-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- The Lurker at the Threshhold A Total Collapse of Values in the 21st Century? by George Melloan "On the last day of the year 999, according to an ancient chronicle, the old basilica of St. Peter's at Rome was thronged with a mass of weeping and trembling worshipers awaiting the end of the world. This was the dreaded eve of the millennium, the Day of Wrath when the earth would dissolve into ashes." The above account is extracted from a book titled, "A.D. 1000, A World on the Brink of Apocalypse," by historian Richard Erdoes, published in 1988 by Harper & Row. It portrays vividly that scene 1,000 years ago, as Pope Sylvester II celebrated a midnight mass for a worried throng, some wearing sackcloth and ashes in penance for their sins, who believed that Judgment Day was nigh. A church council some years earlier had predicted the end of history, literally, at the end of the first millennium. Today, it's a thousand years later, and the Christian world is counting down the days to the end of the second millennium. It's probably safe to say that most Christians are more worried about the judgments of scientists than the judgment of God. Another invisible hand, neither God's nor the market's, has come into being to help guide and regulate economic activity on the planet. It's the microchip. The calendars that computer designers put into operating systems years ago had only two digits. So when the clocks in New Zealand ring in the new year at midnight Dec. 31 some computers may not know what day it is. Mankind will again be wondering if the chimes are foretelling doom. Cybernetic doom. Probably we will escape once more. Just as those Christians of New Year's 1000 ran out into the streets of Rome and celebrated still being alive, probably we will find with joy and relief that all the wonders science has created are still in working order. Our faith in science will be restored sufficiently to launch us into a new millennium in which the laboratories will most likely bring forth more marvels. The possibilities for further development of existing microchip technology are by no means exhausted and after that reaches its limits, sometime in the middle of the new century, quite possibly organic chemistry will take us up to the next plateau of computational speed and memory. The Christian world of 1000 had no such concept of the future. Northern Europe was a primitive place, hardly cognizant of the discoveries in astronomy and mechanics of the more advanced Islamic and Chinese cultures. A belief in witchcraft would persist for centuries. Pope Sylvester himself was a truly learned man, having studied science and mathematics in Spain under Islamic scholars. But he died in 1003 only four years after his appointment to the papacy by German emperor Otto III, who had himself died a year earlier. Rome sank once more into the corruption and intrigue that had preceded Otto and Sylvester. But out of this unpromising movement eventually grew what we have come to call Western Civilization. A modern philosopher, Francis Fukuyama, has surmised that the eventual flowering of human creativity in Christian Europe--and those other parts of the globe, including the Americas, explored and conquered by European Christians--was attributable in part to the focus of that belief on the individual's responsibility for his own salvation. At any rate, Christendom eventually prospered while older civilizations went into a long snooze. And in the 19th century, those creative processes began to produce a long progression of inventions that would transform the world: electric power, telecommunications, the automobile, the airplane, the semiconductor, space exploration, biotechnology. But even though the world around us has changed dramatically, it is less evident that those primal forces that drive mankind toward horrible acts of destruction have changed much. The century that will soon end was also a century of mass slaughter, with two world wars and a host of smaller ones, some quite recent. There is very little material difference between the cruelty of Byzantine Emperor Basil II, who reportedly had 15,000 prisoners blinded during his 1014 conquest of Bulgaria and the threat only days ago by a Russian general to annihilate the entire population of Grozny. As the second millennium began, the Christian Byzantine empire was fighting the Islamic Fatimids near Baghdad and as it ends, the pilots of modern Christendom are bombing surface-to-air missile sites in the same place. The science that has yielded to the world its modern pleasures and comforts has been accompanied by more efficient ways of killing. Perhaps it is no wonder that anti-science attitudes have attained significant influence in the political debates of Europe and North America, where Green parties, Naderites and the like are waging war against nuclear energy, genetically modified organisms and other products of modern creativity. These modern Luddites apparently don't realize that they are fighting beneficial artifacts of scientific discovery, not those primal destructive forces that have roiled human society for eons. But a question they raise, whether science is soulless, is worthy of debate. Novelist Tom Wolfe wrote a provocative essay in the Dec. 3, 1996 issue of Forbes ASAP titled "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died." He recalled that the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche coined the phrase "God is dead," in 1882, arguing that among educated people belief in God had yielded to rationalism and scientific thought. Wrote Mr. Wolfe: "Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the 20th century 'on the mere pittance' of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the 21st, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of 'the total eclipse of all values.'" Nietzsche was prescient in his prediction that the 20th century would be a period of great wars in which moral values would be cast aside. It doesn't matter that he couldn't foresee the specific manifestations of that vision, such as the total immorality of Adolf Hitler, although he came frighteningly close by predicting that Germans would "forever have to atone" for the actions of a "future statesman." But what about his prediction for the 21st century, the terrible "total eclipse of all values?" There are plenty of modern-day philosophers expressing similar concerns, focusing for example on the wanton violence and hedonism that have become standard TV and movie fare. If they are right, mankind does indeed have some rocky times ahead in the coming millennium, going well beyond whatever might happen at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31. But hope springs eternal and it is by no means evident that moral values are being eclipsed or even neglected in the great middle classes of America, Europe and Japan. Indeed, there is little evidence that science has destroyed religious belief or concerns for human rights. If the Y2K bug is our biggest worry when the bells ring in 2000, things can't be too bad. The Wall Street Journal, December 21, 1999 Political Corruption Will Kohl Go to Jail? Secret cash donations? Who cares? Clinton ain't in jail. GERMAN MPs have threatened Helmut Kohl with prison if he refuses to say who gave him secret cash donations while he was leader of the Christian Democratic Union. Mr Kohl has admitted that between 1993 and 1998 he received 300,000 marks (about £100,000) a year from donors who insisted on anonymity, and has said he will not disclose their names. Parliamentary committee members investigating whether Mr Kohl's government could have been bought have said that he must say where the party cash came from or face the possibility of "coercive detention", the toughest penalty they can impose on witnesses who refuse to answer questions. Mr Kohl will gain the right to refuse to give evidence to MPs if the public prosecutor in Bonn decides to investigate him on suspicion of fraud, embezzlement or money-laundering. The prosecutor is expected to announce tomorrow whether he will open preliminary proceedings against Mr Kohl. The atmosphere of rumour and suspicion surrounding Mr Kohl's handling of party donations during his 25 years as party chairman has worsened in recent days, with every statement he has made in his own defence throwing up more questions than answers about his secret system of bank accounts. He has called the accusation that he was bribed or enriched himself "completely unbearable". While even his most bitter enemies do not accuse him of lining his own pockets, millions suspect that secret payments could have influenced decisions taken by his government in his 16 years as chancellor. Mr Kohl's has admitted that he accepted donations which were not declared in the party's published accounts, which is a breach of the law on party funding and is likely to make his position as the party's honorary chairman increasingly untenable. The Berliner Zeitung argued yesterday that a lawbreaker cannot also make the laws and predicted that Mr Kohl would have to resign as an MP. Herta Daübler-Gmelin, the Justice Minister, told the newspaper that Mr Kohl had "as Chancellor knowingly and for years broken the law" and attacked him for owning up in small instalments to misdeeds, which, she said, damaged him, his party and German democracy. None of the party's leaders has disowned the man who led it from 1973 to 1998, but Mr Kohl's successors want him to make a clean breast of what happened while he was in charge. Otherwise rumours are likely to get out of control. Mr Kohl met the firm of Ernst & Young, auditors acting for the party leadership, yesterday to draw up a full account of his secret financial system. The party could face financial disaster if, as punishment for failing to declare private donations, it has to repay state aid. The party's hope of winning February's Schleswig Holstein state election may have been ruined. Its candidate is met with remarks like "here comes the Mafia". The London Telegraph, December 21, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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