Monthly Archives: March 2022

Photos provided by Susana Susana Ortiz

The search for the perfect world, the perfect civilization, the perfect human being is a recurring theme, a fundamental question and perhaps intrinsic to our nature. How can we improve the world as a society, as individuals? The history of humanity is largely the history of the answers to these questions in action, operating on the face of the earth. Literature has also contributed to this debate, but instead of being restricted to looking back, it has the power to imagine how far the consequences of the ideas that guide humanitys actions can go along paths traced from today.

The lesson we can draw from history, from the times paradise on Earth has been promised, is that with the best of intentionsor disguised as the best of intentionsthe greatest atrocities are committed. The role of dystopias may not be to teach lessons but to suggest questions, to shake, to wake up, to open ones eyes to what is not yet but could be, or even more alarming, to show what is already happening but remains in some way hidden from our eyes. Instead of the blunt inevitability of history, dystopias,even if they paint sometimes dire pictureshold out the hope that something can still be done about it.

Babel tangentially deals with a dark page of history that cannot be erased but can be prevented from repeating: eugenics. The eugenics movement arose at the end of the 19th century by attempting to apply the theories of Darwin to human beings. Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin himself, is considered the father of eugenics, defined in his own words as the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations. This affirmation carries an intrinsic racist formulation and the denial of the equality of all human beings, of their equal value and dignity.

Theories of scientific racism were fed from the seed of eugenics, which reached wide development in the United States with authors such as Madison Grant with The Passing of the Great Race, a book published in 1916, where he made the statement of the racial superiority of the Northern Europeans. This publication contributed to the founding of the American Eugenics Society in 1921, an organization from which eugenics theories were transformed into government policies, such as the forced sterilization of people with disabilities or mental illness, but especially of the black population. Later, it was praised by Hitler.

These racist and eugenicist policies explicitly served as a model for the Nuremberg Laws that institutionalized the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. They were taken to the extreme with the massive sterilization of Jewish women and the Aktion-T4 plan that ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who, due to different physical or psychological disabilities, were considered a financial and genetic burden on German society and state.

In the world of Babel, the racial component of the eugenics of the early 20th-century has been overcome, but instead, the new eugenics establishes the criteria to determine which lives are worth living and which are not based on genetic parameters. Only the fittest should be born for the good of the community, which is still an approach similar to that of Nazi Germany since it is an exclusive community, of which only the certified are part.

The new eugenics, using scientific and technological progress, develops and takes genetic determinism to the last consequences, an idea that was already present in the first eugenics movement and postulates that we are determined in all aspects of our existence by our genetic material and that human beings do not change. However, the evidence against that claim is overwhelming. The personal experience of any individual is enough to show that life is ever-changing and that although genetics is a factor to be taken into account, it is a conditioning element but not a determining factor. Our history, experiences, decisions, freedom of action and conscience say more about someone than any genotype can.

Determining who should or should not live by their genetic information is an arbitrary decision, just like the 19th-century race theories used by early eugenists. They also believed that they acted following the infallibility of science and progress. But what is science but a relative and partial knowledge of the immensity of the universe? What is progress but a word empty of content and in need of a direction? Science and progress must be placed at the service of humanity as a whole and, at the same time, of each and every one of the human beings in a particular and personal way. Not the other way around. When humanity ceases to be an end and becomes a means, human lifeespecially that of vulnerable, oppressed and discriminated groupsbecomes something disposable, substitutable. As Hannah Arendt said: where human life becomes superficial, totalitarianism lurks

In Babel, we see how the lives of those who do not meet the genetic standards are directly cut short without further consideration. Seeing this on stage can surprise or even shock us, but the truth is that reality is not far off. Considered one of the fathers of modern genetics, Jrme Lejeune, the French scientist who discovered trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, also developed the amniocentesis as a prenatal diagnostic tool soon after. His biggest fear was that instead of becoming a scientific breakthrough for treating and improving the quality of life for people with Down syndrome, it would become a way to eliminate them before they were born. His fears have been confirmed over time as well as in the cases of people with spina bifida or even with easy-to-treat diagnoses such as cleft lip.

I cannot get out of my head two moments in the theater where both Renee and Ann said they did not want to bring a monster into the world. Is it possible for a child, a baby, no matter how serious his condition is, to be a monster? Can a defenseless being without guilt or evil be a monster? Would it not be the other way around? Are not those who deem them monsters, the ones who deny their humanity, the real monsters?

I have kept thinking about that word, monster, and I have discovered that after allalthough a shiver ran down my spine when I heard it in the playmonster is not an entirely inappropriate way to refer to those who are different. It is a word that originated from the Latin monstrumto showthis is derived from the verb monere, which means to warn. According to classical literature, a monster was a warning sent to the world by supernatural forces to communicate a message.

Perhaps those whom we insist on calling monsters are here to tell us something, to show us that the perfect human being is none other than the one capable of showing humanity, of leaving their selfishness, to give on behalf of others. To warn us that the true human being is the one capable of seeing in the eyes of otherseven in those who are differentperfect human beings, just like him, with the same value and dignity.

See original here:

Babel, and the Search for the Perfect Human Being - The Independent

It still comes as a surprise to some people that Prohibition was one of the flagship policies of the Progressive movement in the early 20th century, alongside womens suffrage, income tax and anti-imperialism. The idea of a fundamentalist Christian Left is as alien to modern readers as the idea of Progressive eugenics, but both flourished in the USA in the decades leading up to the First World War.

This is no secret. While it is easy to imagine Prohibition being enabled by killjoy conservatives, almost every book on the subject written in my lifetime has given due credit to Bible-thumping progressives. As Mark Schrad notes in this controversial new history of Prohibition, it is even acknowledged on Wikipedia.

Smashing the Liquor Machine does not seek to downplay the role of Progressives, nor does it dismiss their prohibitionism as a mistake. On the contrary, Schrad argues that Prohibition was a righteous cause that has been maligned and misunderstood by generations of historians. It was seen as a social justice issue at the time and, he says, it should be recognised as such today. It was not, he claims, an act of coercive paternalism enforced on the Wets by the Drys, but a progressive shield for marginalised, suffering and oppressed peoples to defend themselves from further exploitation.

Central to his thesis is the claim that prohibitionists were not illiberal because they never sought to stop people drinking; they merely wished to destroy the exploitative liquor traffic and, above all, the saloon. For Schrad, this is a crucial distinction because, he argues, restricting commercial activity was not viewed through the prism of liberty at the time and should not be viewed as such today. The crusade was not against drinking but against predatory capitalism, of which the liquor traffic was the most insidious example.

He leans on three facts to make this case. Firstly, the biggest prohibitionist pressure group of the era was called the Anti-Saloon League rather than, say, the Anti-Alcohol League. Secondly, temperance activists talked endlessly about the evils of the liquor traffic and the liquor trust. Thirdly, neither the 18th Amendment nor the Volstead Act which was enacted to enforce it banned the possession or consumption of alcohol.

All this is true. Prohibitionists talked obsessively about the evils of the drinks industry, a habit which Schrad has picked up in the course of his research (I lost track of the number of times he uses the words exploitative and predatory to describe it). They often said that their real enemy was the alcohol industry, and Schrad implores us to take them at their word. But taking people at their word is not always good advice, especially for historians studying fanatical single-issue pressure groups who repeatedly used the bait and switch technique on the public.

The freedom to sell and the freedom to buy are indivisible

We do not say that a man shall not drink, said Richmond P. Hobson when he presented his prohibition amendment to the House of Representatives in December 1914. We do not say that man shall not have or make liquor in his own home for his own use. Perhaps he meant it. After all, his amendment to the constitution proposed only that the manufacture for sale, transportation for sale, importation for sale and exportation for sale of intoxicating liquors be forever prohibited. The amendment failed, but by 1917 the Anti-Saloon League was in a far stronger position. With victory in sight, their new text which became the 18th Amendment deleted every mention of the phrase for sale and simply banned the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors. Aside from a carve-out for American farmers which permitted the fermentation of cider and other fruit juices for personal use, the home production of alcohol was made illegal.

Consumption and possession remained legal, but it is doubtful whether the 18th Amendment would have been ratified had the Anti-Saloon League pushed their luck any further. In any case, a ban on consumption was hardly necessary. The freedom to sell and the freedom to buy are indivisible. Few Americans had the skills, resources or floor space to brew their own beer and distill their own whiskey, even if it had been legal. In practice, their freedom to consume relied on the drinks industrys freedom to sell. Schrads history ends in 1920 just as Prohibition comes into force so he never has to deal with the fall out, but it should be noted that the Anti-Saloon League managed to get a de facto ban on the purchasing and possession of alcohol in 1929 when the Jones Act made it a felony to fail to report the sale of alcohol; in other words, the buyer had to turn himself in.

Why should we judge prohibitionists by their words when we can judge them by their actions? If, as Schrad argues, Prohibition was really about regulating capitalist excesses and opposing exploitation and profit, why was home-brewing banned? If the Anti-Saloon League was only concerned with saloons, why didnt the 18th Amendment simply ban saloons and allow alcohol to be sold in shops and restaurants? If prohibitionists did not object to people drinking in the privacy of their own home, why did they fight so hard for the Webb-Kenyon Act which banned the interstate sale of alcohol by mail order? Schrad insists that the latter was not some nefarious attempt to erode individual liberty to drink but that is exactly what it was.

When asked why he robbed banks, the Prohibition-era criminal Willie Sutton is reputed to have said because thats where the money is. Prohibitionists went after the saloons because thats where the alcohol was. They went after the booze industry because it made booze. The whole point of smashing the liquor machine was to stop people drinking liquor. Enforced sobriety was not an unfortunate side effect of Prohibition. It was the whole point.

Prohibitionist broadsides against the liquor traffic were not purely rhetorical. The Drys genuinely hated the drinks industry and you did not need to be a teetotaller to deplore the way some saloons operated. But the rhetoric served another purpose. If left-wingers believed, as Schrad does, that the actual battle lines of prohibition werent between religion and drink, but capitalist profits versus the common good, it was obvious whose side they should be on. In the same way that modern public health activists shout about Big Tobacco and Big Soda when campaigning for lifestyle regulation, fury at the liquor barons helped obscure the reality that it was their fellow citizens who were the quarry. The campaign for Prohibition showed how easy it is to get people to sacrifice liberty if they believe that faceless corporations will suffer more.

Smashing the Liquor Machine is a rebuttal to almost every history book written about prohibition, but it particularly feels like a riposte to Lisa McGirrs The War on Alcohol (2016). McGirr emphasised the disproportionate suffering of ethnic minorities and urban immigrants under Prohibition and drew parallels with the war on drugs. Schrad, by contrast, emphasises the role of ethnic minorities in bringing Prohibition about. He focuses on Black and Native American prohibitionists who have often been overlooked and searches beyond the USA to discover prohibitionist movements in India, Russia, southern Africa and beyond. He makes it clear that prohibitionism was not the preserve of gammon-faced evangelists in Kansas but was endorsed by a range of public figures including Gandhi, Lenin and Tolstoy.

This is a valuable contribution to the literature and bolsters his argument that Prohibition was not a howl of rage by angry WASPs against modernity. As it happens, I share Schrads scepticism about the overly simplistic sociological theories of Joseph Gusfield, who argued that Prohibition was a symbolic crusade between rural Protestants and city-dwelling immigrants. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore the religious dimension in the USA. The movement began with women praying in saloons. It was led first by the Womens Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and then by the Anti-Saloon League (popularly known as the church in action). It was supported by the YMCA, YMWA, Salvation Army and many other Christian organisations. Schrad does a fine job of highlighting prohibitionists from more diverse backgrounds and he makes an interesting argument about the role of temperance in fighting colonialism, but his approach sidelines the white Protestant reformers who were more representative of the Anti-Saloon Leagues rank and file.

Even the more open-minded prohibitionists were happy to exploit the prejudices of others

Richmond P. Hobson, for example, was one of the most famous anti-alcohol campaigners of his day but is barely mentioned in this book. Almost as famous was the baseball player turned evangelist Billy Sunday who receives just two mentions despite the Anti-Saloon League saying in 1913 that the liquor interests hate Billy Sunday as they hate no other man. The dour and corrupt Bishop James Cannon, who served as the Anti-Saloon Leagues chief legislative lobbyist, is mentioned in passing three times. The only white, male, American prohibitionist who features heavily is the charismatic William Pussyfoot Johnson. Johnson was an important figure in the international temperance movement, but getting Prohibition over the line in the USA was the work of less sympathetic characters who are pushed to the periphery of this book, leaving the impression that the typical prohibitionist was less Methodist, less white and more in tune with the politics of modern day liberals than she was.

Racism and xenophobia were endemic a century ago, and we should not judge our ancestors by our own standards. Nevertheless, Schrad is too quick to ignore and downplay the Social Darwinism of many Progressives. Even the more open-minded prohibitionists were happy to exploit the prejudices of others, whether stirring up fears about black drunkards in the Deep South or fuelling hatred of the Hun after 1914 to turn the public against Americas German brewers. Schrad claims that neither phenomenon was significant. Contemporary Anti-Saloon League cartoons tell a different story.

At times, the revisionism goes too far. Schrad claims the prohibitionists were given a helping hand in the late 19th century by emerging medical science, which debunked long-standing myths about purported benefits of moderate alcohol consumption and which identified health risks which have since been substantiated by volumes of peer-reviewed research. Central to this was the WCTUs Mary Hanchett Hunt who set up the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction in order to, as Schrad puts it, publicise new scientific investigations into the harms of alcohol and encourage their teaching as part of public-school physiology courses.

This is absurdly generous. Hunt was a fraudulent monomaniac who used the WCTUs political muscle to put sensationalist pseudo-science on the school syllabus for decades while syphoning money off into a secret bank account to pay her mortgage. By the late 19th century, temperance instruction was mandatory in all federal schools, and Hunt used her power as de facto censor to create what she called trained haters of alcohol. It is thanks to her that generations of school children were taught that most beer drinkers die of dropsy, that alcohol burns the skin, is instantly addictive and is poisonous in any quantity. Needless to say, such claims are not supported by modern science, unlike the benefits of moderate drinking which have indeed been corroborated by volumes of peer-reviewed research.

The scandal of single-issue fanatics embedding lies in school textbooks for half a century is barely hinted at by Schrad, who concedes only that unsound temperance propaganda may have been counterproductive to the cause while insisting that there was breathless hyperbole on both sides. Scientific temperance wasnt some connivance of Victorian Bible-thumpers looking to legislate morality, Schrad writes. In Hunts hands, that is exactly what it was.

Schrad is neither a teetotaller nor a prohibitionist. His objection is to predatory liquor capitalism, and he seems to favour a state-run alcohol industry. I dont share that view. Having been happily exploited by the liquor machine for the last thirty years, I have no great desire to smash it. As I am not a socialist, the knowledge that Trotsky supported prohibition does not warm me to the cause. I do not see Prohibition as a liberation movement from economic exploitation, as Schrad calls it. I think he is on firmer ground when he says, two pages earlier, that the prohibition movement was based upon a deep-seated desire to get rid of whiskey.

Despite strongly disagreeing with its central premise, I greatly enjoyed this book. Schrad is a gifted historian and a fine story teller. His research on the temperance movements of Europe and the British Empire, which make up half the book, is original and valuable. If nothing else, it is refreshing to hear the story told from the prohibitionists perspective. Many of them truly believed it was a movement of liberation. No one ever sees themselves as the bad guys.

What is missing from the story is the lesson that should never be forgotten, that the prohibitionists were wrong, that the desire to drink alcohol did not disappear with the abolition of the industry, that millions of Americans went out of their way to be exploited by the insurgent liquor traffic that emerged under Prohibition, and that this industry was more predatory than the one it had replaced.

Read more:

Smashed stereotypes or revisionist reveries? | Christopher Snowdon - The Critic

The Eugenics War was initially discussed in "Star Trek: The Original Series," during the now-iconic episode, "Space Seed." The episode had the Enterprise crew stumble across the SS Botany Bay, which was adrift in space. They find that, after nearly 200 years, members of the crew are still alive in suspended animation. The Enterprise crew awakens the leader and brings him on board their ship, where he discloses that he is Khan Noonien Singh. The crew soon discovers that Khan and his people were genetically engineered to be perfect examples of the human species. In the 1990s, however, the augmented humans turned against the non-augmented humans, believing themselves to be superior, and the Eugenics War broke out.

While augmented humans have been discussed briefly in other Trek shows, such as by Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig) in "Deep Space 9" and the incredibly fun arc in "Enterprise" that brought back the character Doctor Soong (Brett Spiner) from "The Next Generation," this bloody war in Federation history has never truly been explored. We propose an entire series dedicated to this story. Audiences could even have Spiner reprise his role of Doctor Soong, as he was instrumental in creating the augments. The show could showcase Khan's beginnings and how he and his crew were eventually lost in space for years on the Botany Bay.

Originally posted here:

Star Trek Series We Want To See On The Small Screen - Looper