20. The Concept of the Apocalypse

February 13, 2021

INTRODUCTION:  An old-testament writing genre that grew in response to the Babylonian captivity to provide hope to the Chosen People who had been kidnapped to Babylon, then invaded by the Greeks and then the Romans.

FIVE HORSEMEN:

1. Serial Pandemics:  COVID and Ebola
2. Donald J. Trump:  end of Liberalism, rise of Fascism
3. Nuclear Annihilation
4. Devaluation of Humanity
5. Global Warming

NEWS ABOUT PH&F:   1600 chocolate bars sold,  African ChocoFudgeBar, African Truffles

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Welcome to Tom's 20th Podcast, a modern version of the apocalypse. That music was the first half of Johannes Brahm's Ballad in G minor, composed in 1893, only four years before his death. Today's podcast is about the concept of apocalypse, a genre of writing that was popular from the fifth century BCE to approximately the third century CE. Apocalypses had a societal function. They provided a spiritual and emotional relief from ugly reality of being occupied by a foreign power that hated you, your religion, your food, your body defacements, your everything. Apocalypses usually featured God zooming across the skies on a chariot along with his heavenly host, righting all the wrongs and installing a government that treated the offended victims right. Old Testament apocalypse, of which there were many, were written in responses to the Babylonian captivity, the Greek occupation that began in the fourth century BCE, when Alexander the Great ploughed through and forced Greek language and culture on the Israelites, and then the Romans, who replaced the Greeks when General Pompey arrived with his army in 63 BCE. Whoever wrote Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, it supposedly featured a dream that masqueraded as an apocalypse. The book of Revelation was written by Saint is said to have been written by Saint John, one of Jesus' disciples. However, for him to have written it, he would have had to have lived to the ripe old age of 94, and he would have had to learn Greek at some point. And none of the disciples spoke Greek. Paul was an apostle. He did speak Greek and write Greek. But they were not literate, the disciples. The Gospels and other books of the New Testament appeared first in Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire. Secular experts on the New Testament doubt whether John is the real author. And actually, most of the 27 books of the New Testament are called pseudo epigrapha, which means not actually being written by the people to whom they have been attributed. However, they were named those names for marketing purposes. Christian apocalyptic writing was inherited from the Old Testament writing tradition, partly in response to their treatment at the hands of the Romans, who actually weren't that intolerant toward minority religions, except during the reigns of Nero and Diocletian, when they did both Nero and Diocletian persecuted the Christians. Nero during Paul's time, that was in uh in the sixties, uh, fifties and sixties, and Diocletian several hundred years later. Most of Paul's letters, considered to be apocalyptic in tone, were written during Nero's reign from 54 to 68 CE. Three hundred years after Paul, when Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the state religion, and polytheistic religions became heresy and were banned. And then a few years decades later, when Rome began its final decline, apocalyptic writing also began a decline and lost its utility as a literary genre. A revelation is a literal translation of the word apocalypse. In St. John's version, again probably not written by him, four horsemen symbolize four facets of the apocalypse. Number one horseman represented conquest, number two represented war, number three famine, and number four death. In today's podcast, I am proposing a rewrite of this age-old apocalypse. This time, to paraphrase Pogo, the enemy are us, and uh Pogo spelled us uh in caps because it represented the US. Uh and the enemy is us or are us. Um but this time the enemy is not us, it's us. It's not the United States, it's the entire planet. This time we recognize as that as post-Enlightenment human beings, God helps those that help themselves, which is supposedly attributed to, which is attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Uh, and this phrase certainly embodies where we are in our personal development. We no longer must think of ourselves as wimpy beings unable to face our own personal responsibility and subject to events and deities over which we have no control. This time, God can't start up his chariot, which by now must be solar powered and save our collective behinds. But perhaps it's still appropriate to think apocalyptically, not with a mythic bent, um, but certainly there are signs of end times, and probably um a lot of human mythology has postulated about end times because humans have long known that we uh have a lot of flaws. Uh and this time, once again, it's our own damn fault where we've gotten what the pickle we've gotten ourselves into. Uh and maybe this time of an unveiling, we can face our inner darkness and take responsibility for our failings, personal, societal, and international. Well, let's consider the first horseman of this neo apocalypse. I'm calling it serial pandemics. In 1995, Lori Garrett wrote The Coming Plague, which sat on my university office bookshelf unread until the day I moved to California and took a new job. And now the plague is upon us, I never even read the book. However, its mere presence on the shelf, staring at me for those ten years each time I opened the office door, kept this horseman uppermost in my consciousness. We all know about the 1918 Spanish flu, which actually originated in Kansas, which is an American state, at a US Army camp, and was spread throughout Europe by American soldiers. It was dubbed Spanish because only Spanish newspapers dared report its presence, whereas the European and American newspapers censored by their respective governments weren't about to write about it. Years later, President Obama took the threat of future plagues seriously in response to the Ebola outbreak, which was very scary. He established the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health, Security and Biodefense, typical government title, it takes up the entire width of the document. His successor, Trump, disbanded the office and reversed any progress toward federal preparedness. Fortunately, he was permitted only four years to wreak havoc to our democracy. At this inauguration, so Joseph Biden's inauguration, he said, There are moments in history when more is asked of us as Americans. We are in that moment now, and history will measure whether we were up to a task. Beating this pandemic will be one of the most difficult operational challenges we have ever faced as a nation. I believe we are ready. COVID or SARS-2 is probably just the beginning of Mother Nature's way of telling us that our current way of treating planet Earth is not working. We cannot continue to strip land of its life, replacing it with monocultures and concrete while destroying the very biodiversity that makes Earth a planetary paradise. How this virus originally showed up remains a mystery, although the World Health Organization has ruled out recently human invention and continues to maintain that the virus first appeared in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And it's called a zoonotic virus because it's thought to have originated in animals, particularly bats, which continue to be a common reservoir of various coronaviruses. And the destruction of tropical rainforests lead to the loss of bat habitat with the consequent spread of bats to human communities. The second horseman, I'm calling Donald J. Trump and his trusty Steve Trump publicans, both horse and horseman represent the all too common fascistic tendencies present in virtually any society. Since its founding, the USA's system of codes and laws maintain an order based on liberalism. However, from the beginning of Donald J. Trump's four-year tenure, the fascistic tendencies of the Republican Party grew ever stronger and can and are continuing after his departure. We are watching now breathlessly the disintegration of the age of liberalism. Perhaps that's overstating it, but it certainly seems that way. The original meaning of liberal uh liberalism uh is lost, um well it's not it's lost to most people. Uh and they mostly think about uh Bush Sr. when he called Michael De Cakis, the pres his uh whom he was running against for president, a card-carrying liberal. But uh liberalism actually goes back to the age of enlightenment when uh French, British, Dutch, German, Italian philosophers uh uh saw man's destiny as not so much divinely dependent, but actually a function of man's own actions and activities. These people were mostly deists, seeing God uh as the divine watchmaker who designs the watch, winds it up, and then walks away. Since the dawning of the American form of government, we have witnessed a push and pull between two countervailing tendencies, fascism and liberalism. A strong pull toward fascism and away from liberalism was, well, this country started with on liberalism, so that would be a push toward liberalism, the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Um, that's those are all reflections of liberalism. But then twenty years later, uh came the uh evangelical movement, um, and that was a push toward uh fascism, away from liberalism. Evangelicals see the world events as the actions of a God who is very much involved in human events, whereas uh liberals, uh Enlightenment thinkers, do not see God that way if God even exists. Um those who are atheists, of course, think God does not exist, and uh those who believe there might be a God who might be deists uh don't see God as having uh a hand in human events. Another strong pull toward fascism began in the South after the Civil War, when African Americans were prevented from running for office or even voting. This was the beginning of the Jim Crow period, which continues to this day. And we're seeing now in Georgia a strong reaction against it and uh Stacey Abrams being one of the great heroes. And then there was a strong push toward liberalism and away from fascism uh during the FDR administration in the 1930s, which promoted the rights of workers to retire with dignity. This during a period when there was no money. Uh this was a period, of course, the the uh Great Depression, and FDR got uh the Social Security Act passed, which was quite a push toward liberalism. Um then there was a strong pullback toward fascism during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s. And finally, uh there was a strong push again toward liberalism in the 1960s during the period of the civil rights movement, and people like Martin Luther King, JFK, and LBJ worked to promote a more equal society regardless of one's color or creed. In recent years, we have seen a fallback to racism and antisemitism, uh, and this has rose to a fever pitch from 2016 to 2020, and of course, January 6th, 2021, award a day that will live in infamy. This fallback to uh racism and antisemitism was especially seen in the summer of 2020, where during the Black Lives Movement and then the Blue Lives Matter movement, which was the counter movement to the Black Lives Movement. Now, despite the hard work of members of the Democratic Party, we are witnessing a rebirth of fascistic nationalism that courses through our collective blood while the kinder, gentler liberalism is fading. At least that seems to be the way it is right now. Who knows what tomorrow we'll bring. Um but right now, during the trial of Donald Trump, it is very disheartening to watch Republican senators and Congresspeople who are too afraid of their local constituents, the local committees, uh, that they might be um removed from office at the earliest opportunity and sent to the dustbins of history because of their uh voting uh against Trump. So we'll see what will happen um next week. Here's what Joseph Goebbels said as Minister of Propaganda. He wrote in his memoir shortly before he, his wife, and their six children committed suicide in the bunker under Berlin in 1945. There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals, for intellectuals would never be converted, and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be the man in the street. Arguments must therefore be crude, clear, and forceful, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology. Now we watch uh the Goebelean era of the post-Trum Trump presidency play out as QAnon, Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers have become extremely powerful. Um, every day Republican Congresspersons and senators such as Kevin McCarthy and Ted Cruz do or say something outrageously damaging to our collective future and continue to cede the governmental soup with their hatred and cynicism while they plan for an apocalyptic revival in 2022 or 2024. Okay, now we come to the third horseman, nuclear annihilation.

unknown 18:05

T.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

S. Elliott wrote in his 1925 poem The Hollow Men, This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. It's interesting that he said it three times, which of course represents the which could represent symbolically the Trinity, which is the name of the first atomic test. But at the time that he wrote this poem, 1925, the Manhattan Project did not exist. Um at that time, uh explosive weaponry with the power of a simple atom bomb was not even an idea in most physicists' minds. But in 1939, Einstein and Leo Zillard wrote uh a letter to FDR speaking of the enormous power potential of fission reactions, including the possibility of making a bomb. Nuclear fission was discovered by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch in late 1938. They worked together and actually they were related. He was uh she was his aunt. Um, Ms. Meitner, although brilliant, was never allowed to work at the University of Vienna where she got her doctorate because she was a woman. She spent, however, most of her career at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where she was a full professor and then director of the institute. However, in 1938, uh Ms. Meitner fled Germany to Sweden because she was a Jew. She could no longer work in Germany. After the war, even though she had discovered nuclear fission uh with her nephew Otto Frisch, uh he was awarded the Nobel Prize, but she was not. He was a man, she was a woman. During her life, Lise Meitner was nominated over 40 times for the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, but she never got a prize for either. The Manhattan Project was begun just a few years after uh the legendary letter of uh Einstein. And uh Einstein's feeling was that the world would be a much worse place if the Germans figured out how to develop nuclear weapons first. So uh that's why, and and that was shared in in the in govern in the government. Uh Ch Anton Chek Chekhov, there's something called the the gun principle, in his plays, the idea behind Chekhov's gun principle is that that if a gun is introduced in the first act, it will surely be used by the end of the third act. And in a way, um that can apply to nuclear weaponry. Uh we have introduced the gun, the gun, which is um the nuclear weapon. And given that humans are by nature violent and murderous, we have thousands of years to prove of data to prove that. Uh, and given that the last century was the most murderous century in all of human history, so we're not getting any better. The fact that we have not eliminated this abhorrent agent of life's destruction ensures that it will be used. The question is where are we in the third act? Another nameless principle that might apply here states that in the history of nation states it is often the case that uh a war between two countries rarely settles disputes, only delays them, only delays the settling of the disputes. It is commonly recognized that World War II was inevitable because. Because World War I had not been truly revol resolved. Of course, um Adolf Hitler was a prime ingredient in the recipe, but so too was the disastrous Versailles Treaty, which set the stage for a second war. There are certain other uh flashpoints uh that we have today that could lead to dangerous wars where nuclear weapons could be used. Uh one is the China-Taiwan conflict, and China is increasingly flexing its military muscle. Flying planes over in Taiwan airspace. Another potential flashpoint is Kashmir, which has been disputed for quite some time between Pakistan and India, both of which have nuclear weapons. A third potential flash point is Palestine, where there where the three great Abrahamic religions converge, and Israel is known to have the bomb, and Iran very well may have the bomb soon. And then a fourth potential flash point is North Korea, which could drag both China and the US into a very quick exchange. The good news is that Horseman number two is currently indisposed. Let's hope he stays that way. Let's hope the Republicans vote. Uh according to their ethics, which they have, they just won't listen to them. The Fourth Horseman is I'm calling the devaluation of humanity. The two most influential dystopian novels, 1984 and Brave New World, each portrayed the fourth horseman who represented the tenuousness of free will. 1984 showed how free will and personal privacy could be almost completely destroyed through technology in the hands of a totalitarian state. Brave New World, written two decades before, presented how a cocktail of technologies, political science, and psychology could result in a world designed to provide societal stability above all else, uh where creature comforts trump uh Trump personal freedom. Numerous dystopian novels and movies have been made since then and continue to develop the theme of the loss of free will and personal privacy. The dumbing down of education, the consumer society. These were seen in the 50s and sixties as two contributions. A more recent threat, becoming clearer by the day, stems from the robotization of production combined with artificial intelligence, both seen as depriving citizens of the right to work. Jobs that formerly were done by humans will soon be the bailiwick of robots. Multibilliaire automagnets are tipping their hands and showing their cards. They invest in machinery that replaces human labor. They are developing software that makes taxi, truck, and bus drivers totally passe. While new battery-powered vehicles will take a big bite out of the existential threat of global warming, such vehicles are designed to last, breaking the Fordian code of planned obsolescence. Radical changes in agriculture are also depriving humans of life, liberty, and happiness. One of the early pioneers was Norman Borlaug, who developed seed varieties that greatly expanded efficiencies of production, at the expense, of course, of the environment, of water, and of biodiversity. The change continued with governments in the global north exerting pressure on those of the global south to import wheat, corn, soybeans, and dairy products, damaging their own economies while killing off small farmers. I'm talking about what the North, the global north, such as Europe and the United States, has done to the global south, such as Africa and South America. To further this process, Earl Butts is said to have, who was the Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, he was said to have urged American farmers to plant fence row to fence row. In decades in future decades, the Salinas Valley of California, the Oz of agricultural economics, will be too salty to farm. Ocean levels are rising and they will destroy the Salinas Valley, which is called Salinas, named after salt, because there were salt mines, apparently, I don't know where, maybe in Salinas. But Salinas, you know, during uh uh you saw it in East of Eden, in the movie East of Eden. Um, you know, the the father was growing iceberg lettuce. I believe that was in the Salinas Valley. Um if it wasn't, it was very similar to the Salinas Valley, which is quite a remarkable place. It's totally flat um and uh and extremely productive. But that's going to be replaced because there won't be any water. It'll be just salt water, which does not uh unless they invent new salads that uh use genetics to make salads that will tolerate brackish water, um, it's doubtful whether Salinas will continue to be the salad bowl. Um instead, I think uh lettuce and other greens will be robotically grown under solar lamps in warehouses near major population centers, which of course will cut down the cost of shipping and also cuts out completely any need for uh uh pet pesticides and fungicides, um just uh just the nutrients to grow. Uh finally, to this mix uh of one, two punches, we add uh Uval Noah Harari, the noted history professor at the University of Jerusalem, who has introduced uh a lot of different concepts, but one of them that really stands out in my mind is the concept of the useless class. During the industrial revolution of the 19th century, farmers moved to cities, lived in tenements, and worked for virtually nothing in factories. Recognizing this fundamental societal shift, Karl Marx introduced two new social categories, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And like Marx, Harari sees beyond the horizon. He is not limited merely to medieval history, is which is what he got his PhD in, uh, but he's thinking way beyond that. And he's extremely persuasive. He's written several books that have really done very well, sapiens and homodaius, and I forget the other ones. Um anyway, he has now introduced the concept of the useless class, composed of people put out of work by robotization and artificial intelligence. He repeats in all his lectures that I have listened to that the useless class is not an inevitability, but a choice. We don't have to evolve a useless class, but perhaps the fourth horseman feels his oats. Now we come to the fifth horseman, climate change. And uh this horse has been whipped countless times. Sorry, I'm I'm trying to stay close to my metaphor. I was convinced of the seriousness of the fifth horseman in 1988 when I saw firsthand the impact of drought in the Midwest. And since then I have read a bit and argued a bit, including uh with one of my highly educated relatives, who responded to my plaintiff rants, show me the evidence. Well, the evidence was uh there's so much evidence. But that's sort of like this trial of Donald Trump. You know, it's the evidence is there, but you know, some people just don't want to see it. There are still intelligent people, such as Senator James Inhoff, who just cannot accept the fact that humans have a profound effect on the climate. He's an evangelical, and his inclinations are to credit God with far more power over the planet than us humans. But I think Senator Al Gore did a fine job of awakening people with his two books and his movies. Especially useful was his analogy of the Earth's atmosphere as being the piece, the layer of varnish on a desk globe. Uh that really resonated with me because I grew up with desk globes. I don't know if kids see those anymore, but every classroom I ever walked into as a child had a desk globe in it. And I can really understand having varnished a lot of things, how thin that seems, and yet and how easy that could be to pollute. His data and his books showing the atmosphere's rapid rise in carbon dioxide and methane, the rapid increase in forest fires, the melting of the ice caps, and the spread of tropical diseases are very persuasive. Still, even the liberal countries are not taking this horseman seriously. A year ago, an article on the front page of Le Monde alerted French citizens to the fact that the major French banks still loan far more money to oil companies than to green companies. This year, Norway, considered the most environmentally conscientious of all the European countries, is drilling new holes in the Arctic for fossil fuels. Australia, at the southern end of the globe, continues to dig up and sell shiploads of coal to China. Canada's Pierre Trudeau, supposedly a liberal, recently expressed dismay when President Biden terminated the Keystone pipeline. Of course, that kills the Alberta tar sands, but that project was doomed anyway. On a positive note, Biden seems to be more serious than Trump and has taken the revolutionary move of mandating that all future federal vehicles be propelled electrically. My next podcast is going to focus on the myriad of technologies that may save humanity. The goal is to be net zero by 2050 in order to maintain a global warming of 1.5%. 1.5 degrees centigrade, I mean. But however, the Earth is not going to be very livable at 1.5 degrees centigrade, but at least it may be survivable. We really don't know. In conclusion, it is possible that there are other horsemen in our modern apocalypse. Asteroids in near or far Earth orbit waiting to plough into the surface of the Earth and cause mass die-off are a virtual geological certainty. Loss of biodiversity is gaining recognition, and there is increasing concern about a sixth great extinction. In any case, mankind is the agent of its own demise. And now a note about Project Hope and Fairness. I am pleased to report that we have received an anonymous gift of$5,000. This is this kind of funding is of course critical. Some other little bits of news about our progress recently. News item number one. We sold 1,600 chocolate bars at Christmas, the African Choco Bar. By the way, if you want to purchase more bars, please let me know. Just write to me at TW Newhouse, T W N E U H A U S at Gmail.com. Write to me and let me know if you want them. I'm going to be importing some more pretty soon. I am selling one ounce bittersweet or milk chocolate bars for$2.50 each. The minimum order is 40 bars and shipping is free anywhere in the United States. The wrappers are now printed on both sides, and I have put a short explanatory paragraph on the inside along with nutrition facts. News item number two. I have developed a wrapper for a new product called African Choco Fudge Bar. This will be manufactured in the village of Pesuan by Servando and his team. The bar has a vanilla fudge center and it comes in three flavors: vanilla, peanut, and candied orange. I am currently teaching Cervando how to make the bars. You can watch 13 videos on how to make these bars on YouTube. They are in French, but the visual part is quite easy to understand. Just write to me at TW Newhouse, T W N-E-U-H-A-U-S at gmail.com for the address. And the third news item is I have developed a line of African truffles that come in 14 flavors. Actually 15 flavors. There will be more flavors or fewer as time goes by. These truffles will be sold at a store in my village. And I'll be manufacturing them shortly. And also I'm going to be doing a little document with pictures that I can send you if you're interested and just curious about what I'm doing. I'll be glad to send you a file about it. Anyway, those are the three things from Project Hope and Fairness. So we're making good progress. And now I would like to return to the last part of Brahms' ballade in G minor. See you next time.