Sepulcher cult

Respect of the dead is one of the most ancient human principles that exists. In the splendid trilogy of films by Jacques Malaterre on the origins of humanity, there are reconstructions of the primeval impact of death at a personal level, that of the family and companions of the deceased. The notion of a sepulcher probably occurred in the beginning as a simple pile of rocks concealing the putrefying corpse. Much later, the concept of individual life after death was concocted, and the sepulcher cult reached an apogee in ancient Egypt. Along with the processes of embalming and mummification, and the erection of elaborate stone sepulchers, the Egyptians codified alleged happenings in their Underworld.

In this New Empire papyrus, the dog-headed god Anubis (whose head has often been described erroneously as that of a jackal) guides the deceased person to his judgment, which uses a balance.

Christians have taken over this Ancient Egyptian concept of a guide in their Saint Christopher, who is actually depicted in this image with a dog's head. Not so long ago, devout Catholic drivers used to attach a St Christopher medal above the dashboard of their vehicle, without realizing that the main role of the prototype personage consisted of guiding individuals into the afterlife! [What a pity that there don't seem to be any statistics revealing the proportion of accident deaths in which the driver was "protected" by a St Christopher medal.]

Getting back to the theme of elaborate sepulchers, I must admit, as a genealogy enthusiast, that I'm always happy to discover ancestral tombs, which are often a primary source of data. Sometimes, on the contrary, tombstones display less reliable information than what you can find in church and government records.

The raison d'être of my musings on sepulchers is to ask a rhetorical question: Should we, today, continue to employ traditional funerary rites that have come down to us from past epochs? Or should they be modernized? And the reason why this subject has arisen in my mind is the news item about a lot of folk having paid money to have a few grams of the ashes of some 200 loved ones sent into space aboard a telephone-sized rocket. The exact price: $495 dollars a gram. [Click here to see this story.] The capsule orbited Earth for two weeks, as planned, before floating back down to the surface of our planet by means of a parachute. But the hilarious aftermath of this afterlife business is that the parachute apparently touched down at a remote and rugged site in New Mexico, which means that the "ashstronauts" have not yet been found. Did the space vehicle and its dead occupants get damaged during their re-entry into the atmosphere? How long will they be able to survive in the harsh desert conditions if rescuers don't reach them soon? Will, in fact, they ever be found? These are terrible questions, which cannot yet be answered.

Personally, I'm convinced that it's high time to ditch all archaic concern for the material remains of the dead. We should realize that corpses are corpses, and ashes are ashes. No more, no less. I believe that much of the ugliness of death can be attenuated by facing up to the fact that a corpse contains no traces of the consciousness and personality of the individual we once knew. So, it's silly to think that the deceased person might, somehow or other, get a kick out of his/her posthumous ride through space.

I can imagine a far more logical spatial trip towards posterity, which could even be organized while the individual is still alive. This would consist simply of using modern technology to obtain a digital copy of his/her genome and then beaming this into outer space by means of a high-energy transmitter, which might be called a Life Ray (as opposed to the death rays of a Star Trek kind). To keep it company on its never-ending journey through space, the genome could be associated with a digitized account of the genealogy and earthly achievements of the deceased. And why not even encapsulate in the Life Ray's message a digitized illustration of Anubis or Saint Christopher? The more the merrier on this excursion throughout Eternity!

Thin line between facts and Fascism

We're four days away from the first round of the French presidential elections. Since I'm not French, I won't be voting, but I have my personal aspirations and apprehensions. I would like to see a great victory for the Centrist François Bayrou, rather than the lightweight Socialist Ségolène Royal, because he appears to envisage French politics in a new light, without the eternal split between the Left and the Right. My vital hope, above all, is for the massive defeat of the Extreme Right of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

For the moment, the super favorite would appear to be Nicolas Sarkozy. I can understand this preference in the sense that many people would like to see France governed by a ferocious little bull terrier, which is exactly the image of Sarkozy. The possibility of a resurgence of Islamic terrorism in nearby Algeria promotes the case of a strongman such as Sarkozy, who doesn't beat around the bush when it comes to pointing a finger at societal outlaws, designated spontaneously as scum in need of Karcher-style cleansing.

In a recent interview with a philosopher, Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell that was picked up immediately by everybody. First, in speaking of pedophiles, Sarkozy said: "One is born a pedophile. Besides, it's a problem in that we don't know how to handle this pathology." Then the pit bull turned to an adjacent subject: adolescent suicides. Here are the words of Sarkozy (my translation): "Some 1200 to 1300 young people commit suicide every year in France. They did so, not because their parents weren't taking care of them, but because they were genetically fragile, victims of a precursory pain." Programmed genetically to die. This is strong language, which brings to mind the terrible theme of eugenics.

Today, few people remember the unexpected but profound collaboration between the French Nobel prize-winner Alexis Carrell [1873-1944] and his young disciple, the American aviator Charles Lindbergh [1902-1974]. Carrell was a believer in eugenics: the science and potential technology of breeding humans like stud cattle. Hitler, among others, was fond of this theme.

Nicolas Sarkozy is a smart guy, and he knows where to stop, before going too far. He's perfectly aware (I hope) of the thin line that separates facts from Fascism.

Genealogy and genes

The Internet has changed genealogical research in both good and bad ways. First, the bad news. For me, it's summed up in the names of two money-making outfits named Ancestry.com and Genes Reunited, which pester researchers constantly with publicity, trying to trap them into becoming paid-up members. These organizations lure newcomers into believing absurdly that family-history data will fall miraculously from the heavens, like rain, as soon as they join up.

On the positive side, I'm constantly thrilled by contacts from folk who've come upon one or other of my slowly-evolving websites concerning ancestors of my father and of my mother.

I'm eagerly awaiting delivery by Amazon of a new book: Stephen Oppenheimer, Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland. According to a review that appeared a few days ago, this medical geneticist from the University of Oxford claims that most present-day English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh people are highly similar from a genetic viewpoint. This leads to the interesting conclusion that Britain and Ireland have probably been inhabited for thousands of years by the same genetic stock, which would have been only marginally diluted later on by the arrivals of invaders described in history books: Celts, Romans, Angles , Saxons, Vikings and Normans. For the time being, Oppenheimer's views remain hypothetical, and other specialists in the genetic approach to genealogy have reached different conclusions.

Meanwhile, as Wednesday's votes are being counted in Northern Ireland, and Gerry Adams is waiting for a gesture of friendly conciliation from Ian Paisley, Ulster's tiny mind will no doubt find it impossible to conceive of the shocking notion that Catholics and Protestants might both be similarly-constituted human beings with identical genetic roots. Last night, French TV showed a brainwashed Belfast kid who was aghast, lost for words, when the reporter asked him if he could have friends on the other side of the wall. [Literally, the city is studded with walls to separate the communities.] We shouldn't even say it's religion that separates these two camps. It's just plain garden-variety ignorance and stupidity... of the kind that "inspired" many of our Australian bushranger "heroes".

Imitation

When my Swedish cineast friend Eric M Nilsson visited me in December 2006, he shot a few images of me talking about Gamone, first in English, then in French. Click here to watch this video sequence. For me, it's amusing to see and hear myself speaking French. I'm not surprised that people notice instantly that I speak with an accent. The only individuals who never considered that I spoke French with an accent were my children, when they were kids. Apparently they would disagree with schoolmates who dared to suggest that I had an accent. For my children, their father spoke "normally".

At home, Christine and I always spoke French together, and with the children. So, they did not really grow up in a bilingual environment. But the intonations of my voice apparently rubbed off onto François, who became proficient at garbling in a way that sounded as if he might be speaking English. Meanwhile, he started studying English at school. One day, his teacher asked my wife: "Please explain something that has been puzzling me for ages. I often hear your son François speaking something that sounds like good English. Then, a moment later, I have the opposite impression, namely, that he doesn't understand English at all. Please tell me: Does François really speak English?" I love that story, because I knew my son well enough to appreciate exactly what was troubling his teacher. He has always been an instinctive actor, particularly apt at playing the roles of people he observed: in other words, a talented imitator. So, it was perfectly normal that he should start out by imitating the voice and accent of his father.

I've just finished reading a great book about imitation: The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. The term 'meme' (rhymes with 'cream') was invented in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. It designates cultural entities that humans acquire by simply imitating other individuals who have already acquired such entities. For example, the art of using a mobile phone can be thought of as one of the countless memes in modern society. It so happens that I've never got around to acquiring that meme... mainly because nobody ever dials my mobile phone number, and I've not been sufficiently motivated to learn how to use this communications device... which I don't particularly like, preferring e-mail. When I ask my daughter to tell me the best way of learning how to use a mobile phone, she always explains that urban adolescents have seen how to use these gadgets simply by imitating the behavior of experienced friends who already knew how to use them. So, the art of using a mobile phone can indeed be thought of as a pure meme. And this meme has spread throughout society like an epidemic, through imitation.

Susan Blackmore is a fine writer, whose eclectic interests range from the psychology of consciousness through to meditation, paranormal phenomena and near-death experiences. The subject of her book, referred to as memetics, is a new discipline whose scope is awesome: the acquisition of all human behaviors and skills, from language through to the greatest achievements of the intellect. Since opening Blackmore's book a few days ago, I've had the constant impression that this is surely one of the most important books I've ever encountered, because it deals with every imaginable aspect of the whole human being. As I said, the underlying theme of memetics is that we've acquired everything that makes us human, all too human, simply by imitating others. (The general concept of imitation includes, of course, the possibility of reading books on a subject, and asking questions.) This ingenious explanation sounds almost too simple to be true.

The meaning of life

My title is misleading. A reader might imagine that I'm using the expression in the same style, say, as a distraught individual who cries out to a friend (or a priest or a psychiatrist): “Life has no meaning for me; I’ve decided to commit suicide.” There, it’s a question of “to be or not to be”: that's to say, meaning (or rather lack of meaning) à la Hamlet, à la Albert Camus:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”

I first read those opening words of The Myth of Sisyphus when I was eighteen, out in Australia, and I was so impressed by the French Algerian-born author that I purchased several of his translated works, and even carried these books with me in my suitcases when I came to France in 1962... which was truly a case of bringing coals to Newcastle. Since then, I've totally revised my appreciation of the existentialist Nobel laureate. Like the US physicist Brian Greene [see The Fabric of the Cosmos], I’m no longer on the same wavelength—if ever this were the case—as Albert Camus. I don't, for a moment, consider that the pursuits of scientific research are mere "games" that should be put aside while an individual is deciding artistically (or otherwise) whether or not to blow his brains out. That suggestion, to my mind, is stupid, indeed grotesque. Besides, I'm not—and have never been—in the least bit suicidal. Human life on Earth—like all life in the Cosmos—is such a precious and fragile essence that one should not spill a drop of it.

The meaning of life is a clearcut affair for those who believe in Jesus... or any other divine entity, for that matter. Nonetheless, if a skull is ominously present, holding up the open Bible in this splendid depiction of Bruno in prayer (a curious visual reflection of the monk's own bald skull), this suggests that believers are constantly pursued by the gentle all-pervading presence of death, of human mortality. And this is normal. In extreme cases such as that of the Chartreux monks, whose earthly existence is characterized by a good dose of mortification, it might even be said that the global meaning of a monk’s life is to be found in the expected aftermath of his death.

But I said at the beginning that my title is misleading, since I was not referring to meaning of either the Hamlet/Camus or the Bruno kind. So, we might ask: What’s the meaning of “meaning” in my title? It’s a word whose archaic etymology is linked to the notion of mind. To look for the meaning of X is equivalent to asking: What do we have in mind when we refer to X? More precisely: What do we have in mind when we evoke the notion of living creatures such as plants, animals and Homo Sapiens?

That question found answers of a revolutionary kind in 1859, when Charles Darwin brought out a book with a long-winded title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Living creatures of a successful kind share a dominant feature. [That last sentence contains a hint of a pleonasm. If a creature is living vigorously—thriving, one might say—it is necessarily “of a successful kind”. Creatures that are not successful in life simply die out. Somebody once said that commuters only complain about trains that run late, whereas nobody ever talks about all the trains that run normally on time. On the great railway of life, it’s the opposite. We only meet up with creatures that have managed to get aboard the right train. All the rest disappear during the trip, and never reach their destination.]

As I was about to say, before getting led astray into talking about trains, thriving creatures share a dominant feature: that of being highly successful in the art of procreation. Years ago, when I was working in French TV, I found myself visiting the research laboratory of a French specialist in a bizarre discipline, linked to embryology, known as teratology: the study of monsters. He showed me his vast collection of malformed fetuses and babies, displayed in big jars of formaldehyde lined up on shelves along the walls of his laboratory. A teratologist uses a vocabulary of weird terms to designate the various kinds of monsters. If I remember correctly, “acephalous” indicates that the creature has no brain, and “cyclopean” means that there’s a single eye in the center of the forehead. I was impressed by a curious remark made by the teratologist: “Nature generally ensures that the most extreme kinds of malformations give rise to a creature that cannot survive. Consequently, we don’t normally encounter many striking teratological specimens in the everyday world around us.” Hearing these words, my mind flashed back to a lovely old Anglican hymn that we used to sing in the cathedral at Grafton:

All things bright and beautiful,
all creatures great and small,
all things wise and wonderful,
the Lord God made them all.

[See a quaint presentation of the words and music at http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/l/allthing.htm]

I wondered whether the hymn would sound so nice if we changed a line:

all things weird and terrible...

Procreation is essentially a matter of copying genes, which is a process that may or may not be carried out in a two-parent sexual situation. The replicator device at the basis of all life—plants, animals and Homo Sapiens—is the DNA molecule, whose structure was explained by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.

Shortly before then, a mathematician named John von Neumann, working in the USA, produced operational computer-type models of the replication process, summed up in a famous book that was published posthumously: Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. For those of us who were meeting up with the phenomenon of computers at that time [I first came in contact with IBM in 1957: the year of von Neumann’s death], the great Hungarian-born mathematician was something of a hero, because it was he who actually invented the fundamental concept of a stored computer program. And he also played a pioneering role in the theory of games... which may or may not have concerned the activities that Camus was designating in the quotation at the start of this post. We all felt that, in programming electronic machines to perform all kinds of tasks, we were exploiting an extraordinary art devised by von Neumann.

Today, if you were to ask me about the meaning of life, I would not hesitate in replying that one thing I have in mind (more than suicide or God or any other boring stuff), when I reflect upon the magic of all living things bright and beautiful (and otherwise), is John von Neumann’s work on self-reproducing automata.