From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Fri Feb 01 2002 - 23:29:36 MST
Go to:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_22_1.html
or read below.
A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say,
on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a
simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets.
It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if
launched from as far away as Boston. That is precisely what a
modern "smart missile" can do. Computer miniaturisation has
advanced to the point where one of today's smart missiles could
be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together
with instructions to home in on the North Tower of the World
Trade Center. Smart missiles of this sophistication are possessed
by the United States, as we learned in the Gulf War, but they are
economically beyond ordinary terrorists and scientifically beyond
theocratic governments. Might there be a cheaper and easier
alternative?
In the Second World War, before electronics became cheap and
miniature, the psychologist B. F. Skinner did some research on
pigeon-guided missiles. The pigeon was to sit in a tiny cockpit,
having previously been trained to peck keys in such a way as to
keep a designated target in the centre of a screen. In the missile,
the target would be for real. The principle worked, although it was
never put into practice by the US authorities. Even factoring in the
costs of training them, pigeons are cheaper and lighter than
computers of comparable effectiveness. Their feats in Skinner
boxes suggest that a pigeon, after a regimen of training with color
slides, really could guide a missile to a distinctive landmark at the
southern end of Manhattan Island.
Pigeons may be cheap and disposable as on-board guidance
systems, but there's no escaping the cost of the missile itself. And
no such missile large enough to do much damage could penetrate
United States airspace without being intercepted. What is needed
is a missile that is not recognized for what it is until too late.
Something like a large civilian airliner, carrying the innocuous
markings of a well-known carrier and a great deal of fuel. That's
the easy part. But how do we smuggle on board the necessary
guidance system? You can hardly expect the pilots to surrender
the left hand seat to a pigeon or a computer.
How about using humans as on-board guidance systems, instead
of pigeons? Humans are at least as numerous as pigeons, their
brains are not significantly costlier than pigeon brains, and for
many tasks they are actually superior. Humans have a proven
track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which
work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those
of their passengers. The natural assumption that the hijacker
ultimately values his own life too, and will act rationally to
preserve it, leads air crews and ground staff to make calculated
decisions that would not work with guidance modules lacking a
sense of self-preservation. If your plane is being hijacked by an
armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants
to go on living, there is room for bargaining. A rational pilot
complies with the hijacker's wishes, gets the plane down on the
ground, has hot food sent in for the passengers, and leaves the
negotiations to people trained to negotiate.
The problem with the human guidance system is precisely this.
Unlike the pigeon version, it knows that a successful mission
culminates in its own destruction. Could we develop a biological
guidance system with the compliance and dispensability of a
pigeon but with a man's resourcefulness and ability to infiltrate
plausibly? What we need, in a nutshell, is a human who doesn't
mind being blown up. He'd make the perfect on-board guidance
system. But suicide-enthusiasts are hard to find. Even terminal
cancer patients might lose their nerve when the crash was actually
looming.
Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow
persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of
flying a plane smack into a skyscraper. If only! Nobody is that
stupid, but how about this. It's a long shot, but it just might work.
Given that they are certainly going to die, couldn't we sucker them
into believing that they are going to come to life again
afterwards? Don't be daft! No, listen, it might work. Offer them a
fast track to a Great Oasis in the Sky, cooled by everlasting
fountains. Harps and wings wouldn't appeal to the sort of young
men we need, so tell them there's a special martyr's reward of 72
virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive. Would they fall for
it? Yes, testosterone-sodden young men might go for 72 private
virgins in the next world.
It's a tall story, but worth a try. You'd have to get them young,
though. Feed them a complete and self-consistent background
mythology, to make the big lie sound plausible when it comes.
Give them a holy book and make them learn it by heart. Do you
know, I really think it might work. As luck would have it, we have
just the thing to hand: a ready-made system of mind-control which
has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations.
Millions of people have been brought up in it. It is called religion
and, for reasons which one day we may understand, most people
fall for it (nowhere more so, incidentally, though the irony passes
unnoticed, than America itself). Now all we need is to round up a
few of these faith-heads and give them flying lessons.
Facetious? Trivialising an unspeakable evil? That is the exact
opposite of my intention, which is deadly serious and prompted by
deep grief and fierce anger. I am trying to call attention to the
elephant in the room that everybody is too polite”or too
devout”to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect
that religion has on human life. I don't mean devaluing the life of
others (though it can do that too), but devaluing one's own life.
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life
highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer
place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At
the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince
themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr's death
is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming
through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a
very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that
other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the
real world. Top it off with sincerely believed sexual
promises”ludicrous and degrading to women though they
are”and is it any wonder that naïve and frustrated young men are
clamoring to be selected for suicide missions?
There is no doubt that the afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really
is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a
smart missile, and its guidance system is in many respects
superior to the most sophisticated electronic brain that money can
buy. Yet to a cynical government, organization, or priesthood, it is
very very cheap.
Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary
cliché: mindless cowardice. Mindless may be a suitable word for
the vandalizing of a telephone booth. It is not helpful for
understanding what hit New York on September 11th. Those
people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On
the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an
insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where
that courage came from. It came from religion. Religion is also, of
course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle
East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first
place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My
concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with
religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the
streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
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