The Gift of Fire by Richard Mitchell (rainbow fish read aloud txt) 📕

The heart of war, the principle by which it lives, is, of course, coercion. It is, in person, the desire that is expressed as policy in humanity, for those aims that we call “political” rather than personal are still desires that arise in the only place where desires can arise, in persons. When the persons who desire ethnic purity, for instance, are especially influential, and their followers thus numerous, we come to imagine that it is something “bigger” than a merely personal desire, but that bigness is an illusion created by numbers.

Whatever the particular cause of this or that war, its aim is to enforce something on others. If I don’t ordinarily use tanks and artillery to coerce others, but only those weapons at my disposal, the coercion is not mitigated into something less than coercion. And the weapons at my disposal are, for my purposes against you, say, just as effective as tanks and artillery. I can wheedle and cajole, I can storm or sulk, I can turn very clever indeed, and turn a fine phrase once in a while. And you may have some of those powers, too, and use them, if only to coerce me into abandoning my attempt to coerce you, for which, we should not forget, many will applaud you as a virtuous fighter against aggression, thus using one of the most telling arguments in favor of war.

Ah but, you may say, that is not truly war. Hostility, aggression, conflict, maybe, but not war. What then, I’ll ask, is the essential that I have missed, the thing that makes one aggression or conflict war, and another not war? Violence, you may well answer, and quickly (I suspect) modify that into “physical violence.” That too, you will modify, when we have to distinguish between football and such work as that of the police on the one hand, and what you want to mean by war on the other. You will have to move on to lethal and widespread violence against innocent and unconsenting persons, to say nothing of the general destruction of property and even some large portions of the face of the Earth. Thus, however, you will find yourself defining war in such an elaborate and detailed fashion that many of history’s most famous and consequential struggles will no longer deserve the name, and the supposed “wars” of prehistoric savages over mates and hunting grounds will have to be seen as nothing more than trivial squabbles.

As soon as we start measuring ideas like war by numbers or size, we give up hope of understanding them. If there is one slave, there is slavery. It takes only one persistent cannibal to ensure the continuation of cannibalism. Is there some number of warriors, or tanks, in whose lack war ceases to be war? When Arthur and Mordred are the last combatants on the field, has war given way to a family spat, or would it be better designated as a case of dueling?

And we also give up hope of understanding them when we try to define our ideas by their supposed consequences. War is that which causes death, and deaths beyond counting? What doesn’t? Everyone living will die, and every building now standing will fall down, and all that we know will pass away. War is that which brings misery and deprivation to millions? Do not millions live in misery and deprivation due to many things other than war? What is the difference between war and plague, between war and the mere passage of time that will bring an end to everything that is?

What else can it be but something in the heart, the intention to coerce, and the willing acceptance of coercion as a way of bringing about some result presumed good? No one ever fomented a war, or signed up to fight it, for what he knew to be evil purposes. Only in comic books. If the root of war is our belief that coercion is sometimes necessary and justifiable, coupled with the lessons of experience by which we know that coercion often succeeds very well indeed, and if the “good” remains among us a matter of one opinion as against another, one interest against another, one unverifiable belief against another, then it is very unlikely that “we” can give up war.

But you could give up war. And so could I. And that would mean that we would reject the use of coercion under any circumstances whatsoever, and, accordingly, abandon all claims to any “rightness” that can not be incontrovertibly demonstrated, like the square of the hypotenuse, to others. It would mean also that we restrict ourselves to committing only those deeds that pertain to a person, and refraining from those deeds that can pertain only to humanity.

I don’t think that would be a bad condition, but some are sure to say of it that it is not to the point. What good will it do, many would ask, if I give up war, and all those other people don’t? That won’t bring an end to war. Which is to say, of course, I am not the cause of war. It’s all those other people, whoever they might be, the ones who say that they are against war, but obviously don’t mean it.

I wouldn’t know what to say to that, of course, but I would have a very interesting question for you: What would become of us all, what would happen to civilization as we know it, if everyone did what you have decided that it would be useless to do?

The Gift of Fire

I went to talk to the Mensans. The members of Mensa are the smartest people in America, and I was intimidated. I was afraid that they might catch me in a circular argument or a lexigraphical fallacy. I was afraid that they would rise up, right in the middle of the pathetic little lecture I had thought up for them, and demolish my silly little premises, and then go, not storming, but laughing, from the room, to hold high converse among themselves, not even offering me any coffee and doughnuts.

The speech was meant to be the opener of a small convention, and scheduled to take place right after breakfast. I got there early, and was sent to join the Mensans in a room on the fourth floor, in an upper room, where they were standing around having coffee and doughnuts. I was relieved of at least one of my fears. But they were all watching television, and no one said anything to me. I stood around for a while and went back downstairs, where the brisk young woman who had sent me upstairs told me that I would have to understand that Mensans never did anything on schedule, and that I would have to wait till they came down, Soon, maybe.

I sat in the lobby and read some of the Mensan handouts that I found on the floor near the sofa. One of them was a sample test. To become a Mensan, you have to get high grades on some tests, and what I was reading was a kind of prep for those tests. It had some very interesting questions. One of them asked which diagram of a group of six would be generated by taking diagram C and subjecting it to whatever operations had transformed diagram A into diagram B. Or maybe it was the other way around. There was a very good train question, whose details I can’t recall, but it had all the classical attributes of train questions - train A and train B leaving at different times from points C and D, moving at rates E and F, and meeting, at last, at the mysterious point X where ships also, I suppose, pass in the night. It really took me back. But the question I liked best of all went something like this:

“Bob and Carol and Alice and Ted all took the Mensa test. Bob scored higher than Alice, who scored ten points lower than Ted. Ted’s score added to Carol’s score and then divided by the difference between Bob’s score and Alice’s score was either twenty points more or twelve points less than the average of all four scores. Which of the four made it into Mensa?”

Well, I may have forgotten some of the less important details. But it was a great question.

I had planned to start my talk to the Mensans with some mention of Prometheus, and to quote a little from Aeschylus. It was the passage in which Prometheus, about to be chained down for quite a long time, makes a little recitation of the things he has done for humanity, and in which he does not mention at all what we usually think of - the gift of fire. He speaks instead of such powers as those of language and number, and, most important of all, the mind’s grasp of itself, in Locke’s words. It is the ability not only to think, but to think about thinking. Before humanity had that, Prometheus says, humans lived a random and aimless life, “all blindly floundering on from day to day.” I knew that the Mensans were people interested in their minds, as people should be, and I thought that I might encourage them in that interest, and, at the same time, give due praise to the great minds of the past who understood long ago that the mind’s grasp of itself is what alone makes possible the examined life, and thus the good life.

So I imagined myself in conversation with Prometheus, who had come back to find out what we mortals had managed to do with the astounding powers that he had given to us alone of all creatures.

How fortunate I am to run into you, he began, for I see by your rumpled clothing and your knitted brow that you must be in the mind business.

I’m honored to meet you, Sir, I replied, and I will confess that I am in the mind business, for I do no heavy lifting. Would you care to have some coffee and doughnuts with the Mensans?

Not just now, thank you. I have come, I must admit, not for social reasons, but on business. Long, long ago I gave you all the power of the mind’s grasp of itself, the fire by which you may burn and glow like no other mortal creature. That got me into a lot of trouble at first, of course, but since my release I’ve had long, long ages of time in which to wonder whether or not I had done the right thing. I have grown so curious, in fact, that I have now undertaken, as you see, a journey whose enormousness you can not imagine, and only for the purpose of finding out to what good uses you have put my gift.

Aha, I said, you have come not only to the right man, but to the right place, and also at the right time. There must be something to that Divine Guidance business. As it happens, I hold here in my hand the answer that you seek.

What have we done, you ask. Just listen to this. Imagine a train leaving point A and moving toward point B at the rate of C. Imagine now another train moving from B to A at rate D, having set forth on its journey E minutes after the departure of the first train. Would you believe it if I told you that we - well, some of us - are able to figure out where and when those trains will meet? So how’s that for mind business?

He looks at me steadily for