The Achievements and the Days. Book VI. Is Ship Earth heading toward a 21th Century Darkness?

By Roland Maes

Book VI. Is Ship Earth heading toward a 21th Century Darkness? of the series “The Achievements and the Days” examines the direction taken by our elites in the management of the world.

Chapter 21 exposes that the evolution pressure of external events on modern humans was replaced by a cultural pressure consisting in a preferred choice of young female mates. The result of this neotination was a gracilization of the females and their reduction to an inferior status.

Chapter 22 analyses the passage of the civilized culture of sharing of our most primitive ancestors, in favor of a market economy allowed by the impoverishment of agriculturalists who suffered crop failures due to inclement conditions. Taxes and debt turned family members into commodities that could be rented or sold. The period 800 BC to 600 AD saw the rise of armies made up of trained professionals, which allowed the conquest of vast empires. Conquest generated chattel slavery and professional armies generated markets. The empires in China, India and Europe reached the limits of their expansion and entered into crisis. In India, Asoka re-founded his kingdom on Buddhism, in China, the Han emperor Wu-Ti adopted Confucianism, and in Europe the emperor Constantine turned to Christianity.

Chapter 23 describes the development of the notions of sin and evil in Egypt, the Near East, India and Greece. This notion found an expression in the Torah.

Chapter 24 argues that the Hebraic Bible was a myth elaborated to justify the territorial ambitions of the David dynasty. The Torah was completed after the deportation to Babylon, to explain the destruction of the Temple. The rebuilt Temple became the center of the identity of the Jews.

Chapter 25 describes the rise of Christianity. Throughout the first centuries following the teaching of Christ, we see a vigorous discussion centering essentially on the nature of Christ. The Roman Emperors consolidated the Trinity Creed in the 2d century.

Chapter 26 is concerned with Islam. The Koran is a construction elaborated after the first conquests to justify them. Mohamed did no more exist that Moses or Joshua. The rise of Islam was due to the geo-political situation existing at that moment in the Near East, when the region turned a free wheel with neither the Byzantines nor the Persians controlling it.

Chapter 27 exposes that the source of 21th century savagery is the secularization of the West. The secularized world is born in the violence of the European wars of religions at the scale of a continent. The Western civilization adopted a civilization of death, amplified by the French Revolution.

Chapter 28 describes the colonization of North America.
The USA was founded by dissident Churches but America “Americanized” the Churches, created an American Religion derived from Christianity and constituted a civil religion based on a common religiosity that is so con-stringent that it generated an independent neo-Christianity.

Chapter 29 describes the advent of Reason under the impulse of the Roman Catholic Faith. The Roman Catholic Church succeeded in an improvement of civilization because it abandoned Hebraic codes and concluded an alliance with the Greek philosophy. The alliance of catholic Christianity with the Greek forms of knowledge is profoundly anchored in history and cannot anymore be undone.

Chapter 30 concludes this book VI by stressing the need to firmly oppose fundamentalism and reactionary postures. The disastrous policy of allowing Muslim familial assembly has brought in our countries families that perpetuate the ancestral customs of their land of origin. The values of Islam slowly but surely and consistently permeate the European societies.
Globally, contemporary Western elites offer the most flagrant examples of abjection, corruption, imposture, bad conduct, theft, vulgarity. International relations more often appear to be plunder, brigandage, robbery and pill

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roland Maes
• Release date: Mar 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9782953933253

Roland Maes

Roland Maes was born in 1935 in Belgium. After acquiring a degree in zoology at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), he studied virology at the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research (Tübingen, Germany) and at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy (Philadelphia, USA). He worked during a year at St Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, always in virology and thereafter was during four years Research Officer for the Pan American Health Organization, stationed near Rio de Janeiro, where he worked on hoof and mouth disease and interferon. He moved thereafter shortly to Brussels (European Headquarters of Travenol) and then to Strasbourg, where he was active at the Richardson-Merrel Research institute. He resolved to create his own company in Strasbourg, working mainly on the development of diagnostic tools for tuberculosis and on alternative medicine. This occupation put him in close contact with developing countries of the Asian and African continent. R. Maes is the author of numerous scientific publications.

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The Achievements and the Days

Book VI.

Is Ship Earth heading toward a 21th Century Darkness?

Roland Maes

Copyright © 2019 Roland Maes

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www.rolandmaes.com

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Acknowledgements

This work would never have taken shape without the help of Ernst Van Ingen. I thank him heartily for his assistance and patience.

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The size of this book prevents me to present excerpts from the other books, except books IV and V.

Book IV: The Diversity of European spiritual Histories

Book V: The improbable Rise of the free Man

Table of Contents

Frontispiece

preface

Chapter 20: Our Contemporary Challenges

A. Blindness.

B. Stupidity

C. Chauvinism

D. Infantilism.

E. The American hedonist.

F. Angry protests.

Chapter 21: The Rise of Homo sapiens

A. H. neanderthals and H. sapiens.

B. the extinction of H. neanderthals

C. Cultural neotenization.

Chapter 22: From a Communist Humane Society to a Market Society

A. Baseline Communism.

B. Exchange and reciprocity.

C. Barter.

D. Credit systems.

E. Social currencies

F. Social and Economic Mutations traced to Agriculture.

G. Market currencies

Chapter 23: The Development of the Notion of Sin and Evil

A. EGYPT

B. INDIA

C. THE NEAR-EAST

D. GREECE

Chapter 24: The Hebraic Bible

A. The conception of the Torah

B. The origin of the Israelis

C. History of the Israelis

D. Eretz Israel /Great Israel

E. The Jews

Chapter 25: The Rise of Christianity

A. The first mentions of Christians

B. What kind of man was the trouble-maker?

C. The Trinity dogma.

D. The predication

F. Questions on the nature of Christ

G. essence of the Christian teaching.

Chapter 26: Islam

A. Why do they hate us?

B. clash of civilizations

C. Sunnism versus Shi’ism

D. God

E. Essence versus existence: Enumeration versus generalization

Chapter 27: 21th Century Savagery

The religious fact.

Chapter 28: The United States of America: At times good, at times bad, at times ugly

A. The little Ice Age and the European expansion

B. The initial settlements

C. The price of Independence

D. President Jackson: Trump’s predecessor.

E. The religion of America is America.

F. Absolute sovereignty of Trump

Chapter 29: Is a Regress of Western Civilization Possible?

A. The Judeo-Christian civilization is a myth.

B. The Greek-Christian heritage: drive to Reason.

C. The Galileo Galilei case

D. The notion of civilization.

Chapter 30: What Awaits Europe?

A. A pacific Muslim invasion.

B. The imposition of the sharia

C. Mistreatment of Women

D. Conclusion

Thank you

About the author

Other books by the author

Book VI.

Is Ship Earth heading toward a 21st Century Darkness?

Frontispiece

This sculpture is in Nuremberg. It is made after Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools, 1494) written by Sebastian Brant (1458 - 10 May 1521). In this satire, the author lashes the weaknesses and vices of his time. It is a work in which a ship laden with and steered by fools goes to the fools’ paradise. Here he conceives Saint Grobian, whom he imagines to be the patron saint of vulgar and coarse people.

The concept of foolishness was frequently used in the European pre-Reformation period to legitimize criticism. Erasmus used it in his Praise of Folly, published in 1511, a satirical attack on superstitions of European society in general and the Western Church in particular, and Martin Luther in his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German nation, published in 1520.

The Past is never past. History helps us understand both the past and the way the world works today. No historical age was simple, isolated, pure or homogeneous. Solutions to challenges required leaders who were flexible, intelligent and able to understand the complexities of their world. That’s just as true today. We desperately need more historical literacy. This book wanders through History to describe situations like the challenges we confront today and verify how these challenges were met, for the better or the worse.

Preface

Mrs. White, an American Roman Catholic mother of 4 sons complained on leggings and crops in a letter published on March 25, 2019 by The Observer, a student newspaper serving Notre Dame University, Saint Mary’s and Holy Cross Colleges.

She wrote she was ashamed for the women she saw wearing leggings and crop tops at a Catholic Mass she attended. She claimed young women wearing leggings make it harder for men not to look at their bodies. According to her: "The human body is a beautiful thing. But we don’t go around naked because we respect ourselves — we want to be seen as a person, not a body. We don’t go naked because we respect the other people who must see us, whether they would or not. You couldn’t help but see those blackly naked rear ends. I didn’t want to see them — but they were unavoidable. How much more difficult for young guys to ignore them". Nudity under any form is offensive to a large segment of the world population even if only suggested, as per this image. She also blamed the entertainment and fashion industries for making it hard on Catholic women to teach their sons that women should be respected. Mrs. White ignores a fundamental tenet of her creed, the monism that lends as much importance to the material world as to the spiritual: "who does the angel does the beast". This contemporary complaint is rebuked at length in Book VI because respect for women does not hinge on coverage, but the issue burst open regularly in former times.

Sexual reproduction was a key element for the attainment of a superior level of evolution. It was an evolutive step difficult to reach as exposed in book I. Without sex, there would not be today a Mrs. White to complain about it. Why then are we so uneasy about sex, to reach such an excessive and un-warranted degree of aversion for sex appeal? Is there a reason to challenge the positive role played by sex in the evolution of mammalians once the hominin level of cognitive development had been reached? Has the sexual drive not overreached its purpose, and has it not become a hindrance to further progresses? Do bestial sexual pulsations jeopardize Man’s evolvement toward a humane destiny?

Another question of contemporary importance is the place given by various civilizations to love and trust. Most modern nation-states distrust each other and build walls on their frontiers while their populations distrust their governing elites as well as each other. Are the trust and love in an union established between a man and a woman on a foot of equality, and the love lend by parents to their children throughout their education, and the management of the city and of the nation in a manner that commands the adhesion of the governed, not the key to an evolvement of a human group to a higher level of humaneness?

Darwin had an idea (1) that united the world of meaningless matter in Brownian motion on the one side and the world of purpose and design on the other. This idea of evolution excluded human history. A chronological record of historical events (2) shows that there is progress, but the sense of the human evolution is not evident. It is currently fashionable to underline the contributions of non-Western cultures to civilization. I noted in book III that a World-centrist caricature holds the pernicious view that Western science is derivative of knowledge developed in the non-Western world. Even if parallels can be drawn between the achievements of Mayan, Chinese, Greek, Byzantine, Arabic and other non-Western cultures, these are not identities but analogies. The abortion of the passage from scientific acquisitions to practical applications is traced to the unwillingness of the political and managerial elites of these cultures to admit technological adaptations that endangered their dominant position. In Europe, France remained for a long time an agricultural nation when Germany, Belgium, Holland and the UK had firmly embraced industry.

It is evident that there was a general progress in technical modernity registered from the years 1400-1500 A.D on, in diverse cultures. However, China, Japan and France closed their frontiers, restricting the entrance of foreigners as well as the exit of their nationals. All three, and Islam, viewed themselves as far superior to other civilizations. They elaborated a Weltanschauung that comforted their conviction of pre-eminence. They confounded civilization with cultural development and the USA commits the same error today, for which the religion of America is America. Once a Weltanschauung has been adopted, one loses much of one’s ability to remember previous beliefs. More often than not, no evidence supports our beliefs, except that the people we trust (politicians, pundits, scientists) hold them. And we trust them not because they know but because they inspire trust. They and we fool ourselves constantly by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true. Centuries may elapse before the accumulation of paradigmatic abnormalities forces an overhaul of the accepted theories. We can be blind to the obvious and we are also blind to our blindness.

The contemporary general failure of our management of human affairs, which is glaring, should make us attentive to the actions of our elites at all levels of human activity. Dürer pointed this out as early as anno 1524, after Machiavelli put in evidence the collapse of the Christian ethics of societal conduct. Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1512. Whereas the counsellors of the European medieval rulers, with the exception of the counsellors of the French Crown, emphasized the need for a humane approach of government, Machiavelli taught to secular Italian Princes deceit, treason and banking on human weaknesses. Most Western rulers followed his advice and continue to do so in contemporary times.

Justice, Truth and Reason are muted and held captive by Deceit. Dürer, 1524.

After 5 centuries of implementation of this ‘Real Politik’ system of government by Nation-States, the result is appalling, yet there are no signs of amendment. Our blind power-hungry elites maintain an unshakable faith in their most absurd propositions because a community of like-minded believers, blind to reality, comfort and sustain them, even in democratic societies. To withstand an illusion of skill supported by a powerful professional culture, the Royal Society of London, founded on 28 November 1660, proclaimed "Nullius in Verba" in 1661.

This motto roughly translates as ‘take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.

We have inherited a basic primary neural mechanism enabling us to assess on an instant basis a situation as good or bad, requiring escape or approach, and this primitive mechanism, which I expose at length in book I, gives us immediate, easy, intuitive answers that are in most cases appropriate. It minimizes effort and optimizes performance, but not always because it has little understanding of logic and statistics. This inherited biological intelligence is controlled by reason and coherence of thought specific to the human race, which takes over only when glaring paradigmatic deviations prop up. We usually apply our inherited biological intelligence to grasp a reality as a whole (3) and only later break it up into its constituent parts through analysis and reconstitute it through synthesis (i.e. reason and logic). Experimental scientists but also theorists must work for months and even years to test whether data is contradicted by existing data and verifying if these existing data are not marred with errors. As research progresses, the science changes as understanding improves. This does not imply that all science will always change. In many areas, at some point in time, the pieces fell into place, the basic theory is in place and that area stops changing. It remains thereafter to apply the acquired science, which is frequently not done anymore.

There was a time when the realm of terrestrial physics was considered too messy to be amenable to mathematical modelling. Eventually, a mathematical theory covering both celestial and terrestrial physics developed. Ginsburg and Colyvan (4) went further in 2004 and developed a theory of population dynamics that rests on the observation that the chance of an individual to reproduce or die depends on its ability to acquire its share of the energy available to a population. This straightforward observation lead them to treat organisms as real physical non-equilibrium systems of which they make the core of a theory of population dynamics. Ginzburg and Colyvan challenge the widely held opinion that the laws of nature in biology cannot have a standing comparable to those in physics. To them, mathematics rule supreme over all scientific fields. This change in perspective leads to a radically different mathematical shape of the population dynamical equations, whose signal characteristic is that they respect the laws of inertia. In other words, organisms continue in motion unless acted upon by a force. They conclude that the dynamics of populations depend not only on the amount of food available to a generation but also on the conditions under which the parental generation lived. They thus stress that historical knowledge is the mother of scientific knowledge.

The Past is never past. We need historical literacy. I hope this essay, which is not a history textbook but an attempt to discern the steps taken by mankind in the course of time to achieve a higher degree of humaneness, contributes to it.

Contemporary good epistemological manners impose an orderly, sequential description of successive events. This approach runs counter to common human cognitive processes. I encourage the reader to proceed as he wishes, for example from the last book to the first and from the last chapter toward the first if it suits him. The segmentation of this essay in several books allows this approach.

References.

1. Carl Zimmer: Evolution. The triumph of an idea. Harper and Collins, New York, 2001

2. Kroniek van de mensheid. B. Harenberg, Elsevier, Amsterdam-Brussel, 1986.

3 Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin books, 2012. ISBN 978-0-141-03357-0.

4. Biological Orbits. How planets move and populations grow. Ginsburg and Colyvan, Oxford Univ. Press. NY 2004. ISBN 0-19-516816-X.

Chapter 20

Our Contemporary Challenges

Our perception of the Universe is now complete in the sense that the tiniest particle existing in the Universe, as well as its most colossal objects, have been recognized. Our Weltanschauung has evolved into a view not suspected by our ancestors, and remarkable inroads have been accomplished in all fields of science. Evolution psychology teaches that our fellow humans, our cousins the primates and other species have sentiments just as we. We recognize that our fellow human beings but also dogs, cats, elephants, parrots, crows, dolphins, killer whales or horses need love, a love that transcends the boundary of the species.

Yet, the history of Man shows that the love extended by humans to other humans is the scarcest that ever was among mammals and birds. Steven Pinker°°° detected a gradual refinement of the mores in the West, initially advocated by the Augustinian monk Erasmus in 1530, and an increased self-control that allows command over one’s surges of anger, which avoid lethal outcomes. This view is over-optimistic. No progress in humanity, from the historical times when agriculture and metallurgy were developed up till today, can be registered throughout the world at large and barely within the Western civilization. The two nuclear bombs that vitrified the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not a never-again horror of the past. A nuclear vitrification was envisioned twice since then by the USA (Korea by McArthur and Vietnam by Nixon), once by the URSS on behalf of Castro’s Cuba, once by India against Pakistan in 2002 over Kashmir (India occupies part of Kashmir because Nehru was born there. That is