Genesis: The Rewrite Part II

A Return to the Garden of Eden: An Insane Goal

With the denial of God in the Second Fall, history had to be rewritten. Karl Marx constructed a coherent, rational view of history to replace the story of the unfolding relationship between God and Man in the Hebrew Bible. First, Marx eliminated God in favor of Man. A person could be free and independent only if God does not exist: “A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation, if he is the source of my life. My life necessarily is grounded outside itself if it is not my own creation.”^[1] In the future, humankind will be free because human beings create Man through economic production. “The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of Man through human labor,” Marx declared.^[2]

Second, Marx moved the Garden of Eden to the future. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels described the future Paradise: “When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” In the grand vision of the Manifesto, history ends with the disappearance of oppressors, resulting in freedom for all: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Instead of Paradise, the social experiment in the Soviet Union to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth produced a nightmare with the deaths of over 15,000,000 people; later, Chairman Mao with the Great Leap Forward would top the Soviets with the murder of 30,000,000 people. Maybe, Pol Pot should win the prize for total revolution. He and his Khmer Rouge restarted civilization in the Year Zero, the time when revolutionary ideals replaced all culture and traditions within a society. Slave labor, malnutrition, poor medical care, and executions killed a quarter of the population of Cambodia.^[3] This proportion does not include the 100,000 Cambodian peasants killed in the 1972-1973 bombing campaign initiated by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The number of bombs dropped on Cambodia was over three times that dropped on Japan in World War II. So much for technological progress.

The Nazi rewrite of history eliminated the Jews in preference to the Aryans and replaced the Garden of Eden with an Aryan Paradise on Earth. To demonstrate that the Aryans were the chosen people, Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichmann murdered six million Jews and disposed of their bodies in mass graves and factory crematoria. The Nazi theologians argued, “How could the Jews be the chosen people, when we use their ashes for tire traction on ice? Therefore, we are the chosen people. Q.E.D.” Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, locates the foundation of Nazi doctrine as anti-Semitism. For the Nazis, he writes, “the Jews could not be ‘the people elected by God,’ since that’s what the Germans were.”^[4]

To ensure racial purity, the Nazis, in 1933, introduced compulsory sterilization for congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, and hereditary diseases such as epilepsy and chorea.

Konrad Lorenz, later to receive the Noble prize for co-founding the science of animal behavior with Nikko Tinbergen^[5] and Karl von Frisch, gave, in 1940, the medical “argument” for racial purity: “There is a certain similarity between the measures which need to be taken when we draw a broad biological analogy between bodies and malignant tumors, on the one hand, and a nation and individuals within it who have become asocial, because of their defective constitution, on the other hand . . . The elimination of such elements is easier for the public health physician and less dangerous for the supra‑individual organism, than such an operation by a surgeon would be for the individual organisms.”^[6]

Despite the Germanic wordy circumlocution, some physicians heeded Lorenz’s ideas on racial purity, especially when he stated without ambiguity, “It must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior beings than is the case today.”^[7]

Hitler declared, “Conscience a Jewish invention . . . a blemish like circumcision.”^[8] The revaluation of all values adopted from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche demanded that an ardent Nazi break free from constraints of conscience and the emotional barriers against cruelty. The central Nazi moral principle was inferior peoples are raw material for the establishment of a glorious Paradise on Earth based on race. In such a future paradise, the Aryans will elevate human achievements to undreamed of heights. (See illustration.)

During la Belle Époque, usually dated from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Garden of Eden was visible from Europe and America; at the close of the insane war in 1918, in Western democracies, Paradise on Earth slipped below the horizon.

Scientists: The New Sorcerer’s Apprentices

Francis Bacon imagined a glorious future for us once our ancestors made themselves the masters and possessors of nature; however, the ever-ascending arc of science and technology turned out to be not under human control. Physicists, neuroscientists, and computer and genetic engineers are the new sorcerer’s apprentices, having summoned great forces that they now cannot either control or banish. Science and technology became the masters and possessors of us.

No one knows how molecular nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence will transform human life, not the engineers at M.I.T., the geneticists at Stanford, or the computer scientists in Silicon Valley. Perhaps the ever-ascending arc of science and technology is headed to superintelligence, maybe to a thermonuclear war that annihilates humankind, or possibly to a severe climate change that destroys Homo sapiens and most other creatures.

The great wars of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, the Gulag, climate change, and the degradation of ecosystems would not have happened without modern science and technology whose origins as we saw can be precisely dated to 1543 with the publication of Copernicus’ book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and to 1620, when Bacon published The Great Instauration.

Both works changed forever how human beings live, and both began with a particular understanding of Christianity. For Copernicus, God created a cosmos beautiful from His vantage point outside the universe. Created in His image, the astronomer in his mind’s eye could occupy God’s privileged position and over the next 250 years displaced Him, so that the scientist became the highest being in the universe. For Bacon, Adam in the Garden of Eden was the master and possessor of Nature; if he labored for his food, he did so happily. Bacon’s grand vision was to alleviate human suffering by restoring mankind to Paradise through the new experimental method that gave scientists and technologists the knowledge to command Nature.

The Great Transformation from Spiritual Life to Material Existence

From a long historical perspective, the Genesis Rewrite brought about a great transformation from spiritual life to material existence; God disappeared, replaced by the highest living creature, the human being, who in the Rewrite is a manifestation of an extraordinary complex neuro-network that emerged after millions of years of evolution.

This transformation to the material is so widely experienced that Pope Benedict XVI, in the first year of his pontificate, lamented the weakening of churches in Europe, Australia, and the United States. “There’s no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ,” he told a meeting of clergy in the Italian Alps. “The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying.”^[9] Capitalism focused attention on material prosperity, on the good life in this world, away from eternal salvation, so that few Christians today see themselves as pilgrims journeying through this Earthly life, shunning the attachment to worldly things and avoiding the snares set by Satan.

Not surprisingly, the great achievements in the Genesis Rewrite are in science, technology, and material production. The crown jewels are Newtonian physics, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, special and general relativity, quantum physics, and the biology of the physical basis of life, including the unravelling of the genetic code. The James Webb telescope to explore the early universe is an amazing technological feat, as is the Internet wiring of planet Earth.

The production of material goods is also amazing. Two hundred years of capitalism in America created for the wealthy and the poor a superabundance of goods. The typical Walmart Supercenter carries 142,000 different items. A shopper at Kroger’s or Whole Foods can buy blueberries in December grown in Peru, fresh flowers flown in from Columbia, and organic lamb imported from New Zealand.

Laptops, flat-screen TVs, and smartphones are everywhere, in the ghetto as well as aboard yachts, which is not to deny the scandal that three million children in America live in abject poverty, the kind found in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world^[10] or to discount the marked increase in midlife mortality of white non-Hispanic Americans, the result of “deaths of despair” caused by drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide in a declining middle class.^[11]

In the United States, the distribution of income has never approached anything like equality. Cornelius Vanderbilt II, between 1893 and 1895, built his Newport, Rhode Island summer home, The Breakers, a 70-room, 65,000 square foot mansion, at the cost of more than $7 million (approximately $215 million today when adjusted for inflation). For a rear view of The Breakers, see illustration.

In 2017, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos collectively had more wealth than the bottom 160 million Americans.^[12] Bezos, pre-divorce the richest American, would have to spend $28 million every day to keep his wealth from growing, while half of Amazon’s employees make less than $28,446 a year.^[13] In 2019, the seven heirs to the Walmart fortune were worth $179 billion, making the Waltons the wealthiest family in America.^[14] Should the economic well-being of the ordinary citizen be measured by George Soros, the world’s wealthiest hedge fund manager with an estimated net worth of $25.2 billion, or by Ethan Martin, a sodbuster in Nebraska at the beginning of the twentieth century?

The Nation-State: The New God

Nation-States became the new gods, far more demanding and severe than the Church had ever been. Unending conflict occurred as the new gods split up the world into regions of economic and political interests under an international political system that was anarchic, since no supranational authority existed to enforce rules. Each Nation-State desired to flourish economically and to possess the military power to ensure its self-preservation; as a result, the international political system was unstable as became obvious in the twentieth century with World Wars I and II. In addition, every attempt to return humanity to the Garden of Eden ended in disaster. 

A partial, conservative catalog of the political murders of the twentieth century is mind-boggling, unbelievable, but sadly undeniable. Deaths: World War I (military only): 9,700,000; Russian Revolution and Civil War: 9,000,000; forced col­lectivization: 3,000,000 Ukrainian peasants; Russian gulag: 1,000,000 political prisoners; Spanish Civil War: 1,200,000; World War II (military and civilian): 51,000,000; Nazi death camps: 6,000,000 Jews and 6,000,000 Slavs, Gypsies, and political prisoners; Japanese Rape of Nanking: 300,000 Chinese; Allied bombing of Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, and Dresden: 500,000 German civilians; Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 140,000 Japanese civilians; Vietnam War (military and civilian): 5,000,000; Chinese Great Leap Forward: 30,000,000.^[15]

At the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Los Alamos, Isidor Rabi, an experimental physicist and a close friend of J. Robert Oppenheimer, called attention to the “greatness and folly of humanity,” in his commemorative talk, “How Well We Meant.”^[16] In the war years, Los Alamos was “probably the greatest gathering of intellect of all times, with the possible exception of Athens in Ancient Greece.”^[17] Scientists, then, believed that “only through science and its products could western civilization be saved” from a “fanatic, barbarian culture.”^[18] Rabi lamented that Americans have no historical perspective and in the postwar period “forgot the basic reason the United States entered the War . . . to protect civilization, and, in the process, save the United States.”^[19] The folly that followed the greatness was that military power became an end in itself: “The question now is not so much how to protect civilization, but how to destroy another culture, how to destroy other human beings. We have lost sight of the basic tenets of all religions — that a human being is a wonderful thing. We talk as if humans were matter.”^[20]

Rabi failed to point out that Los Alamos and its equivalent in the Soviet Union, Arzamas-16, gave to their respective Nation-States the capacity to destroy any culture and its people three times over on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

By 1950 the Genesis Rewrite Was Over Intellectually

By the mid-twentieth century, the intellectual foundations of the Genesis Rewrite were known to be false through a straightforward argument, not an involuted, abstract one that only the most intelligent scientists and philosophers could grasp. Erwin Schrödinger pointed out that the human person is not a manifestation of an exceedingly complex neuro-network. He asked us to consider a landscape painter. Suppose sunlight is reflected from a red apple into his eye. The sunlight passes through the lens of the eye and strikes the retina, a sheet of closely packed receptors — 4.5 million cones and 90 million rods. Activated by the incoming sunlight, chemical changes occur in the rods and cones, which are then translated into electrical impulses that travel along the optic nerve to the brain. Further electrical and chemical changes take place in the brain. In terms of the physiology of seeing, this description is complete; however, the sensation red has not entered this scientific account of perception. The landscape painter experiences the red of the apple, not the myriad chemical and electrical changes necessary for seeing. Surprisingly, a detailed scientific understanding of the eye and the brain does not include the perception of color.^[21]

What is true for seeing is true of the other senses: Physical-chemical changes in the brain are insufficient to explain any sensory perception. The sensible qualities a person perceives never appear in the brain as such.The brain itself is shrouded in complete silence, even while a person hears the deafening roar of a jet aircraft engine.Likewise, the brain, encased in the skull, is covered with darkness even while a person perceives the brilliance of the sun’s glare.Our brains do not become colder when we touch snow or harder when we touch iron.The brain tissue itself takes on none of the sourness of a tasted lemon or the acrid odor of a skunk’s spray.^[22]

Mechanical, chemical, and electrical changes themselves are not thoughts, desires, and emotions. The toolbox of physical science is limited to air pressure, chemical changes, electrical impulses in nerves, brain cell activity, and other measurable properties of matter. Materialism is mute about hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and touching. The interior life is nonmaterial — for the outsider observer, say a neuroscientist, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts cannot be touched, smelled, tasted, heard, or seen.

Human beings as well as the higher animals are not material beings, and thus they cannot owe their existence to the mindless evolution of matter. If our source is not matter, then it must be something nonmaterial, something transcendent, and in Western culture that is Divine Mind, or God. Historically, the denial of our origins and the insane goal of returning ourselves to the Garden of Eden brought about killing on an industrial scale and misery on a cosmic level, something never experienced by humanity before.

Current international relationships are volatile

When I began this essay, Russia threatened to invade Ukraine; US and NATO analysts believed Vladimir Putin and his conservative followers with their unvoiced slogan “Make Russia Great Again” wanted to restore the dominance and prestige of Russia that were lost when the old regime collapsed under Mikhail Gorbachev. Through the skillful use of money, China hoped to become a major player for international alliances and markets. Xi Jinping was an old-style leader of a new god; supposedly, he concluded with Vladimir Putin an alliance against the US and NATO. Kim Jong-un was developing a hypersonic weapon delivery system, for he knew that only nuclear weapons had kept North Korea from being crushed by China or the United States. To my ears, 2022 sounds very much like 1914, but this time with nuclear weapons. One slight mistake in this high-stakes international contest for political power and economic dominance would end the ascendancy of Homo sapiens.

Only the unlikely change in the behavior of Nation-States can avert a catastrophic disaster for humanity. Although it may take decades or centuries, once ideas are implemented in a society, personal habits and expectations are established, economic rules instituted, and political bureaucracies created, all exceeding difficult to weaken, much less radically change.

Russia invaded Ukraine five days ago. This morning, Putin put his nuclear forces on high alert; arguably, World War III has begun. Russians are convinced of their exceptionalism, the preordained fate of their nation to be a great power; Americans are convinced of their exceptionalism, of their destiny to lead humankind to freedom and democracy. Putin cannot abide to what he sees as a “unipolar world” that was imposed after the Cold War with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making.”^[23] The “one master, one sovereign,” the United States, led the world to impose economic sanctions to destroy Russia’s economy, and in Putin’s view to cancel Russian culture.^[24] Putin is now fighting for the existence of Imperial Russia’s 1,500-year-old history, and if he remains as President, then a nuclear exchange with the United States seems inevitable.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1840 that “there are two great peoples on the earth today, starting from different points: these are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. . . . The American struggles against the obstacles that nature opposes to him; the Russian grapples with men. . . . The conquests of the American are made with the plowshare of the laborer, those of the Russian, with the sword of the soldier. To attain his goal the first relies on personal interest and allows the force and the reason of individuals to act, without directing them. The second in a way concentrates all the power of society in one man. The one has freedom for his principal means of action, the other servitude.

“The point of departure is different; their ways are diverse; nonetheless each of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold the destiny of half the world in its hands one day.”^[25]

Twenty-three day later — and to the surprise of Western analysts — the Ukrainians have fought valiantly and intelligently, forcing the Russians to a stalemate. Putin cannot afford such a loss and shifted his strategy to reducing Ukraine to rubble by using missile strikes against civilian targets.

Seventy-four days later, the Biden administration seems to have changed its cautious strategy of brokering an end to the conflict that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and an acceptable relationship between the United States and Russia. President Biden’s recent assertion that Mr. Putin “cannot remain in power;” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s declaration that Russia must be “weakened;” House speaker, Nancy Pelosi’s vow that the United States would support Ukraine “until victory is won,” all pronouncements that confirm the United States is at war with Russia, a frightening state of affairs  further confirmed by the Biden Administration crowing about providing intelligence to kill Russian generals and to sink the Russian flagship Moskova in the Black Sea.

The conflict in Ukraine demonstrated that Russia is not the superpower everyone assumed. The Putin’s “special military operation” failed to achieve the intended quick victory for two reasons: 1) The Russian military hardware and software were inferior to that supplied to the Ukrainians by NATO and the United States; and 2) The Ukraine people fought valiantly and passionately to remain free of dictatorships, while Russian troops had the emotional commitment of mercenaries. Russia is a second-rate nation-state; only the possession of nuclear weapons makes it a superpower. 

Many Ukrainians living abroad have returned home to defend their beloved country and to protect their beautiful cities. Denys Karachevtsev, a cellist and a former resident of Kharkiv, announced to the world on YouTube that he went back to “my heroic city, now struggling to survive the war, to raise funds for humanitarian aid and for the restoration of the city’s architecture.” His project is to play the cello in the streets of Kharkiv, so the world can see the destruction of his much-loved city. See the accompanying video; the bombed buildings are in sharp contrast to the ordered, rational music. We human beings are capable of two extremes: We can destroy everything that stands in our way, and we can touch the transcendent through a handful of notes played on a cello. Without the transcendent to guide us, we destroy Mariupol, the Warsaw Ghetto, and Hiroshima. The Genesis Rewrite terminates in endless violence. 

We are in urgent need to break free from the Nation-State, the new god, and to recognize and to accept that we are creatures created by God, not a political regime. We happy few can learn to love ourselves and others without an expectation of reward, the way that God loves everyone, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, and yes, Ukrainians and Russians. 

Endnotes

[1] Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 356. Italics in the original.

[2] Ibid., p. 357. Italics in the original.

[3] For a discussion of genocide in the century of mass murder, see Lewis M. Simons, “Genocide and the Science of Proof,” National Geographic Magazine (January 2006): 28-35 and Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” The New York Review of Books (July 16, 2009).

[4] Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 179.

[5] The Dutchman Nikko Tinbergen, an outspoken foe of Nazism, spent two years interned in a Nazi concentration camp.

[6] Konrad Lorenz, quoted by Benno Muller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945 (Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1997), p. 15.

[7] Konrad Lorenz, quoted by Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 134.

[8] Herman Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger, 2010 [1939]), p. 220.

[9] Benedict XVI, reported by L’Osservatore Romano (July 2005).

[10] National Poverty Center, Extreme Poverty in the United States, 1996 to 2011, http://npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/policybrief28.pdf.

[11] Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf.

[12] Noah Kirsch, “The Three Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% of the Country, Study Finds,” Forbes (November 9, 2017). 

[13] Annie Lowrey, “Jeff Bezos’s $150 Billion Fortune Is a Policy Failure,” The Atlantic (Aug. 1, 2018).

[14] See Walton Family, Wikipedia.

[15] These numbers are low estimates. For the difficulty of estimating mass political murders, see Lewis M. Simons, “Genocide and the Science of Proof,” National Geographic Magazine (January 2006): 28-35 and Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” The New York Review of Books (July 16, 2009).

[16] I. I. Rabi, “How Well We Meant” in New Directions in Physics: The Los Alamos 40^th Anniversary Volume, ed. N. Metropolis, D. M. Kerr, and Gian-Carlo Rota (Boston: Academic Press, 1987), p. 257.

[17] Preface to New Directions in Physics: The Los Alamos 40^th Anniversary Volume, ed. N. Metropolis, D. M. Kerr, and Gian-Carlo Rota (Boston: Academic Press, 1987), p. 257.

[18] Rabi, p. 263.

[19] Ibid., pp. 263-264.

[20] Ibid., 264.

[21] This argument is from Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 153. Also see C. F. von Weizsäcker, The History of Nature, trans. Fred D. Wieck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 142‑43.

[22] Here is a short amusing example of why our interior life does not result from brain function alone. During the day adenosine builds up in the brain to register the amount of time that has elapsed since a person awoke. When adenosine concentration peaks, a person feels the irresistible urge to sleep. No matter how much a neuroscientist probes the brain with scans and chemical assays, she will never find sleepiness.

[23] Roger Cohen, “The Making of Vladimir Putin,” New York Times, March 26, 2022.

[24] Anton Troianovski and Javier C. Hernández, “Putin Goes into Battle on a Second Front: Culture,” New York Times, March 25, 2022.

[25] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In American, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1835, 1040]), pp. 395-396.