting children, the penalty for sodomy with children over 9 years of age was death by stoning, but copulation with younger children was not considered a sexual act, and was punishable only by a whipping, “as a matter of public discipline.” 3 In today’s Iran, the devout paedophile may indulge his tastes with the blessing of the Ayatollah Khomeini no less: A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate. If he penetrates and the child is harmed then he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life. This girl, however would not count as one of his four permanent wives. The man will not be eligible to marry the girl's sister 4 . Paedophilia is, as we know, transmitted from generation to generation; though while most abused do not become abusers, most abusers were once abused. Its recognition as a crime against the child is relatively recent, and is not even universal today. In the United States, New York became the first state to institute child protection laws (1875) that made abuse against children a crime, and other states soon followed with similar laws. In 1974 the U.S. Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which encouraged remaining states to pass child protection laws and created the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. Amazingly, under Shari‘ah law, sex is allowed with children as young as babies on condition the child's orifices are not harmed. Even that stricture probably did not apply to orphans or children outside one's own tribe in sixth century Arabia. But to a child, the trauma is the same regardless of whether it has society's approval or the blessing of clerics – who are as often as not the perpetrators. The Goat Boy When he was six, Mohammed was returned to his mother. She died a year later and the boy was given over to his grandfather, ‘Abdu’l Muṭṭalib. The Sirah has this curious passage, which bears all the signs of having been bowdlerized and possibly mistranslated: The Apostle, still a little boy, used to come and sit on [the bed] and his uncles would drive him away. When ‘Abdu’l Muṭṭalib saw this he said: “Let my son alone, for by Allah he has a 3 Louis M. Epstein. Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism (New York, 1948), p.136 4 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Tahrir-ol-vasyleh, Fourth Edition. Darol Elm, Qom great future.” Then he would make him sit beside him on his bed and would stroke his back with his hand. It used to please him to see what he did 5 . The narrative thread has been broken, and the odd detail of the stroking of the boy’s back, with his hand no less, and then liking what he saw is suspicious. Why describe such a humdrum act so graphically, or at all? Unless, of course, it wasn’t the boy’s back that he stroked – the words for penis (zubr) and back (ẓuhr) being easy to confuse in the mind of a devout editor 6 . Furthermore, in the above extract, Guillaume has innocently translated the phrase wa huwa ghulaam jafar (رفج ملغ وهو) as “still a little boy”. While bowing to his expertise as a great Arabist, it should be pointed out that ghulaam is cognate with ghalama “to be in rut”, and can be translated as adolescent or lusty lad. But even more perplexing to several Arab scholars whom I asked, was the choice of the qualifier jafar. The only online explanation I could find refers to a kid when it has just been weaned from the mother goat. Whether the universal association of goats with the Devil and rampant sexuality stems from their precocious sexual maturity 7 , or from the resemblance of their horns to a small erect penis, or all of the above, is immaterial; the significance of “goat boy” is too obvious to ignore. The grandfather’s protestation “Let my son alone, for by Allah he has a great future” otherwise makes no sense in the context 8 – unless he was making a joke about how well hung the boy was for a seven-year-old, and showing off his (presumably erect) member to the assembled relatives. This is the kind of unintended humiliation the memory of which can make a young lad cringe for life and be hypersensitive to mockery. No-one should find these suppositions shocking. The point needs to be made that in sixth-century Arabia such salacious humour and innocent child-baiting was totally normal. But by the time all these events were recorded in writing Arab society had undergone a sea change from the uninhibited bawdiness of Mohammed’s early years to the tight control of the early Abbasids, who had to tailor Islam to a much wider audience of different cultures spread over a far-flung empire. A young dynamic cult had been made respectable with layers of formalised reverence, so that any reference to the Prophet by name or even as “him” had to be followed by the little invocation “ṣalaatullaahu ‘alayhi wa sallam” (God’s prayers and peace be upon him) thankfully shortened these days to (pbuh) or (saws). Similar (but shorter) prayers follow the mention of any of his wives, companions or descendents. Mention of the Koran without some epithet such as “noble”, “holy” etc., came to be deemed disrespectful as the dead hand of orthodoxy descended. And that spelled the eclipse of a whole tradition of ribald humour and poetry with the elaborate metaphors and double-entendre at which Arabs excel and which the Arabic language encourages, and whose offshoots can nevertheless still be found in Algerian sh‘abi songs 9 . In a way, we owe this change to Mohammed's inability to take a joke. The charge of paedophilia has become one of the favourite jibes directed at Mohammed by critics of Islam. We are told that Mohammed asked his friend Abu Bakr for the hand of his 4½ year-old daughter Aisha. According to the account, the ever loyal Abu Bakr was becomingly reluctant at first, 5 Sirat Rasul Allah p.73 6 Albeit elsewhere in the Sirah the diminutive term for penis, zubayba, is preferred. 7 Male goats will start to show secondary sex traits around 3 to 4 months of age provided they are developing properly and have adequate nutrition. The traits of mounting other goats and appearance differences start to show around this time and around the time of puberty. Most goats will demonstrate mounting and erections more during the normal rutting season that starts after the summer equinox and day length begins to shorten. Younger goats generally will display these traits more than older ones during this time. 8 “A great future” is a very free translation of sha’nan, which could just as easily be rendered as “important matter” or even “luck, destiny”. The grandfather’s elegant choice of words is thus lost in translation. 9 Rachid Aous, Les Grands Maîtres Algériens du Cha‘bi et du Hawzi. Editions El Ouns, Paris 1996 but allowed Mohammed to marry her when she reached six. On reaching nine, the child had to put away her dolls when her husband came to consummate the marriage, as they came under the Islamic prohibition against representations of the human form. And yet all this criticism may be misplaced. The story shows signs of having been manipulated, most likely in order to whitewash Abu Bakr, who had pimped his daughter in order to secure the succession to the command of the Muslim army, already a force in the land. So it may be unwise to draw too many conclusions from this much quoted episode of the Sirah. Child marriages were often used in tribal societies to cement treaties, (as they still are in Afghanistan to plaster over feuds,) and the practice was not confined to them. In 1396 Richard II of England married the six-year-old Isabelle of France for very similar reasons, though we are not told what became of her hymen. Another story points to Mohammed’s dislike of being naked. When carrying stones with his friends before his revelations began, he was the only one to keep his clothes on; while the others used their robes to hold the stones. In another hadith he orders his followers to urinate in a squatting position, rather than lifting their robes and displaying their members. His unfashionable modesty was glossed as piety, but again it could be related to his childhood abuse. Believe or die But to me, the ultimate clue to this childhood abuse is to be found in one of the central elements of his prophetical message, the idea of total submission and the name of his religion, Islam. The child translates the powerlessness of the catamite, – being told to bend over and be quiet – into a form of worship: [68:42] The Day the shin will be uncovered and they are invited to prostration but the disbelievers will not be able. [68:43] Their eyes humbled, humiliation will cover them. And they used to be invited to prostration while they were sound… [68:48] Then be patient for the decision of your Lord, [O Muhammad], and be not like the companion of the fish when he called out while he was distressed. [33:36] And it behoves not a believing man and a believing woman that they should have any choice in their matter when Allah and His Apostle have decided a matter; and whoever disobeys Allah and His Apostle, he surely strays off a manifest straying. Finally, there is Surah 111, the five-line curse of the wicked Uncle Abu Lahab, the “Father of the Flame”, so nicknamed for his fiery temper. Ostensibly this is a chapter sent down in revenge for Abu Lahab’s very astute diagnosis of Islam's weak point – the promise of posthumous and therefore unverifiable reward. But the vehemence of the language and the inclusion of Abu Lahab’s wife, seem out of proportion to the crime. [111:1] Perdition overtake both hands of Abu Lahab, and he will perish. [111:2] His wealth and what he earns will not avail him. [111:3] He shall soon burn in fire that flames, [111:4] And his tale-bearing wife, [111:5] Upon her neck a halter of strongly twisted rope. Curses were no laughing matter at the time, and poets were a feared lot. Mohammed himself sent hitmen after one Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf for having composed amatory verses about the Muslim women, and another was dispatched to kill a satirical poetess, Asmaa bint Marwan while she suckled her babe 10 . The inclusion of such a curse as a chapter in the Holy Koran gives it the strongest possible weight. Which all brings us back to his grandfather's bed in the shadow of the Ka‘aba, and whatever did, or did not happen there. If all this were just a personal issue it would have been lost in the sands of time. But there was one gaping weakness in Mohammed’s invocation of his invisible champion Allah to rebuild what T. E. Lawrence might have dubbed “the citadel of his integrity”. As pithily put by Delos McCown “The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.” An energetic campaign was needed to lend reality to the creation. The novelist Sebastian Faulks has summed up the basic tenet of the Koran thus: “It says ‘the Jews and the Christians were along the right tracks, but actually, they were wrong and I’m right, and if you don’t believe me, tough – you’ll burn for ever.’ That’s basically the message of the book.” To counter the objection that Allah is invisible, the book builds its argument by turning all observable phenomena into “signs” (ayaat) of his existence. People who cannot see these are therefore blind – an insult to boot. It was this need to exact belief in Allah from others, if necessary at the point of a sword, which gave birth to a religion which in many ways perpetuates Mohammed’s original deprived childhood down through generations of devout Muslims. Fathers (and imams) are authorised to sexually abuse their children and beat them to make them pray, and their wives if they fail in their “duties”. Allah is a tailor-made alter ego for a deeply traumatized child, tortured by shame as well as guilt. The business of praising this entity, who if he were he really omnipotent and omniscient obviously wouldn’t need any praise, can thus be interpreted as a process of shoring up one’s own confidence in his existence and boosting his power to intervene. Praising him aloud can also strike fear into the enemy – or enemy substitute. Plainly, the chief threat to such a child comes from those who would attack his belief, and thereby undermine his psychic defences. Seen in this light, the Koran’s main message is the tirade of a fragile and stunted mind, full of the grandiosity so typical of the disorder. The boy invents a divine champion to issue a challenge to his persecutors. It turns out he is not the only one with a scarred mental makeup, and thus under the banner of his champion he acquires followers. The resulting mess then goes viral. 10 Before this event, according to the Sira (p. 676), “those who were Muslims concealed the fact.” That it should take such a heinous crime to bring Islam out of the closet merits a moment’s reflection. Brazen atrocities have often heralded the emergence from the shadows of new hate ideologies.

Molecular Meetic

I can recognize my wife's voice at the other end of a busy fruit market, and she doesn't even have to shout that loud. If that fails, I can phone her on her mobile. Now if you don't have a wife, you can try Meetic. Meetic is a way to find your match - hopefully your exact fit - over the heads of not just a crowd, but over oceans, mountain ranges and through the haze and concrete of uncounted housing estates. 

But how do biological molecules, who are finding their matches and mating at speeds measured in kilohertz, find each other? We are told, - without any proof at all - it's random Brownian motion in the aqueous medium, helped along by body temperature. A nucleotide is caught by the right ribosome just in time to be added to a lengthening chain of DNA. That's so neat: was it just lined up and waiting? Or does it have to jostle past all the other stuff suspended in the bio soup, like that lady waving a bunch of bananas trying to get to where she can pay for them?

This question should be one of the biggest conundrums in science, and I'll tell you why in a second.    What algorithms would be needed to quantify the forces attracting two complementary 3D configurations through the molecular jostle? Can an enzyme's attraction to its substrate be simply calculated by totalling energy values for the covalent bonds, hydrogen bonds, van der Waals forces, electrostatic forces of the final union and dividing that by the square of the distance? How do we factor in the jostle? Or does that lady zip through the crowd like Cat Woman?

Or can molecules sniff each other out over distances, and regardless of relative orientation?

OK, I'm on to sniffing, and before you think of that as just an olfactory metaphor, you need to ask yourself, what do you know about the sense of smell?

Among the questions science cannot answer, the elephant in the room is consciousness. I don't mean the waking/sleeping kind, but the subjective experience of the mind. And science's inability to explain consciousness is not due to a lack of progress, but to its reductive experimental method. While scientists put off answering the question of consciousness sine die, perhaps in the vague hope that some new discovery will pop up, Tantrik yogis have been studying it for centuries, using a completely different method. Namely by training their consciousness and expanding its awareness. Like a musical instrument: if you want to know more about it, start practicing. Their answer - that everything is all part of a single consciousness - sounds flip, and is easy to dismiss as just another example of religion being a failed science. The parallels between the Shiva/Shakti dance and the wave/particle ambiguity are just coincidence, and what do those yogis know about real things?   

But here's the thing. How could quantum biophysicists study the possibility of Molecular Meetic? If a way can be found to calculate expected values of molecular pairing rates in biosynthetic and enzymatic reactions using the random Brownian motion model, and compare these with actual values, they might be forced to revisit Rupert Sheldrake's question: how do we know a stone has no consciousness? 

I'll leave that with the specialists,  but now I'm off to crack open that bottle of Connemara single malt that's been sending me its complex molecular signals through the kitchen wall as I write.

 

Treat the symptoms and the cause will go away.

Don't you ever get ticked off by pundits assuming that there are "underlying" or "fundamental" causes for everything? Why do causes have to come from underneath? What if they press down from above?

This unquestioned thought habit is probably rooted (did I say rooted?) in Aristotle or some other philosopher's work, and carried on through the likes of Thomas Aquinas and the fathers of the Church. 

With the advance of science it has taken on new guise with the discovery of the microscopic agents of disease, magnetic fields, cosmic rays and chemical reactions. 

So is a cause underlying because it's too small to be seen? Does it have to be fundamental because you need to probe "deeply" to find it? Or maybe we think it's fundamental because it allows us to frame it as a manifestation of some basic physical "law". 

Opponents of allopathic medicine will tell you that cold medicines should be avoided because they only treat the symptoms, like runny nose and coughing etc., and not the "cause". They ignore the obvious fact that stimulating the production of mucus is the virus's way of creating a warm, moist and nutritious environment for itself, inaccessible to the antibodies ferried by the blood. 

So a pill that helps dry up the mucus makes life harder for the virus. 

Remember when New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had the idea of Zero Tolerance for broken windows as a way of curbing much more serious violent crime? Opinions are divided on whether that was effective, and Malcolm Gladwell preferred the explanation that Roe vs Wade put less unwanted teenagers on the streets fifteen years on.

But you can see where I'm going. 

The hierarchical view of causality has been an unquestioned assumption which underlies (!) so much of our thinking that it generally passes quite unnoticed. It also underlies (!) the illusion of power.

I guess I should come back to that, when I've had more time to think about it.

The British Mirage

The British economy is largely a mirage. If you look too close it will disappear. Behind every loan there is another loan. A three-month rent or mortgage strike by half of Britain's poor would bring down all the banks and almost everything else with it. 

Everything else? What else is left after the big Tory divvy-up? 

When there is more money to be made by ripping out machines and voting yourself a bonus than by putting men to work; and when that money is invested either in luxury flats or commercial real estate rack-rented to fashion brand outlets and all of it leveraged to the rafters you are heading for a nation not of shopkeepers but one divided between loan-strapped landlords looking for renters and the homeless unemployed who can't afford to rent. 

Any government, left or right, will have to come to the rescue of the former by coming to the rescue of the latter, in order to rescue the banks who are hostages to the former. 

Hope that makes sense. 

Because it clearly doesn't. 

The former will be doubly gratified because with the rent money received they can lend to the government at interest (to help pay their own loans) so the govt can afford the social programs which include helping the poor with the rent. 

This hollowing out of the economy can only accelerate with AI and robotics replacing productive labour. 

Two of my friends here in France, whose job and only skill is sexing newly hatched chicks, have been put on notice that their job can now be done by a machine. It might even be an app. 

Some investor made a bomb on that and is spending it in a tropical paradise. 

I won't try to paint Corbyn as a saviour because I think the time for saving England has passed, but if he can walk back some of the damage done to England by Reaganomics and Thatcherism, then hats off to the man. 

Milton Friedman, the Iron Lady's guru, was also adviser to Augusto Pinochet - lest we forget.

Crawfishing back to a Golden Age: the Yellow Vests

I just came across this word crawfishing in Norman Mailer's 1948 vivisecton of war, "The Naked and the Dead". I suppose it relates to the crawfish's mode of locomotion: on its belly, and tail first. In the Army of course, this can sometimes be the wisest thing to do; or it can be a dereliction of duty. The decision is left to the superior officer. Nevertheless, the idea of crawfishing retains a pejorative nuance that leans towards the second interpretation.

In the past week, here in France we have all received invitations to the great debate about what's wrong with La République. Typically, meetings are held in various community and town halls, where the rules for debate are explained by a chairman, and the proceedings conducted by young ladies called animatrices. One lady rules the floor, while the other attempts to condense the inputs with a felt-tip on a whiteboard. Between them, they filter out the anger and the good ideas together.

Each citizen has three cards to use for the right to stand up and speak. The discussions are kept within the confines of a single question, namely "What area of your personal experience makes you share the anger of the Yellow Vests?" Four or five sub-topics are then dealt with one by one. The animatrices are quick to discipline anyone straying outside his or her own personal experience. No politics, please!

At the end of the discussion, we are each given a copy of Emmanuel Macron's verbose letter to the French nation. Ita sugary sentiments coat a layer cake of incomprehension and obfuscation.

As somebody revently observed about the US, if an ancient Greek were to find himself in present day America, he would see an oligarchy, not a democracy. The same can be said today for any number of countries, beginning with the UK and increasingly, France. Indicative of this trend is what has happened to public services in the last 35 years.

When I was here in 1986, a Breton could traverse France in his lorry and with a fistful of francs, purchase a field whereon to park his lorry, call it home, and demand a telephone line from the state-owned PTT. Their pledge was then to connect anyone within 48 hours. And they did. What this cost in staffing levels or logistics did not enter into the equation. The quality of a public service was judged on its, er, quality. The cost to the consumer was the same to all, regardless of supply side cost.

In addition to his telephone line, he was automatically entrusted with France's very own precursor of the internet, a Minitel terminal. Along with French Railways, the envy of the world.

But the envy of the world came at a price. The PTT, (Post, Telegraphs and Telephones), along with all the other public services, utilities, transport, health, education, pensions, were manned by as many workers as it took to provide a consistent level of service across the country, all hired on ironclad lifetime contracts and backed by strong unions.

This was way back then, in 1986, when the top tax rate was, I believe, 70%. So there were obviously some less public-spirited bods who may have thought the envy of the world came at too high a price.
Your average Frenchman, though, was justifiably proud of his country's progress, and the services provided by his republic for its citizens. He felt in some sense a participant, if not a shareholder in the public enterprise. Railworkers, teachers and nurses were the salt of this republic's earth.

Fast forwarding to the present, my neighbour did up a house in the village and applied for a telephone line. The nearest point of connection was less than a meter away. A meter, not a kilometer. Over two months later, technicians arrived and he has his line. They combine other jobs in the vicinity to make it worthwhile coming the extra mile.

Services that used to be judged purely on excellence, are now evaluated for ROI. Village post offices are closing down while the cost of a stamp soars, hospitals are being regrouped, even as ambulance services to get to them are being slashed.

In the meantime, following EU directives on competition and mirroring Britain's lead in shedding its public sector, French public services have been privatised, split up, renamed and repackaged in a bewildering succession of redesigned logos. What used to belong to the citizen now belongs to private shareholders. As before, you buy your electricity from the same old, mainly nuclear-powered, national grid, but you get to choose among four different companies to bill you. Shareholders of these companies are onto a good risk-free number, since retired or failing power stations will be sold off for a nominal euro to a cleanup company funded by the taxpayer.

Taxes for the rich now top out at 40%, and new loopholes abound, so they're happy.

I haven't been to enough of these debates to give you a comprehensive list of everything that has gone downhill since 1986, even if that were interesting. Yellow Vest rage has not yet rallied around a single theme or direction.

But I do get an overall impression that if the country could crawfish back to 1986, if the republic could be returned to its citizens, if the small shops and restaurants annihilated by social charges could be brought back, if the default speed limit were 100 again, the Yellow Vests would have done their job. Unfortunately, between EU directives and the monetary straitjacket of the Euro, added to the vested interests of those now in power, that ain't gonna happen. To look back and want to undo the mistakes of the past thirty years might seem quite sensible. But you would get branded a supporter of the extremist left.

Unfair Competition

Any readers who watched the live transmissions of the recent 15th International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poznań, Poland may have been surprised, if not shocked, when 17 year-old prodigy Mone Hattori, from Japan, was eliminated after the second of four rounds.

Apart from mature and deeply felt renderings of works by Beethoven and Grieg as well as the obligatory Polish composers she had delivered a flawless performance of one the the most pyrotechnical pieces ever written for violin, the H. W. Ernst Variations on The Last Rose of Summer. You can see her here.

When she failed to appear in the third round, the shared outrage was amply voiced by viewers in the chat box that accompanied the live transmissions. The wrongness of the decision was later confirmed by the anti-climactic final round with the survivors turning in limp versions of the obligatory concertos to the bemusement of the audience. With the notable exception that is, of the eventual first prize winner, the very deserving Veriko Tchumburidze from Georgia.

So what went wrong? Hers was not an isolated case. The dismissal of another competitor, Celina Kotz, was incomprehensible to many.

Jury Chairman Maxim Vengerov explained the scoring system in a video for Facebook Violin Channel page. In an attempt to ensure impartiality of the jury members, they were not allowed to vote for their own pupils or for a player they had taught in the last 5 years. It goes without saying that teachers are fond and proud of their best pupils and want them to do well.

However, they were allowed to vote to eliminate a player, in a "yes/no" system apparently inspired by reality TV shows. And this could be where the system failed.

Imagine, if you will, a jury selected from a wide spread of countries each one jealously rooting for their own country or their favourite pupil, with no direct way of positively influencing the outcome of the competition. The only button you can press is the dismissal button. Your only ploy left is to try to see off the competition. And with only ten members it only need two or three to vote down the most obvious danger in the shape of a likely hands-down winner, for the wicked deed to be done.

Further evidence of the way this system can skew results, equally loudly decried by the kommentariat, was the survival to the finals of Vengerov's own pupil, Maria Włoszczowska. Struggling out of her depth through the two concerti, her cheeks visibly burning with embarrassment, her presence could only be explained by the reluctance of the jurors to vote "no" to the chairman's protégée.

Every year, international music competitions and all the top music colleges have to deal with applications from a constant stream of superbly turned out performers from Japan, Korea and China. To most Europeans, putting in five hours a day of violin practice from age three seems somehow inhuman, and a borderline infringement of children's rights. Something it would be wrong to expect a European child to undergo.

Turning out a world-class soloist also represents a sizable capital investment, in teaching, instruments and fancy dresses. And Asian parents are willing to make big sacrifices to pay the price to see their prince or princess on the stage. Are there no limits to how far they will go?

All this give European judges and players a feeling of unfair advantage, and for the more nationalistic among them, a sense of cute overload from an Asian female talent invasion. This shared feeling among the judges means that the hurdles are much higher for Asian musicians.

Perhaps next time, Simon Cowell should be invited to choose the jury. He would never allow such travesties.

As Bela Bartok famously noted "Competitions are for horses, not artists." At least horse races leave little room for doubt about the winner.

You Read It Here First!

For a long time now, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been exporting its barbarous hubris worldwide in a way that would suggest it is actually begging for a showdown. For some folks its successful campaign to head the UN Human Rights Council was a slap in the world's face. And kicking off 2016 by beheading 47 Shia believers in one day further underlined its contempt for the world's bleeding hearts.

Along with tolerating Turkey's abuse of the NATO umbrella, coddling the Saudis significantly weakens the USA's moral standing and claim to act as the world's policeman. And there is no shortage of volunteers to take over this role, or of nations who would love to take the Kingdom down a notch, if not to give it a good drubbing.

Plot spoiler alert!

My Extreme Nemesis scenario boils down to turning the Hijaz with its twin omphaloi of Mecca and Medina (formerly Yathrib) into an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. Some of the more spirited online comments on news items exposing Saudi backwardness even tout the idea of turning the whole Kingdom into molten glass, though clearly creating such a large window onto the Earth's glowing core would be over the top and over budget.

Of the five pillars of Islam, the Hajj pilgrimage is the only one directly operable manu militari. Whether the cult could survive on the remaining four pillars hinges in part on how much its finances depend on revenues from the pilgrimage business.

The simplest mechanism would obviously be cruise missiles fired from a submarine in the Red Sea. There is an Islamic prophecy I read somewhere that the Qureishi clan's long-running b'n'b business would be terminated from the direction of Ethiopia, just across across the water. More specific is a Russian YouTube video, which I can no longer find, that simulates a two-pronged sea-borne missile attack without being specific about the target. It could be the effect of the poor animation, but the sub commander was walking in a funny way.

For the moment a nuclear scenario may seem farfetched, but a few recent developments seem to be working towards clearing the way to making it less inconceivable.

My first alert that things could be moving in this direction came when, after years of stonewalling the USA, Iran accepted the American nuclear deal, apparently wholeheartedly and in a verifiable manner, following just one week of Russian diplomacy. I asked myself, what could Russia have possibly offered Iran in exchange for abandoning its home-grown nuclear program? And in what way are Russia's plans advanced by such an initiative?

And of course, what would those plans be?

Then there are the recent articles about Russia replacing its submarine fleet, and test-firing its latest Kalibr missiles in the Arctic. The missiles travel at Mach 5, far too fast to be intercepted by the expensive air defences that the Saudis have acquired from America.

And now this! Holy War declared by the Patriarch of the Holy Russian Church!

I give it two years.

Of course, as my wife smugly pointed out, I have been wrong before. As when I predicted that the Saudis would invade Syria on February 29th (to avoid having to deal with anniversary riots every year) after their Northern Thunder exercise involving 350,000 troops. Fortunately they chickened out, and I don't mind being wrong.

So tell me I'm wrong! Use the comments box below. And if I'm right, remember where you saw it first!